devnet, Author at Yet Another Linux Blog

Apple Denies Linux Access To Its Movie Trailers

Apple has decided to block streaming content from http://apple.com/trailers/ for Linux users. I say this because tonight I went to view a few of the upcoming movie trailers and was told to “Get the Latest Quicktime” in order to watch and I was denied the ability to watch them.

I hit the forums to see if others have the same problems that I have and I’ve found that many people have begun reporting the problem from around May of this year. Not being one to give up, I decided to test things a bit to see what apple.com was doing.

I installed the useragent switcher on Firefox and switched my agent to Windows Vista and IE7. I then watched headers as apple once again denied me despite my agent being accepted by it. It seems that it is looking for an actual install of Quicktime on your system (I can’t tell you for sure, I just know that useragent isn’t what it is sniffing for).

How does one circumvent? Pretty simple. When you are given that denied message “Get the Latest Quicktime”, go to View >> Page Source. Look for a URL that ends in .mov. Copy that URL and paste it into a new tab. That’s it, you’re now watching the trailer.

I want to thank Apple for being exclusionary to Linux users when you benefit so greatly from Open Source software. It sets a great example and shows what is really important to you as a company…and that is forcing your software onto everyone similar to Microsoft.

UPDATE: I wanted to let everyone know my platform since everyone seems to think I’m silly enough to blog about this without installing the proper codecs. I use PCLinuxOS 2007 as my main workhorse distro. The apple trailers site worked for me previously until I recently checked it. I’ve updated this
to current and have all codecs installed (w32codecs, mplayer, xine,
gstreamer, etc.). I have uninstalled, reinstalled, and tweaked
everything I can think of tweaking to get this working. Nothing thus
far works. I should note that this is with Firefox 3 and I’m not sure
if that has anything to do with things.

KDE: Right Click, Extract Here

I’ve been hunting for a post on how to have KDE “extract here” like Foresight Gnome edition does (it’s really handy to one click extract archives). Post after post found via Google did nothing at all to help me out. Most tried to have you read how to do this manually by creating your own service menu and they would use xterm to extract. I wanted to use ark…mainly because it’s there and it’s a gui.

Then I decided to search KDE-Apps.org and viola! I found it. A handy little tool that allows you to right click on any archive and “extract here” with Ark. Here’s how to install it.

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4 Little Known Thunderbird Extensions

I recently searched through the mozilla thunderbird extensions website and found 4 extensions that I didn’t know about that actually prove to be quite useful. I use Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 on Foresight Linux and have tested all of these extensions and verified that they work on that environment. Hopefully, they’ll help someone craft a more enjoyable email experience 🙂

Search for Sender

If you’re like me, you like to group like items together in your inbox. With this extension, you can group emails from the same sender as quickly as a right click. Really, it’s just a shortcut that places the sender email up into the search box and searches for you. The nice part is, with this extension, you don’t have to type it. Quick, easy, and simple. This has quickly become an extension that I cannot live without.

SyncMab

SyncMab is an extension similar to foxmarks for Firefox. With foxmarks, you keep all your bookmarks on a central server of your choosing so that your bookmarks are the same across all computers you use that have Firefox installed. This is perfect for me since I have a set of work bookmarks and home bookmarks and like to be able to switch back and forth between them. But what about thunderbird? It doesn’t have bookmarks right? Exactly, but it does have contacts in your addressbook! So, you’ll be able to save your contacts to a server of your choosing and then on another computer with thunderbird you can synchronize your contacts by downloading that file using SyncMab. It’s brilliant and allows you to always have the same contacts across operating systems, across computers, and even to maintain multiple addressbooks 🙂

Display Quota

This extension will display a small graphic in Thunderbird that tells you how much space you have left in your IMAP mail account and can warn you when you get close to filling up. This might not be too useful for those of you that use IMAP with huge quotas (gmail) but for others, it may be. I have heard that some users do not like the popup that displays for warning on this extension. For those users, Thunderbird has a built in function you can enable:

Open your configuration editor in Thunderbird and find the following keys:

mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.show – % when quota should show up
mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.warning – % when quota becomes yellow
mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.critical – % when quota becomes red

Thanks to goddess-gate.com for information on how to do this.

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Microblogging, Status, and Blogging 2.0

In my previous post, I asked readers how they plugged their blog and/or microblogged, web 2.0 style. Some microblogging readers recommended that I check out Ping.fm. It was exactly the service that I needed; the ability to simultaneously post status updates on twitter, pownce, facebook. I specifically look for services that don’t require that I install anything on my desktop (I like IM much more).

The only problem with this is that ping.fm is in beta stage…and a closed beta at that. So, I began to read various different blogs to try and find any other service that might do the same thing as ping.fm.

During my search, I cam across profilactic.com, which is a central aggregate place similar to friendfeed.com. The interesting part about profilactic is that it plugs into ping.fm and every single user can be part of the closed beta for ping.fm!

This means that you can microblog/status message bebo, blogger, brightkite, facebook, hi5, Jaiku, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, Myspace, Plaxo Pulse, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, and Xanga through one single interface OR through Instant message (there is a ping.fm bot).

Here’s the kicker…profilactic.com supports 186 sites as well as the ability to create a custom site. There are too many to list. Check out their supported sites.

So, you can utilize ping.fm to instant message status updates or microblog and instantaneously have it sent out to close to 200 different sites all at once. This is handy for me since I like to use pownce a bit more than twitter but my coworkers use twitter more. My status updates are still broadcast (on 60 second delay) on twitter through my instant message to the ping.fm bot. Ping.fm also supports the iPhone and has the ability to have custom triggers.

To take advantage of these great services, head over to profilactic and signup. When you’re setting up your sites, you’ll be able to plug into ping.fm (it will require that you signup using the profilactic beta password that profilactic will provide for you during setup). Don’t forget to visit my lifestream and add me as a friend 🙂 Happy micro/status/blogging!

How do YOU Plug Your Blog to Web 2.0?

I’ve been drastically neglecting a few areas of my blog. The main one is plugging it into social networks. I’ve been using things like twitter, pownce, and stumbleupon…but I haven’t truly plugged my blog into these services.

Now there are so many…I don’t even know how to plug them all in 🙂

Which services are most important? Which ones are you, the reader, using? Thus far, the easiest way I’ve found to manage things is to choose one service like Tumblr or Pownce and aggregate all other services into it. THEN to use friendfeed.com to envelop them into a stream.

I’m curious as to how others are managing things…I’d like to make Yet Another Linux Blog reach a larger audience and I think that this is a good starting point. So if you have suggestions, please let me know 🙂

rPath Documentation Status Update

There are many changes on the horizon for rPath Documentation.

One of the things that team docs here has known for a while is that the rPath wiki is a fantastic tool to leverage for documentation. It’s quick. It’s easy. It allows engineers to contribute directly to the wiki. It allows community members to contribute to to the wiki.

We’ve also known for a while that this tool has a major caveat…and that is that versioned documentation is costly. For example, if we had say version 1.0 documentation of a project at wiki.rpath.com/v1/productname and version 2.0 came out, we’d have to maintain 2 separate documents with the same information in two different URI’s and 2 different name spaces. With each addition of namespace and project version, updates would be more costly and time consuming.

It’s also a bad thing that a user can search the wiki…and have the possibility of getting results from versions that they are not using…possibly information and behavior of products that no longer applies.

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