Software Free

The folks over at JanRain have launched demand.openid.net. This is a great little tool that will help users tell the sites they like how much they really want OpenID. It comes complete with a handy-dandy bookmarklet you install in your browser to quickly tell the world about the sites you want OpenID enabled. Great work JanRain folks!

Already have some coverage on it already:

• Demand.OpenID.net: A One Click Call to Action
• Crowdsourcing the Demand for OpenID!

I usually try to get a review copy and read through a book before mentioning it here, but a book like Deploying Rails Applications (Amazon.com alternative) has been in demand for a long time now. Its provenance (coming from the keyboards of Ezra “Engine Yard” Zygmuntowicz, Bruce Tate, and Clinton Begin - and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf) encourages me to support it without direct review. That’s not to say it’s certainly a good book, but it darn well shouldn’t be a bad one.

As it was planned Fedora 9 (codename "Sulphur") is released today. As for me it wasn't such expected as Ubuntu Hardy Heron but it is still very important event in Open Source world. So, here is the list of new features in this version of RedHat sponsored Linux distribution:

You have to feel sorry for Red Hat and their community offering these days. Only a few weeks ago the web was littered with icon link backs to Ubuntu’s site reveling in the fact that Hardy Heron was to be released. Virtually nowhere, apart from Distrowatch would you see that the once mighty Fedora was working through the beta stages of its latest offering.

Merbunity is a new site dedicated to “news, projects, and tutorials” related to the Merb Web framework (increasingly a common alternative to Rails). It’s very early days, but it’s well designed, and the initial content is good. It feels a little like a Ruby Inside for Merb. Great job! Among the launch content, and of almost immediate interest to Mac-based Merb developers, is Dr. Nic Williams’ TextMate bundle for Merb.

I recently reported that my laptop would get to extreme temperatures running the latest offering from Canonical. Just standing idle the CPU temp would be soaring at 50-60 degrees and under the most menial loads it would rocket to the mid 70’s.

After much searching around on the forums, I managed to come up with this fix. I’m not sure how it works, but I now get idle temps of around 45 degrees and under load, approximately lower 50’s! Here it is:

call up your /etc/modules file and add the following:

# added 13 May 2008 by Phil Heaton
battery
ac
thermal
processor
acpi-cpufreq
cpufreq-userspace

Like I said, I don’t know how this works, but it does for me!

Hours ago, David Heinemeier Hansson announced informally on Twitter:

Rails 2.1 RC1 has been tagged, the gems are on the beta server, official announcement shortly. But no need holding you back from trying it.

New features include built-in timezone support, Gem dependencies, better caching, and more.

To get Rails 2.1 RC1 from the beta gems server, just use:

sudo gem install rails –source http://gems.rubyonrails.com/

If you prefer to go native, Ryan Bates of Railscasts has already produced a screencast showing how to install Rails 2.1 RC1 using Git.

For the past 12 months I have been using Ubuntu as my main OS of choice, graduating through the upgrades from Feisty to Gutsy. So when Hardy hit the servers at Canonical, I was naturally eager to try it out.Ubuntu 8.04 has a lot of advantages over its predecessors, but unfortunately, the new kernel version seems to have a few problems too.

Installing Hardy was a little fiddly to begin with. My system is a Samsung X22 laptop with Intel Core2 Duo T7500 2.2Ghz, ATi Radeon HD2400, 2GiB DDR2 RAM, with a Pheonix BIOS.

1) There are quite a few applications in linux that has the ability to download torrent from the terminal. rtorrent is perhaps the most easiest to use and widely configurable out of all of them. To kick off with downloading any torrent file, you simply have to provide the link location of the torrent file, ie. rtorrent <torrent_address>

(click for larger image)

rtorrent is highly customizable and and can be configured by editing the configuration file located in ~.rtorrent.rc by default. You can assign rtorrent to load your own custom configuration file using this command: rtorrent -n -o import=~/custom.rc

Some interesting entries you could use in your configuration file; by default rtorrent does not come with a config file.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 90 for the weeks May 4th - May 10th, 2008. In this issue we cover: Ubuntu Brainstorm Growing, Ubuntu Finland receives award from Finland's Minister of Communications, Ubuntu Featured on Italian TV, submit questions for Launchpad podcast, Forums News and Interviews, Ubuntu UK Podcast Episode 5, and much more.

Thanks to zazengate, we now unleash upon the world the German counterpart of SOM. You too can help make SOM available in your language. Contact us if you’d like to help out.

That’s all.

What, were you perhaps expecting me to speak some German? Rosenthalerstrasse. Brustwartzen. Liebling! Go spread some files, you lazy bum.

My love for xkcd comics has influenced me to write this modified autoconfig “cracking” tool that cracks wifi WEP password from your neighbors, exactly the way shown in xkcd comic number 416:

(click for larger view)

Here is the tool in action:

As you can see there are some state of the art features added to this version. This tools is the result of weeks of sleepless night, yet I am not too sure whether I should release this version to the public. There are some sick people out there who can seriously abuse this tool. If you are still skeptical about the existence of this, you can watch it live in action:

Remember, hacking is serious business.

Disclaimer: No Children or neighbors were hurt (that I know of) during this demo.

At last month’s North Shore Web Geek Meetup, I met Gal Arav, the creator of Newsflashr (and formerly creator of InstantBull):

Newsflashr aggregates feeds from a large number of news sources, and lets you scan the headlines from those feeds as a tag cloud (what are the interesting terms which appear frequently in the headlines in those feeds) as well as in a list sorted by Alexa rank.

It’s the kind of site you can spend a lot of time in, if you’re a news junkie, playing around with different sorting options and looking for trends in the data.

Here’s the tag cloud, for example of the “elections 08″ topic as I am writing this post:

Facebook started it, LinkedIn followed and now is the turn for Orkut to have the status update feature.

From now on, you can update your status by going to your Profile page. Type whatever you wish to be shown as part of your status and that’s it.

Source: Orkut Blog

Yee-haw! The Ruby Hoedown enters its second year, taking place in Huntsville, Alabama on August 8th and 9th, 2008. It’s billed as the “Ruby conference for the South” and is sponsored by Engine Yard. Keynote speakers so far are David A. Black (of Ruby Central fame) and Chris Wanstrath (of GitHub fame). Registration is $149 until June 2nd.

And a Bonus: Toronto Rails Project Night!