XPde desktop environment

I’m posting this from within XPde. It’s not bad. There’s no way I’d use it for day to day activity, but it might be useful for bringing over some of the masses to Linux!
Anyone who’s used to Windows will be immediately at home here. Like Windows, you have “My Documents”, “My Computer”, etc on the desktop.
Just like a virgin install of Windows you can’t do much with it either. There aren’t many applications on the desktop menu.
I’m already missing ALT-dragging windows however. That’s one aspect of the Windows GUI I’ve always despised. No doubt there’s a way to get that working but I CBA!

To cap it off, XPde is one to keep an eye on, and may be very useful in the future! Well worth checking out!

IRC snippets

Just so you know that Linux users don’t bash on Windows users alone. We bash on other Linux users too! Thank you Kevin for keeping this recorded.

<kelvin> any slackware users around?
* martin raises hand
<kelvin> i have a question on it…
<martin> kelvin: Alot of people here are un-socialble muppets who use red hat. lol
<kelvin> oh, so no one knows slackware?
<martin> red hat, use there up2date, apt-get, and loves rpm based distro’s
<martin> kiddiot’s dream
<martin> gues it takes the learning out of things eh?
<martin> kelvin: I said I did.
<kelvin> ah, good. then you can answer a question on slackware?
<martin> sure
<kelvin> ok, so why do only lame muppets from kerry use slackware?
<martin> wanker

(Apologies to my readers from Kerry, and Slackware users!)

B2Links – link organiser for b2, and other updates

I mentioned B2Links before but it’s been renamed. The one final feature missing from it is polling weblogs.com to see if each link has been updated in the last x minutes/hours. I might take a look at this next week!

On the b2++ front – I discovered a bug when new users register. Sometimes their blog template isn’t copied over properly. Just login (at the b2login.php url sent to you in the email) and choose another template. A fix will be in the next snapshot, maybe tonight.
I should also make more checks for mod_rewrite in the install process, as at least person had trouble with it. That should be a simple 3 line fix though!
Tim mailed me a long list of features he’d like to see in b2++, as well as suggesting a name change for the project as it’s diverging quite a bit from the original b2. Leave a comment if you have any ideas!
I’d also like to hear from b2 mod/hack authors as the plugin system of b2++ will make it quite easy for original b2 hacks to be incorporated and distributed. When I get around to Smartyising the backend, it’ll be much easier to add stuff there!

imgSeek

imgSeek is a most useful application! I’m importing my photo collection in there. That’s taking a while, as there’s a few gigs of data to work through! Sketching is fun, and could be useful as you can refine your sketch and it’ll keep updating the matching photos. Selecting an existing photo, and looking through the similar photos it like the first time you went online.
You find a photo, it displays “similar” ones, right-click on another photo and find similar ones to that which displays more photos.. It’s a nice way to look through a huge collection of photographs!
What are you still doing reading this, go try it out now!

imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features. The query is expressed either as a rough sketch painted by the user or as another image you supply (or an image in your collection). The searching algorithm makes use of multiresolution wavelet decomposition of the query and database images.

(via Ice Walkers)

ssh login attack

Looking through my log reports this morning I was shocked to see lots of failed logins for users such as root, ftp, nobody, apache, operator, amanda, mysql, etc. All originated from one host, ns1.webmediaworks.net, A visit to their website explained everything..

TechTeaM OwnZ u box dollarz@bol.com.br

Unfortunately, the whois db seems to be down so I can’t even contact the webmedia site owners..