bugs – Jupiter Broadcasting

Core File Tales | BSD Now 346

Wes Payne — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 05:00:00 +0000

Show Notes/Links: https://www.bsdnow.tv/346

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Well, Actually | User Error 88

Wes Payne — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 00:15:00 +0000

Show Notes: error.show/88

The post Well, Actually | User Error 88 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Plasma Predicament | LINUX Unplugged 244

chris — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 21:42:59 +0000

Show Notes/Links: linuxunplugged.com/244

The post Plasma Predicament | LINUX Unplugged 244 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

16.04 and Shut Your Face | LINUX Unplugged 141

chris — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 20:52:31 +0000

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We get a little rambunctious as we talk about Ubuntu 16.04, why not the openSUSE Build Server & the remarkable problem with Ubuntu that’s just now being solved.

Plus some audio never meant for public release, updates on your favorite projects, first hands on with the Bq Ubuntu Tablet & more!

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Follow Up / Catch Up

And We’re Off: World’s First Ubuntu Tablet Is Now Shipping

Yes, if you pre-ordered one of the Ubuntu-powered slates from Bq last month you’ll want to keep an eye your email address over the coming days.

Received my bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition today!

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2016 | LinuxFest Northwest 2016

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Ubuntu 16.04 Review Follow Up

Few things that were not mentioned in LAS:

new option to always show menu has been added
client side decoration is fully supported in Unity
Gnome Calendar is installed by default
Empathy has been removed similar to Brasero as not many people use desktop IM clients
Startup Disk Creator have been update, and actually works
Gnome Software has proper notifications (what Noah was saying has been fixed)
Music and Messaging menus are dynamic now, for example if you use VLC to play media only controls for that player show up
Unity now support 3rd party themes better
most software are set to optional, so you can uninstall a key software and it won’t break your system
The launcher, not only can you move it to the bottom, it also shows the icon of the application you launched to let the user know that it has been launched and is loading (for slower computers, this will help the user from accidentally launching it again)
Launcher now properly shows different instances of nautilus (i.e. USB CD, Trash, Downloads, etc. are shown separately and not all clumped into one icon of Files)
Gnome Software got comments and rating support

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Follow Up Pt 2

Ubuntu 16.04 Intel Graphics: Unity, Xfce, KDE, LXDE, GNOME, MATE, Openbox – Phoronix

Again, it’s the out-of-the-box experience on each of the desktop environments without any tweaking. There’s also some desktop environment developers that recommend running Linux games in their own X.Org Server, etc.

Bug #1552539 “Ubiquity Erase Disk and Install Fails to create Sw…” : Bugs : ubiquity package : Ubuntu

Daily Build of Gnome 16.04 using installation option to Erase Disk and Install fails with following message:
“The creation of swap space in Partition #5 of SCSi3(0,0,0) (sda) failed.

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Duh Ops | WTR 35

chris — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 10:12:04 +0000

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Brook is a support engineer at puppet labs. She discusses so many tools used on a daily basis, be sure to check the links in the show notes!

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Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: So, Angela, today we’re going to interview Brook Shelley. She is a fantastic support engineer at Puppet Labs which is a great startup out of Portland. And she goes on to tell us about Puppet. About being a support engineer. We talk a bunch about life and her journey from being an English major to a professional in a technology field.
ANGELA: And before we get into the interview, I want to mention that you can support the network and Women’s Tech Radio specifically by going to patreon.com/jupitersignal. Now, it’s today because we have Tech Talk Today which is our thank you show of daily headlines that we do four days a week and it’s kind of like a thank you for supporting us, here’s just a little bit more and different than what we offer in any of our other shows. And it’s specifically for the people that support the network. I mean, anybody can watch it, really, but there’s some exclusive content that you get access to and updates about your network on the inside when you become a patron. So, go to patreon.com/jupitersignal to support Pagie and myself on Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: And we get started with our interview with Brook by asking her what she’s up to today and where she is in her career.
BROOK: My name is Brook and I work at a company called Puppet Labs. Right now I do support engineering. I’ve been doing tech work for around 10 years. Usually in the IT, sys admin supports fields. And so I guess I’m somewhere in my mid-career. I just keep working in different places learning different fields. This is my first job where I’m working with a server automation, whole new thing for me. And it kind of falls under the dev ops worlds, which I think the term is hilarious but it seems to be what people are using these days.
PAIGE: Isn’t dev ops another, another version of the developer designer unicorn?
BROOK: Yeah. Something like that. I mean, it’s just like, what if we got ops people and dev people to work together in harmony. I also call d’ops because I think that’s funnier, but-
ANGELA: Oh, I thought it was Duh Ops. Duh ops.
BROOK: Oh, yeah.
PAIGE: But that’s kind of also true, right?
BROOK: That works too. Yeah, I like that a lot.
PAIGE: That’s good. So what is, for people who aren’t familiar, because i know this is actually kind of a unique position at Puppet and a couple other companies. What is a support engineer?
BROOK: So, for us, what that means is, we sale a product that is an enterprise software, so we sell Puppet Enterprise. And it sort of puts together a bunch of open source components and a few other things to help large companies, and small companies, manage their server infrastructure. So when those people implement it or get their software implemented by — our software implemented by our engineers, our professional services folks, then when they have trouble with it, or if they have questions about it, they usually file tickets via email with us. And then my team is responsible for talking to them about their issues, reproducing them, filing bugs with our engineering team, directly fixing things ourselves. So we’re kind of the glue that holds it together once it’s shipped, because like any other software it works really, really well until you have it configured in a custom way and it’s all these moving parts and then you start going oh, there’s a few things I’m confused about. So that’s what my team does. We’re sort of a 24/7 team. We have people in Malaysia as well. I think there’s like eight or nine of us and we’re all pretty savvy experienced sys admin people. It’s also really rad because my team is, I think just about half women, which is super cool.
PAIGE: Oh wow. That is super rare.
BROOK: Yeah, especially for an engineering team. Yeah. So I feel really lucky that we have that. Both my boss and my boss’ boss are also women, which is really fantastic.
PAIGE: Oh wow. Yeah, womens’ leadership changes the whole team.
ANGELA: That’s great.
BROOK: Yeah, totally. It was a big factor in why I moved here to Portland and went and took this job, because I was like, oh man, if I can be surrounded by amazing, smart women, that’s my ideal goal.
PAIGE: I like it. So, I think, my understanding, and I would love you to correct me on this, is that Puppet as a product is an awesome wrapper to make a Docker more usable, especially in the enterprise environment? I think some of our viewers here are familiar — or listeners are familiar with Docker. I covered it on a couple other shows, but is that accurate?
BROOK: Uh, no. I would say it’s inaccurate. Docker is a separate piece of software. Docker is a way to bundle up applications and configurations into pendencies. Into little, like, container things and ship those out. But what Puppet does is Puppet installs, configures, and keeps in a steady state a myriad of server software and things. So, let’s say you have one Apache server and MySQL server and you’ve got some load balancers and whatever else. Instead of having to manually configure each one of those, you might set up Puppet and maybe create some modules to set all of those settings for you. And then when you want to launch a new server, you just start that node up, point it at your puppet master, and say hey this node gets this configuration. And you choose like a class or a role or something. It puts that on there and if someone, let’s say your employee, goes on that node and tweaks the configuration themselves, every 30 minutes that node checks back in with the master and says hey I look like this. ANd the master says that’s wrong. You should change your configuration. So, it also does some change management a little bit too. And that’s sort of the real rough outline of what it does, but it’s a pretty robust thing. We have customers that manage tens of thousands of servers with it. Some pretty big name customers too.
PAIGE: So, now you’re a support engineer. Have you always been in tech? Is this something as a kid you were taking things apart all the time? Do you have a degree in computer science? What’s your journey?
BROOK: So, yeah. When I was younger we were pretty poor, but my dad, when we were — I was maybe like in early middle school — my dad got a job in the defense industry and brought home a computer. And we’d had like an Apple 2E when I was really young that we inherited from somebody, but I just got on it a lot. And being a queer woman, I was looking for answers in community, because I was raised in a very Christian household and so I was like, I bet I can find stuff on here. So I started just like surfing around the internet and inevitably the computer would break in some way or I would get confused about how to connect to some IRC channel and so I started researching those things just to connect to find out what the hell was going on with me. And, that was impetuous for me to get started in tech was just fixing my own problems. And then, inevitably, I became the go to girl for my family and my friends whenever something would break. Like, hey can you help me with my computer or hey can you help me with my printer, and I just did those things. I went into the University of Texas at Austin and majored in English Literature.
PAIGE: So that’s not computer science.
BROOK: Not at all. I started working at the laptop help desk for the education department while I was there and — because i just fixed computers. And I was like, well it seems like people want to pay me money to do this, so I might as well take the money. I write now, but at the time I was like oh I want to be a novelist. I’m not going to try to do this tech thing. This is just temporary. ANd somehow temporary turned into ten years of doing this. I mean, it’s definitely something that’s always interested me. I think it’s fun to solve problems and it’s fun to sort of learn about new technologies. A lot of times my passions lie elsewhere and to some degree what I do as a job is a job. I didn’t necessarily get into tech as goal to become a programer and I don’t necessarily build servers or set up software on my free time, but it’s a job I’m very good at. It’s something that interest me and I kind of stumbled into it and kept going. But I’m actually also a college dropout. My situation was very bad when I was in college and for various reasons my dad stopped sort of filling out my financial aid information and so I couldn’t get loans anymore, which meant I had to drop out. And i was lucky enough that by that time I was already started in tech, so I’ve been able to continue with my career ever since then. I think my grandma hasn’t forgiven me about not finishing my degree yet, but at this point it’s been a while, so.
PAIGE: Yeah. It’s paper, right? At the end of the day.
BROOK: Yeah. And, I mean, I would love to go get a PhD in English, but it’s expensive so.
ANGELA: I know a lot of tech professionals that don’t have any college at all. You know?
PAIGE: Yeah. I even know a couple high school dropouts.
ANGELA: Yeah.
BROOK: And all the stuff I learned that I use every day are things that I picked up on my own, on the internet. And through friend and through mentors. So, my college classes taught me a lot about the socialist interpretation of Dostoevsky, but not necessarily the things that I do every day.
PAIGE: Yeah. I think one of the biggest values in education is learning how to learn. Especially once you mastered that, the internet is such an amazing worldwide resource. It really is changing lives. We have these stories of children in India who are ending up as millionaires because they’re teaching themselves how to build apps on the app store online.
ANGELA: Right.
BROOK: Totally, yeah. It’s amazing. And I think this is one of those — I have a lot of friends who are involved in things like Pi Ladies and other types of organizations that help women in other, like oppressed and minority groups in tech get involved with it. And the biggest thing I see a lot of times is just people not knowing that they can do something. Kind of feeling tentative. Well, I don’t know, that’s for somebody else. And it’s so amazing to see people kind of be able to in a more caring and free environment feel like they can succeed. And then when they feel like that, all of the sudden it’s like oh man you’re writing so many cools things and doing things I would have never thought of.
PAIGE: It’s like, people should have a podcast about that.
BROOK: I think so. Yeah. It turns out.
PAIGE: It turns out. Obviously, it’s a big passion of mine. I think that it’s just, you know, if you know that you could do it, you can do it.
BROOK: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: It’s the biggest hurdle.
BROOK: Exactly.
PAIGE: So, Brook, you’ve mentioned that you kind of actually are one of the few people in technology who manages to leave their job and tech at work.
BROOK: Yeah.

PAIGE: So what else do you do with your free time?
BROOK: Well, I live in Portland and so that means I bicycle a lot between different places. I absolutely love food. Like, sort of, maybe too much. Right now I’m on a ramen kick. I didn’t do gluten for like five years so every opportunity I have to ramen I’m doing it.
ANGELA: Okay, wait. So are you like college student ramen’ing it or are you adding like sarata and egg and green onions? How are you?
BROOK: Yeah. I’m going to like ramen shops. like fancy ramen shops that do like, they put their own pork belly and do like a bone broth.
PAIGE: You have to help me on my quest then, because as you know, I recently moved to Portland.
BROOK: Yeah.
PAIGE: And when I was in San Francisco I found this ramen joint, because I am definitely gluten intolerant.
BROOK: Yeah.
PAIGE: Where they would sub cabbage in for the noodles and it was amazing.
BROOK: Okay.
PAIGE: So if you see a place in Portland that subs cabbage for noodles, I’m there.
BROOK: There’s a place in Portland that does like a yam noodle instead of the-
ANGELA: Wait, you don’t like sweet potato?
PAIGE: I love sweet potatoes.
ANGELA: Oh.
BROOK: This is like a shirataki, so it’s like a white yam. It’s actually, it’s weird deal, it’s like all in, it’s all in soluble fibers so it’s like celery, so you don’t really digest it, but it’s good. I don’t know. It’s strange.
PAIGE: It’s called a high resistance starch.
ANGELA: Better than a cheeseburger, probably. Better for you, I mean.
PAIGE: Yeah.
BROOK: Possibly, yeah. I mean there’s some cheeseburgers.
PAIGE: There’s actually some interesting nutritional research that we need more highly resistant starch in the diet to act as prebiotic to host bacteria in your intestines properly.
ANGELA: Holy moly.
PAIGE: Which is why people are encouraging things like the shiratakis and plantains.
ANGELA: Interesting.
PAIGE: And a couple other things.
ANGELA: I wonder if there’s going to be then a movement to support adding more of that — I think it’s called — no cellulose — yeah, I think it is.
BROOK: Yeah.
ANGELA: Like the wood pulp that’s in a filler in a lot of our food.
PAIGE: No. No I don’t-
ANGELA: Because you can’t digest that either. But it could host something, I’m sure.
PAIGE: Yeah, probably not the right things though.
ANGELA: Yeah.
BROOK: I just eat a lot of rocks. No, I’m kidding.
ANGELA: Let us know how that goes.
BROOK: I travel a lot for fun and to go see friends that I know through Twitter and various other places. So when I’m traveling I eat a lot of food. I also read pretty constantly. I’m in a book group here in town that’s like a lesbian book group. And then, I don’t know, I have a Goodreads challenge that I’m trying to complete this year of like, I think 60 or 70 books.
ANGELA: Wow.
BROOK: When I was kid that was really easy, because I never stopped reading. I was always like hiding and reading or walking around and reading. But now that I have a job it’s like oh I have to stop reading this novel so I can go to work. But I do that a lot. I used to make music. I haven’t done that recently. But it’s something that I –
PAIGE: How do you make music?
BROOK: Uh, I grew up playing bass and so I played in some bands. And then I also used to make electronic music, which is something I want to start doing again. And I write. I write a whole lot. i do sort of a daily meditative prompt thing. There’s this website called hellloprompt.com and they send you a daily prompt. Like yesterday’s was I think on like wedding proposal or something like that. And then the day before that was like a story about a bully or something. And so it’s just a bunch of different small prompts and you can write a few sentences or a few paragraphs and send them in and they all get collated anonymously. So the next day you see the previous day’s stories and then a new prompt. It’s really fun. I do that and then I write for The Toast occasionally. I just had a piece on a tarot website about why tarot is important to me as somebody who grew up as a Christian and also as a lesbian. And, yeah, just stuff like that. I’ve got a couple different things coming out and some books this year too, and writing is a big deal for me.
ANGELA: That is really awesome.
PAIGE: Very cool.
BROOK: Yeah, thanks.
PAIGE: So, if people want to follow you for this sort of stuff do you tweet about it?
BROOK: Yeah, I definitely do. Yeah, my Twitter account is probably the best place to see things like that. And I think the books is like orbooks.com/lean-out. So the book is called Lean Out and it’s a bunch of stories about misogyny in tech.
PAIGE: I see what you did there.
BROOK: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: We will not lean in.
BROOK: Yeah, you want to lean out.
PAIGE: So what is your Twitter handle?
BROOK: It’s BrookShelley, so B-R-O-O-K-S-H-E-L-L-E-Y. And that’s kind of the name I use for everything.
ANGELA: Great.
PAIGE: Awesome. And that will be in the show notes.
BROOK: Awesome.
PAIGE: For sure.
BROOK: Yeah, and it’s fun. I mean so many people on there too. Like, I say a good amount of my friends these days are people I met through Twitter, which is kind of fun.
PAIGE: How do you meet people through Twitter? This is one of the, — I’m not going to lie. This is one of the fascinating — I’ve actually had several people recently be like oh I met this person through Twitter. And I’m like, it’s just a, it’s tiny microblogging platform.
BROOK: Yeah.
PAIGE: Which has sort of messaging, but not really.
BROOK: Yeah. I mean a lot of it is just like friends of friends. So some people I know through real like things. We’ll follow each other on Twitter. We’ll be chatting about something. Maybe one of their friends will pipe in and add something or make a joke. And I’ll sort of follow the people that my friends retweet, sometimes. And then I’ll make a joke or respond to something. Inevitably if we’re both funny and kind of enjoying each other’s company in the sort of microsphere or Twitter, then we’ll like DM each other or say like hey we should grab a drink sometime. Yeah, especially when I’m traveling. I was just in New York and I was just in LA and while I’m there I’m like, hey if I have any friends on here who live in this city and you want to show me something or go get a drink, let’s do that. And then I often meet up with people. New York was super busy because of that. And I stay with people that I meet through Twitter too. LIke people I’ve never physically met in real life.
ANGELA: That’s awesome.
BROOK: Yeah. It’s super weird though, because it’s like, I’ve never met you but I guess I’m going to crash at your house when I come there. ANd they’re like, yeah rad. It usually goes well.
PAIGE: That’s like couchsurfing but with more knowledge.
BROOK: Yeah. And you can also date people from Twitter. That’s the more-
PAIGE: Whoa. Whoa. Whoa, now.
ANGELA: Her mind just blew. It’s all over the wall.
PAIGE: Angela, I think we’re going to have to have like a teach Paige Twitter episode. We’ll do a video this time.
BROOK: It’s the best. And it’s so much better than like OkCupid or Tinder because where that’s like static information that you say about yourself-
ANGELA: Right.
BROOK: Twitter is what you care about. What you’re talking about. So you can see what somebody actually is like to some degree.
ANGELA: What their passion is too.
BROOK: Yeah. Yeah. And then also who their friends are. So, you’re like oh that person follows Ron Paul. Maybe I don’t want to hang out with them or whatever.
ANGELA: Caution. Caution.
BROOK: Yeah.
PAIGE: What if it’s like an ironic follow.
BROOK: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, they just follow to make sure that he’s not getting more dangerous or something. I don’t know.
PAIGE: So you can, whenever he says something stupid you can do that thing where your snub him or sarcasm back.
BROOK: Exactly. Yeah.
PAIGE: Okay. This is funny. What I’m — all I’m hearing in this conversation is like, Paige you’re social ineptitude via text will get you killed, but — or not killed, but you know. This will not go well.
ANGELA: Smited.
PAIGE: Yes. Smitten.
BROOK: I mean, you8 know, there’s a whole bunch of different ways to do stuff and I have — I — for me, I had a lot of people that I grew up around who are not really friends anymore. A lot of it due to my queerness and a lot of it due to me moving. ANd so, I’ve had to rebuild a chosen family and rebuild a group of people in my life in the past few years. And so it made me a lot more apt to try new things. I have a lot of people i know who, you know, they have the same friends from college or high school and so they’re impetus for making new friends isn’t as high. But yeah, it’s pretty fun.
PAIGE: I mean, it’s no joke that the tools that we have built, like Twitter, like Facebook, and all of these other different social networks can be used in this awesome way to build these intricate connected widespread communities. And, you know, I just happen to be really bad at sharing via text. I’m awesome in Meet Space. I swear.
BROOK: Yeah. There’s always, yeah, there’s always meetups and stuff too that are kind of fun. Although, I’m — I do better online. I do really well in one on one and small situations. If there’s a room full of like 10 or 20 people, I’m usually in the side of the room and like maybe want to read a book.
PAIGE: Yeah, I’m exactly the opposite, which is fairly unusual for a geek and I get myself in trouble that way sometimes, because everyone is like well we’ll just talk about it online. I’m like, do we have to? Can we talk about it now?
BROOK: Yeah, exactly.
PAIGE: Can I bring a beer? How about pizza?
BROOK: You’re the person who calls people on the phone as opposed to like texting them?
PAIGE: Oh, let’s not go that far. Mostly, I’m actually the person that just shows up at your house.
B; Hey, I like that. That’s good.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: Like old school. Like, hey can Brook come out and play?
BROOK: Exactly. I like it.
PAIGE: Awesome. So I did have one other question that I like to ask. I’d love to know what tools you’re using right now to do your job, because it’s always interesting to see what other developers and support technicians and all sorts of things are using in their jobs so that people can get a handle on it. What your job needs for skills.
BROOK: Yeah. My favorite tool of all time is nvALT which is like a — it’s a fork of a thing called Notational Velocity and at its basic level it’s just a plane text editor that does universal search. So the screen looks like, you’ve got a big box for text and you’ve got a left sidebar that lists all of the articles you’ve written or all of the things you’ve written. And then you’ve got a search bar as well. When you type in anything it will find all the notes that have those words in it. And if you press enter on the search it will create a new note with that as a title. So that’s like my brain dump. I found that I’m not very good at story arbitrary information like numbers and whatever else. But my computer is. So I have that synced up to Dropbox and then over to Byword on my phone. And that gets me really far. Other than that, we use Confluence here at work to store a bunch of internal information. We use Zendesk to do our ticketing. I use an inbox for personal stuff and Gmail for work stuff, Google Apps rather. And as far as server things go, obviously Puppet Enterprise, which is something I have to know really, really well. But because I have to bring up a lot of VMs really quickly and test various interpolations of them and be able to roll them back really quickly if I mess it up, we use Vagrant for that. So we have a bunch of different sort of VMs being managed by Vagrant. It’s a cool service. You can like — you template things to YAML and then you say like Vagrant up and create a new VM. You can log into it, mess with it. We have a snapshotting plugin for it, so you can create a snapshot as soon as it’s launched and installed so that if I go misconfigure it and break it, instead of trying to go fix it I can just roll back to the known good state. Let’s see, other than that, we use HipChat to talk to each other. That’s pretty important. And then Markdown, a lot of Markdown stuff. It’s how we write our documents. It’s how we do our ticket stuff in JIRA.
PAIGE: Is nvALT Markdown friendly now?
BROOK: Yeah, it is. The Markdown preview isn’t great, but I haven’t found a place that really has great Markdown preview. Yeah, I like it just fine though. Mostly I use it, especially because it’s very distraction free. It’s just a white box. So I can’t format-
PAIGE: I have used the exact setup that you have on that one and I liked it myself quite a bit with nvALT, Dropbox, and Byword.
BROOK: They’re fantastic. I really like it. I mean, every once in a while I’ll go check and see what else is out there as far tech stops go, but they’re always missing something key that I need, so I’m like all right, I’m sticking with this one.
PAIGE: Yeah. I ended up moving over to Evernote just because i have to deal with so much multimedia stuff with trying to do podcasts and meetups and things, but other than that I would much rather be in nvALT.
BROOK: Yeah, and I like Evernote okay, but for me I’m sort of paranoid and I’m like, well I don’t really trust them to stay around as long as plain text.
PAIGE: Very true. I might, I might be paranoid to export on a regular basis via (unintelligible) to my Dropbox.
BROOK: I love it. That’s awesome. It’s the best way to do it. And then we use like 13’ Macbook Pro retina computers and a second screen. Although, my personal computer that I use a lot when I’m here at the office is one of the new Macbooks. The little 12’ inch ones. And I’m like absolutely head over heals about this computer because it’s so tiny.
PAIGE: I actually was going to ask you that because I saw you had it the other night. And I’m still slightly on the fence because I’m always touchy about first gen technology, but.
BROOK: Sure.
PAIGE: What’s awesome?
BROOK: It’s so light and portable. It fits in my purse. I take it with me in my purse everywhere.
ANGELA: That’s awesome.
BROOK: Yeah. The retina screen is amazing. It’s not fast, but I don’t need it to be. It turned out that most of what I do is via SSH in a terminal and then things that I don’t do on a computer, sorry, on a server are things that I’m just, like I’m writing text. So I don’t need processing speed. And the GPU is good enough to let me throw game of thrones onto my TV. So it’s just what i need for a machine. And the battery life is a little bit less than I want compared to my old Macbook Air, which had like 14 hours. This one has like eight or nine. But eight or nine hours is still a long time so I’m pretty happy with it.
PAIGE: And one port life hasn’t killed you?
BROOK: No. I don’t plug anything into my computer except for headphones.
PAIGE: Yeah.
BROOK: I occasionally — I broke down and got the adapter so I could charge my phone with it, but that’s it. I don’t — I mean I connect to hard drives via a NAS. I don’t use secondary monitors when I’m at home or whatever. So I don’t really need much else. And if I project something onto a screen. Like, a lot of times people have Apple Tvs or whatever else. If I do talks and things like that, I don’t like using PowerPoint so I don’t worry about that either.
PAIGE: Nice.
BROOK: Yeah. I’ve radically simplified it.
PAIGE: Yeah. I really — I kind of did the same thing the first time I went down to a Macbook Air. It was just like, oh wait, I don’t really need, well because I don’t have time to play games anymore so I don’t really need crazy processing power, because mostly I’m just writing text code and it’s brower text code. So it’s not like I’m compiling anything.
BROOK: Yeah. Yeah, I’m alway confused when people are like, oh I need a really powerful computer. I’m like for what? But I think that’s like — that was the story of the ‘90s and the early 2000s was sort of like more power is always better and you’re always going to — except for the fact that websites and sort of the way people do Javascript stuff is more and more complex, generally you don’t need much.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember, you can find the show notes on the YouTube page or go to JupiterBroadcasting.com and from the show dropdown select Womens’ Tech Radio and find the episdoe that you want to listne to or ead about, and scroll down to those show notes. You can also use our contact form on the website, which you can select Women’s Tech Radio or any show on the network to email us about with any kind of feedback.
PAIGE: You can also find us on iTunes. If you have a moment please leave us a review. Let us know what you think about the show. You can reach out to us directly at wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com or follow us on Twitter, @heywtr. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

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A Chat with Red Hat | LAS 370

chris — Sun, 21 Jun 2015 07:19:35 +0000

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We visit with Red Hat at their home office & find out their long-term plans for CentOS, making Fedora more competitive & why they give away their biggest competitive advantage.

It’s a special edition of the big show!

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The Linux Action Show Visits Red Hat

Brought to you by: System76

Red Hat, Inc. is an American multinational software company providing open-source software products to the enterprise community. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with satellite offices worldwide.

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Red Hat’s stock hits 15-year high

The stock even briefly hit a high of $81.44, although it’s now trading at just above $79, still historically high. It hasn’t traded near $80 since the heady days of the internet bubble back in 2000, when it hit $135 and traded at over $100 for a couple of months.

But in 2015, the stock has been on a tear again, since the company has now delivered nine straight quarters of beats on both revenue and profits.

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SMBTrapped in Microsoft | TechSNAP 210

chris — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 19:01:23 +0000

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Researches find an 18 year old bug in Windows thats rather nasty, we’ve got the details. A new perspective on the bug bounty arms race & the security impact of Wifi on a plane.

Plus great feedback, a bursting round up & much much more!

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Cylance finds “SPEAR” a new spin on an 18 year old Windows vulnerability

In 1997 Aaron Spangler discovered a flaw in Windows
By causing a user to navigate to a file://1.2.3.4/ url in Internet Explorer, the user’s windows credentials would be sent to the remote server, to attempt to login to it
“Redirect to SMB is a way for attackers to steal valuable user credentials by hijacking communications with legitimate web servers via man-in-the-middle attacks, then sending them to malicious SMB (server message block) servers that force them to spit out the victim’s username, domain and hashed password”
“It’s a serious issue because stolen credentials can be used to break into private accounts, steal data, take control of PCs and establish a beachhead for moving deeper into a targeted network.”
“Software from at least 31 companies including Adobe, Apple, Box, Microsoft, Oracle and Symantec can be exploited using this vulnerability”
“Redirect to SMB is most likely to be used in targeted attacks by advanced actors because attackers must have control over some component of a victim’s network traffic.”
“Less sophisticated attackers could launch Redirect to SMB attacks on shared WiFi access points at locations such as coffee shops from any computer, including mobile devices. We successfully tested this attack on a home network using a Nexus 7 loaded with all required tools.”
“While the user credentials sent over SMB are commonly encrypted, the encryption method used was devised in 1998 and is weak by today’s standards. A stronger hashing algorithm being used on these credentials would decrease the impact of this issue, but not as much as disabling automatic authentication with untrusted SMB servers. With roughly $3,000 worth of GPUs, an attacker could crack any 8-character password consisting of letters (upper and lower case) as well as numbers in less than half a day.”
“Microsoft has yet to release a patch to fix the Redirect to SMB vulnerability. The simplest workaround is to block outbound traffic from TCP 139 and TCP 445 — either at the endpoint firewall or at the network gateway’s firewall (assuming you are on a trusted network). The former will block all SMB communication, which may disable other features that depend on SMB. If the block is done at the network gateway’s firewall, SMB features will still work inside the network, but prevent authentication attempts with destinations outside the network. See the white paper for other mitigation steps.”
“Microsoft did not resolve the issue reported by Aaron Spangler in 1997. We hope that our research will compel Microsoft to reconsider the vulnerabilities and disable authentication with untrusted SMB servers. That would block the attacks identified by Spangler as well as the new Redirect to SMB attack.”
Cylance Whitepaper (PDF)

Given enough money, all bugs are shallow

Eric Raymond, in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, famously wrote: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
“The idea is that open source software, by virtue of allowing anyone and everyone to view the source code, is inherently less buggy than closed source software. He dubbed this “Linus’s Law”.”
“However, the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability was a turning point for Linus’s Law, a catastrophic exploit based on a severe bug in open source software. How catastrophic? It affected about 18% of all the HTTPS websites in the world, and allowed attackers to view all traffic to these websites, unencrypted… for two years.”
“OpenSSL, the library with this bug, is one of the most critical bits of Internet infrastructure the world has – relied on by major companies to encrypt the private information of their customers as it travels across the Internet. OpenSSL was used on millions of servers and devices to protect the kind of important stuff you want encrypted, and hidden away from prying eyes, like passwords, bank accounts, and credit card information.”
“This should be some of the most well-reviewed code in the world. What happened to our eyeballs, man?”
“In reality, it’s generally very, very difficult to fix real bugs in anything but the most trivial Open Source software. I know that I have rarely done it, and I am an experienced developer. Most of the time, what really happens is that you tell the actual programmer about the problem and wait and see if he/she fixes it”
“Even if a brave hacker communities to read the code, they’re not terribly likely to spot one of the hard-to-spot problems. Why? Few open source hackers are security experts”
“There’s a big difference between usage eyeballs and development eyeballs.”
“Most eyeballs are looking at the outside of the code, not the inside. And while you can discover bugs, even important security bugs, through usage, the hairiest security bugs require inside knowledge of how the code works.”
Peer reviewing code is a lot harder than writing code.
“The amount of code being churned out today – even if you assume only a small fraction of it is “important” enough to require serious review – far outstrips the number of eyeballs available to look at the code”
“There are not enough qualified eyeballs to look at the code. Sure, the overall number of programmers is slowly growing, but what percent of those programmers are skilled enough, and have the right security background, to be able to audit someone else’s code effectively? A tiny fraction”
“But what’s the long term answer to the general problem of not enough eyeballs on open source code? It’s something that will sound very familiar to you, though I suspect Eric Raymond won’t be too happy about it.”
“Money. Lots and lots of money.”
“Increasingly, companies are turning to commercial bug bounty programs. Either ones they create themselves, or run through third party services like Bugcrowd, Synack, HackerOne, and Crowdcurity. This means you pay per bug, with a larger payout the bigger and badder the bug is.”
However, adding more money to the equation might actually make things worse
“There’s now a price associated with exploits, and the deeper the exploit and the lesser known it is, the more incentive there is to not tell anyone about it until you can collect a major payout. So you might wait up to a year to report anything, and meanwhile this security bug is out there in the wild – who knows who else might have discovered it by then?”
“If your focus is the payout, who is paying more? The good guys, or the bad guys? Should you hold out longer for a bigger payday, or build the exploit up into something even larger? I hope for our sake the good guys have the deeper pockets, otherwise we are all screwed.”
I like that Google addressed a few of these concerns by making Pwnium, their Chrome specific variant of Pwn2Own, a) no longer a yearly event but all day, every day and b) increasing the prize money to “infinite”. I don’t know if that’s enough, but it’s certainly going in the right direction.
“Money turns security into a “me” goal instead of an “us” goal“
“Am I now obligated, on top of providing a completely free open source project to the world, to pay people for contributing information about security bugs that make this open source project better? Believe me, I was very appreciative of the security bug reporting, and I sent them whatever I could, stickers, t-shirts, effusive thank you emails, callouts in the code and checkins. But open source isn’t supposed to be about the money… is it?”
“Easy money attracts all skill levels — The submitter doesn’t understand what is and isn’t an exploit, but knows there is value in anything resembling an exploit, so submits everything they can find.”
“But I have some advice for bug bounty programs, too”:
“You should have someone vetting these bug reports, and making sure they are credible, have clear reproduction steps, and are repeatable, before we ever see them.”
“You should build additional incentives in your community for some kind of collaborative work towards bigger, better exploits. These researchers need to be working together in public, not in secret against each other”.
“You should have a reputation system that builds up so that only the better, proven contributors are making it through and submitting reports”.
“Encourage larger orgs to fund bug bounties for common open source projects, not just their own closed source apps and websites. At Stack Exchange, we donated to open source projects we used every year. Donating a bug bounty could be a big bump in eyeballs on that code.”

FAA Needs a More Comprehensive Approach to Address Cybersecurity As Agency Transitions to NextGen

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) faces cybersecurity challenges in at least three areas:
(1) protecting air-traffic control (ATC) information systems,
(2) protecting aircraft avionics used to operate and guide aircraft
(3) clarifying cybersecurity roles and responsibilities among multiple FAA offices
“FAA has taken steps to protect its ATC systems from cyber-based threats; however, significant security-control weaknesses remain that threaten the agency’s ability to ensure the safe and uninterrupted operation of the national airspace systems”
“Modern aircraft are increasingly connected to the Internet. This interconnectedness can potentially provide unauthorized remote access to aircraft avionics systems. As part of the aircraft certification process, FAA’s Office of Safety (AVS) currently certifies new interconnected systems through rules for specific aircraft and has started reviewing rules for certifying the cybersecurity of all new aircraft systems.”
“FAA officials and experts we interviewed said that modern aircraft are also increasingly connected to the Internet, which also uses IP-networking technology and can potentially provide an attacker with remote access to aircraft information systems. According to cybersecurity experts we interviewed, Internet connectivity in the cabin should be considered a direct link between the aircraft and the outside world, which includes potential malicious actors. FAA officials and cybersecurity and aviation experts we spoke to said that increasingly passengers in the cabin can access the Internet via onboard wireless broadband systems.”
“Four cybersecurity experts with whom we spoke discussed firewall vulnerabilities, and all four said that because firewalls are software components, they could be hacked like any other software and circumvented. The experts said that if the cabin systems connect to the cockpit avionics systems (e.g., share the same physical wiring harness or router) and use the same networking platform, in this case IP, a user could subvert the firewall and access the cockpit avionics system from the cabin. The presence of personal smartphones and tablets in the cockpit increases the risk of a system’s being compromised by trusted insiders, both malicious and non-malicious, if these devices have the capability to transmit information to aircraft avionics systems”
One would hope that the cockpit avionics are separated from the onboard entertainment and wifi systems by more than just a firewall. Even if they are not, a properly configured firewall is very difficult to compromise.
Additional Coverage – BatBlue
It seems that the authors of this report were not experts on the subject, and when interviewing experts on the topic, they asked questions like “is there any way to get around a firewall”

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The post SMBTrapped in Microsoft | TechSNAP 210 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Lunch Lady Lockdown | TechSNAP 207

chris — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 18:37:16 +0000

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Reverse Engineering Incentives to Improve Security. New Jersey school district computers held for ransom & the flash bug that lives on from 2011 with a twist!

Plus some great networking questions, drone powered Internet & more!

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Reverse Engineering Incentives — to Improve Security

Gunnar Peterson writes a blog post about an interesting way to improve security in the enterprise
Based on a scheme Walmart used in the 1980s, where employees got a bonus if “stock shrinkage” (theft) was below a certain level
This kept more employees from stealing, where before they had no incentive not to
So, he morphs the idea for information security:
“I’ve often said that no one wants to write insecure code, and I wonder if something similar would work in infosec. Could a company put a fixed number each year towards an “average” breach cost and then if one does not occur, credit it back in a bonus to the tech staff, developers and sys admins?”
“Think – digital version of days since last workplace injury. My guess is that incentives along those lines would very probably work way better than the majority of products on RSA trade show floor, and at a fraction of the cost.”
He discusses the various problems with the idea
How do you define what is a breach
Instead what about a “pay for each bug found”?, but he points out the possibility of the Cobra Effect
So the idea is: “we do not end up on the front page of the newspaper in a breach story” means everyone gets a bonus payout roughly equal to what we would pay in response cost on a rolling two years basis. This should tend to focus the mind and inspire people. Fired up? Ready to go? Now let’s go install some patches!
“Its not perfect of course, but has the advantage of focusing attention onto the issues of strategic impact and puts security people, developers, sys admins and other on the same side of the table. To me, this is long overdue and a powerful organizational tool.”
“Some might argue that incentives are silly, these are professional developers. What we need is regulation. We have used regulations, for example PCI or Company security policies, for a long time in infosec, they are not worthless, but they are not optimal either. At the very least they are only one tool in the toolbox and we should look at others.”
“Security people’s main role is to be a barrier between an organization and stupid. So the real question is – what kind of barrier is the most effective? Regulations create the hostile, tactical and divided environments in which security people operate today. Bonuses have a way of getting people’s attention I have noticed and they have a way of getting people to work together.”
“What I think the outcome here would look like is to simplify the coordination between the security team and dev/ops teams. On any engagement I easily spend 30-50% of my time on James Baker-style shuttle diplomacy trying to convince devs and ops folks that security is not deliberately setting out to destroy their timeline, bonus and career. If you just took that portion out of it, that means that any security time and dollars that get spent are spent on trying to solve actual security problems not Security/Dev/Ops Glasnost.“
It is an interesting idea, although it only seems to work for commercial software development

New Jersey school district computers held for ransom

An attacker has taken over a Gloucester County school’s district’s computer network, and is demanding payment of 500 bitcoins ($128,000) to return control of the system
“Without working computers, teachers cannot take attendance, access phone numbers or records, and students cannot purchase food in cafeterias. Parents cannot receive emails with students grades and other information.”
The superintendent said the attacker “did not access any personal information about students, families or teachers”
It is unclear how the attacker could prevent teaching from accessing records, but not give the attacker access to those same records
The Superintendent said, without Smartboards, students used pens, pencils and papers, going back to, what he described, “education as it was 20 or 30 years ago.”
“We are still a long way from being fully operational. We have to work to restore the functionality of all of our computers.”
“The school district is being forced to postpone the Common Core-mandated PARCC state exams”
It seems like the school needs a better backup system
A similar cryptolocker style attack hit the college I was consulting for a few weeks ago
They immediately dumped the system and restored from that mornings backup, and were back up in a few hours
I teased them that if they were using ZFS, they could have just done “zfs rollback” and been back up in a few minutes, with less data loss
You still need backups, of everything
A full Disaster Recovery plan is in order for a school board, students should still be able to use the Cafeteria no matter what is wrong with the computers
A cold spare using a read-only backup, that doesn’t allow new changes, but at least allows access to important information like parents’ phone numbers, seems to be in order
NJ School District Hit With Ransomware-For-Bitcoins Scheme t

Flash bug from 2011 still lives on

CVE-2011-2461 was an interesting Flash bug
Unlike a typical flash bug, the problem was in the Adobe Flex SDK, used to write the flash programs that run in your browser (.swf files)
So, the fix wasn’t a newer version of the Flash player, but a patch to the tools used to author the flash files
However, even years later, it seems many of these old flash files are still around, and users are still vulnerable because of it
“The particularity of CVE-2011-2461 is that vulnerable Flex applications have to be recompiled or patched; even with the most recent Flash player, vulnerable Flex applications can be exploited. As long as the SWF file was compiled with a vulnerable Flex SDK, attackers can still use this vulnerability against the latest web browsers and Flash plugin.”
Adobe released a tool to patch .swf files, seems to be rarely used
Researchers at NibbleSec ran into the problem while investigation a SOP (Single Origin Policy) bypass attack
Researchers presented their findings at the Trooper 2015 conference
During their scan, they found that many sites still host vulnerable Flash applications, including Google, Yahoo, Adobe, SalesForce, and more
“SOP prevents scripting content loaded from one website—or an origin—from affecting the content of another website. For example, a script hosted on website X that’s loaded by website Y in an iframe should not be able to read sensitive content about the other site’s visitors, like their authentication cookies. Neither should website Y be able to obtain information about users of website X by simply loading a resource from it.”
“Without this mechanism in place, any malicious site could load, for example, Gmail in a hidden iframe and when authenticated Gmail users visit the malicious site, it could steal their Gmail authentication cookies.”
It will be interesting to see if the new found attention actually gets this bug solved

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The post Lunch Lady Lockdown | TechSNAP 207 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Questions for elementary OS | LAS 352

chris — Sun, 15 Feb 2015 17:26:22 +0000

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Two members of the elementary OS project join us to discuss the recent dust up around their blog post asking for more funding from their users. We’ll ask the hard questions you’ve been wondering, get the latest from the project & talk about the future.

Plus we look at the sales for the first BQ Ubuntu Touch edition, Linus’ personal choice award, some good news for OpenShot & more!

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A Chat with elementary OS

Brought to you by: System76

Freya Beta 2 is here!

You thought the day would never come, but after 6 months and almost 600 fixes we’re bringing you the next step on our way to a final release of elementary OS 0.3!

elementary — Payments

We explicitly say you can download Luna for free, we include a pay-what-you-want (including $0) text entry with $10 pre-filled, and we also include an explicit “Download Luna for free” link that simply sets the text entry to $0 for you.

Next, you’re given the payment/download dialog:

The text entry matches whatever was on the first screen, but we again let you change it to anything you’d like, including $0.

Users have downloaded Luna over 2,000,000 times. Around 99.875% of those users download without paying. Of the tiny 0.125% who do, the most common payments are the default $10, followed by $1. But again, only a tiny fraction of one percent of users even decide to pay in the first place.

Furthermore, we’ve received feedback that this flow is deceiving. It doesn’t make it clear enough that there are multiple payment options and it includes a payments step even if you’ve chosen to enter $0.

elementary misses the point « Blog Fiasco

A recent post on the elementary blog about how they ask for payment on download created a bit of a stir this week. One particular sentence struck a nerve (it has since been removed from the post): “We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software.”

elementary — How big is elementary OS really?

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Runs Linux

The Lego Movie… Runs Linux!

So I was watching the making of The Lego Movie with the only purpose of finding some Linux goodness. I was pretty upset when I saw Windows 7 and Photoshop at a close up, but then there is the animation (and the GNOME) stuff.

Desktop App Pick

Lets Make Music (LMMS)

Produce music with your computer
by creating melodies and beats, synthesizing and mixing sounds, arranging samples and much more.

Weekly Spotlight

AutoKey

AutoKey is a desktop automation utility for Linux and X11. It allows you to manage collection of scripts and phrases, and assign abbreviations and hotkeys to these. This allows you to execute a script or insert text on demand in whatever program you are using.

AutoKey features a subset of the capabilities of the popular Windows-based AutoHotkey, but is not intended as a full replacement. For a Linux-based implementation of AutoHotkey, see IronAHK. AutoKey’s GUI features a number of concepts and features inspired by the Windows program PhraseExpress.

Features

Python scripting engine allows you to automate virtually any task that can be accomplished via the keyboard and/or mouse
Built-in code editor with autocomplete and calltips
Scripts are plain Python files that can be edited in any text editor
Similarly, phrases are stored as plain text files
Create collections of phrases/scripts in folders, and assign a hotkey or abbreviation to the folder to display a popup menu
Regular expressions can be used to filter windows by their title or class, to exclude hotkeys/abbreviations from triggering in certain applications
Scripts, phrases and folders can be attached to the notification icon menu, allowing you to select them without assigning a hotkey or abbreviation

Our Past Picks

These are the weekly picks provided by the Jupiter Broadcasting podcast, the Linux Action Show.

This site includes a separate picks lists for the “Runs Linux”, Desktop Apps, Spotlight Picks, Android Picks, and Distro Picks.

— NEWS —

Ubuntu Phone Sells Out During First Flash Sale

Despite the technical issues the Bq Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition handset managed to sell out its debut run.

Ubuntu phones will be available to buy between 9-18 (CET) 2015.02.10

BQ: 12,000 orders per minute

@Baktus we experienced a huge demand this morning, receiving over 12,000 orders per minute

— BQ (@bqreaders) February 11, 2015

Ubuntu Phone: Is It Worth It? (Aquaris E4.5) – YouTube

I am back from London. I attended the Ubuntu Phone Insider event and have an Ubuntu Phone I took back with me. Here is what think about the device and the OS. Help support my channel and make it possible for me to obtain devices to review.

VLC Media Player 3.0

VLC Media Player 3.0.0 is one of the most anticipated applications of 2015, eagerly awaited by millions of computer users worldwide. Prominent features of VLC 3.0 include Wayland support, a Chromecast output module, several Android improvements, among which we can mention rotation, opaque, and subpicture blending, as well as batch convert support.

Linux Torvalds awarded Arch Linux as the most consumer friendly distrobution

The purpose of a GNU distribution is to make it easy for users to use their system. It’s a stupid idea to force your users to compile everything from scratch,” said Linus Torvalds at the event. If you think your users are going to compile everything, only compilers will use your software.

OpenShot Video Editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux by Jonathan Thomas — Kickstarter

There are many challenges that go along with building any software. Some are obvious and some are more subtle. However, some challenges, as I’ve recently realized, aren’t related to computers at all. Sometime in late October, my wife and I decided that it would be fun to put our house on the market, and “test the waters”. We have been talking about moving out of Arlington, TX (a relatively big city) for years, and heading towards a bit more land, and less city. As fate would have it, we had an offer on our house within 1 week, and all of a sudden needed to find a new house, make repairs, pack, rent a moving truck, etc… etc… Needless to say, this required a lot of time and energy.

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The post Questions for elementary OS | LAS 352 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

NOde | CR 140

chris — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 15:23:30 +0000

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Can’t we all just settle down & focus? Mike’s just about had it with javascript framework madness. Plus could Microsoft be uniquely positioned to take advantage of the eventual die off of some frameworks?

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Hoopla

Xamarin.Forms Review

The post NOde | CR 140 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

How Non-Devs Can Help Linux | LAS 350

chris — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 19:20:50 +0000

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What are the best options for non-coders and developers to contribute to their favorite open source project? We’ll break down some of the barriers we’ve faced & approaches we like to help out in a non-development capacity.

Plus the common ways the Ghost vulnerability is being exploited, how you can do your taxes under Linux & a few surprises!

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Contribution to open source when your not a developer

Brought to you by: System76

Problems we’ve faced trying to help

Who could use the money the most ie: Mozilla vs Tox
Abandoned IRC, unclear if anyone still “owning” the project.
Mixed ways of funding. I want to contribute, but each project has their own payment system, and way of handling it.

Non-Monetary ways to help

Advocation for software,
Documentation
Community outreach
Bug Triage, find dupes, discover missing information developers would need to fully troubleshoot.

— PICKS —

Runs Linux

Samsung Smart Refrigerator

The Samsung 4-Door refrigerator with 8″ Wi-Fi Enabled LCD will allow you to browse the web, access apps and connect to other Samsung smart devices – opening up a world of interactive communication and entertainment.

Samsung’s new smart fridge mirrors your smart phone

Desktop App Pick

Gourmet Recipe Manager

Gourmet Recipe Manager is a recipe-organizer available for Windows, Linux, and other Unix systems.

Weekly Spotlight

BeansBooks

Easily create invoices and purchase orders, pay bills and track sales tax. Import and automatically categorize bank transactions.

Our Past Picks

These are the weekly picks provided by the Jupiter Broadcasting podcast, the Linux Action Show.

This site includes a separate picks lists for the “Runs Linux”, Desktop Apps, Spotlight Picks, Android Picks, and Distro Picks.

— NEWS —

WordPress, PHP Apps, Subject to Ghost glibc Attacks

“Less than 48 hours after the disclosure of the Ghost vulnerability in the GNU C library (glibc), researchers have uncovered that PHP applications, including the WordPress content management system, could be another weak spot and eventually in the crosshairs of attackers.

Ghost is a vulnerability in glibc that attackers can use against only a handful of applications right now to remotely run executable code and gain control of a Linux server. The vulnerability is a heap-based buffer overflow and affects all Linux systems, according to experts, and has been present in the glibc code since 2000. ???An example of where this could be a big issue is within WordPress itself: it uses a function named wp_http_validate_url() to validate every pingback???s post URL,??? wrote Sucuri research Marc-Alexandre Montpas in an advisory published Wednesday. ???And it does so by using gethostbyname(). So an attacker could leverage this vector to insert a malicious URL that would trigger a buffer overflow bug, server-side, potentially allowing him to gain privileges on the server.???”

LibreOffice gets a streamlined makeover, native alternatives for major Microsoft

The Document foundation announced availability of the latest version of LibreOffice on Thursday, which it says is the most beautiful version of the open source productivity suite yet. LibreOffice 4.4 also fixes some compatibility issues with files that are saved in Microsoft’s OOXML formats.

Official Google Drive Linux Client Screenshots Leaked

The screenshots above are bundled with the official Google Drive Mac client and they first appeared with version 1.18.7821.2489 (I checked the previous version and some random old versions and none contained these screenshots), released on October 30, 2014, which isn’t long ago and it most probably means that Google is testing Drive for Linux internally. So we might actually see an official release pretty soon.

Bill Gates Inadvertently Shows Off Ubuntu on His Facebook Page

The Internet is abuzz today after Bill Gates published an image on his Facebook page and a link towards his website with the text “15 years from now, most people in poor countries will be able to take classes online.” It’s a sound goal and it’s perfectly doable, but in the image posted on Facebook the operating system is Ubuntu.

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The post How Non-Devs Can Help Linux | LAS 350 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Obviously Linux’s Fault | LINUX Unplugged 75

chris — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 20:40:03 +0000

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It’s a new year & a new round of Linux bashing. But are some of the criticism corrects? Can we handle a little tough love as a community for the collective good? We debate.

Plus the 4 best new Linux distributions to watch in 2015, a MATE love story & an Arch victory.

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CVE-2014-9390 aka “Git on case-insensitive filesystems” I did not give the…

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Open source solutions for remote support

The 4 Best New Linux Distributions to Watch in 2015 | Linux.com

By Jack Wallen

Every year new Linux distributions pop up and promise something new and game changing. I believe this time around, the claims certainly have a chance of changing the way Linux is seen by a number of user groups. Whether you’re an average user, a gamer, a power user, or some hybrid user in need of a desktop to perfectly suit your needs, I believe 2015 will bring to light some projects that will be right up your alley.

Main Linux problems on the desktop, 2015 edition

In this regularly updated article, which is without doubt the most comprehensive list of Linux distributions’ problems on the entire Internet, we only discuss their main problems and deficiencies (which may be the reason why some people say Linux distros are not ready for the desktop) while everyone should keep in mind that there are areas where Linux has excelled other OSes: excellent package management, multiple platforms and architectures support out of the box, usually excellent stability, no widely circulating viruses or malware, complete system reinstallation is almost never required, besides Linux is extremely customizable, easily scripted and it’s free as a beer.

I want to make one thing crystal clear – Windows, in some regards, is even worse than Linux and it’s definitely not ready for the desktop either. Off the top of my head I want to name the following quite devastating issues with Windows:

devastating Windows rot

no enforced file system and registry hierarchy (I have yet to find a single serious application which can uninstall itself cleanly and fully)

svchost.exe

no true safe mode

no clean state

the user as a system administrator (thus viruses/malware – most users don’t and won’t understand UAC warnings)

no good packaging mechanism (MSI is a fragile abomination)

no system wide update mechanism (which includes third party software)

Windows is extremely difficult to debug

Windows boot problems are often fatal and unsolvable unless you reinstall from scratch

Windows is hardware dependent (especially when running from UEFI)

Windows updates are unreliable and they also waste disk space

there’s no way to cleanly upgrade your system (there will be thousands of leftovers), etc.

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The post Obviously Linux's Fault | LINUX Unplugged 75 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Google Bugs Pay You! | Tech Talk Today 73

chris — Thu, 09 Oct 2014 10:24:58 +0000

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Google pays out over $75k in bug bounties for flaws just in Chrome, and 159 of them are critical, we’ll share the details. HTC reveals the ultimate selfie phone, and maybe a new a category of cell phone accessory, we’ll debate.

Plus our speculation on an upcoming tech event & a handy trick!

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HTC’s Desire Eye wants to be the king of selfies | The Verge

Now HTC is announcing the Desire Eye, a mid-range phone that the company says will be the selfie phone to rule them all. It will be available from AT&T later this year at a price that’s yet to be determined. Where all other smartphones have their best cameras on the back of the phone, the Desire Eye has the same camera on the front as it does on the back. It’s a 13-megapixel camera — the highest resolution front-facing camera to date — and features autofocus, a dual LED flash on both the front and back of the phone, and 1080p video recording.

It has a 5.2-inch, 1080p display that looks great and has wide viewing angles. It has the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor paired with 2GB of RAM as HTC’s flagship One M8. Its soft-touch plastic finish isn’t as premium as the all-metal chassis’ of the M8 or iPhone 6.

It’s IPX7 water resistant, so it can be dunked under a meter of water for up to 30 minutes without issue.

There’s a mode to take a picture with both the front and rear cameras at the same time, a la FrontBack, and an ultra-gimmicky mode that lets you insert yourself into a scene using both cameras. You can also merge your face with another person’s face to create a mutant selfie.

HTC Re camera Preview – CNET

The little periscope-shaped camera (right-angle flashlight and asthma inhaler are also suitable) is designed so that you stop watching and recording life through your smartphone’s screen and get in on the experience instead.

At the business end you have an f2.8 lens with an ultrawide 146-degree angle of view with a 1/2.3-inch 16-megapixel CMOS sensor behind it. That sensor is bigger than what you’d find in most smartphones, but average for point-and-shoot cameras and most POV/action cams.

The Re connects to your smartphone via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Launch the Re app (which will be available for Android and iOS later this year) and it initiates the connection process via Wi-Fi. Once connected you can control the camera, view and transfer content and change settings. With the app you can also activate a time-lapse mode so you can take a series of photos over a period of time (you set the frequency and length of time) and turn them into a movie.

Along with the tripod mount on the bottom you’ll find a Micro-USB port and a microSD card slot for storage. An 8GB card is included, but the camera supports cards up to 128GB.

Though HTC pitches the Re more as a lifestyle cam like Polaroid’s Cube than a rugged action cam for extreme sports, the body is waterproof to 1 meter (3.3 feet) for up to 30 minutes without an additional housing.

The HTC Re camera will be coming to the US first in late October/early November and the UK in November. It’ll cost $199 and somewhere around £160-£170 in the UK.

Google Patches Chrome for 159 Security Vulnerabilities

In total, Google is patching 159 security vulnerabilities in Chrome 38, which is one of the highest numbers of security-related fixes for any single browser ever released. Going a step further, Google noted that it also made “113 relatively minor fixes” that it found with its open-source Memory Sanitizer application. Other browser vendors likely might have also counted the 113 memory fixes in their security totals, so for argument’s sake, let’s say that Chrome 38 fixes 272 security related issues.

As part of the security updates, Google is paying out $75,633.70 in bug bounties to a number of security researchers for properly reporting issues to Google. The top award is a $27,633.70 award paid to Jüri Aedla for a vulnerability identified as CVE-2014-3188. That vulnerability could lead to remote code execution and is triggered by a number of bugs in the Google V8 JavaScript engine and the Inter-Process Communication (IPC) function.

‘It’s been way too long’: Apple sends out invites for Thursday, October 16th iPad & Mac event | 9to5Mac

Apple has just announced a keynote address for Thursday, October 16th to take place at the Town Hall auditorium on its Infinite Loop Campus in Cupertino, California. Invitations to select members of the media and special guests indicate that the event will, as always, begin at 10 AM Pacific time/1 PM Eastern Time.

Free OpenSource Dyslexia Font – OpenDyslexic

The post Google Bugs Pay You! | Tech Talk Today 73 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Bitcoin Trolls | Tech Talk Today 63

chris — Tue, 23 Sep 2014 09:53:57 +0000

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Steam rolls out a big overhaul that leaves us quite impressed, the FTC goes after Butterfly Labs for scamming their customers, and Chris shares his personal story.

Plus the bugs biting iOS 8 users, 4k TV gets cheaper & much more!

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Steam Is Getting A Massive Overhaul

The revision—which Valve is calling the Steam Discovery Update and which goes live today—will implement a number of big changes including a revamped recommendations system, a queue in which you can swipe through new games based on what you’ve played and liked before, and a new program called Steam Curators that will allow anyone to take the role of tastemaker, recommending games to the public and accumulating followers based on their tastes.

We have made great efforts to increase the number of titles we can publish on Steam, which means more choices for customers,” Valve UI designer Alden Kroll said in a press release. “This update introduces multiple features and functionality to help customers explore Steam’s growing catalog and find the games they are most interested in playing.”

iOS 8 Users Report Slow Wi-Fi, Battery Drains | News & Opinion

“Wi-Fi problems on iPad Air, iPad mini with Retina display and iPhone 5S after upgrading to iOS 8,” an Apple user wrote in a Saturday post on the Apple forums. “I am thinking about going back to my iPad 2 with iOS 7.1.2 that is working perfectly until the Wi-Fi issues are resolved.”

Wi-Fi woes were not the only thing plaguing iOS 8 users. Others reported battery-drain issues. “My battery drains very fast (100 percent to zero in about 4 hours with minimal usage), started happening right after I upgraded to iOS 8. Issue started happening both on my iPhone 5S and on my iPad Air after iOS 8 upgrade,” one user wrote.

Feds say Bitcoin miner maker Butterfly Labs ran “systematic deception” | Ars Technica

The Federal Trade Commission has filed a civil lawsuit against Butterfly Labs (BFL), an embattled Kansas-based Bitcoin miner manufacturer. The FTC alleges that the company engaged in fraudulent and deceptive practices.

Federal authorities believe that the three named members of the company’s board of directors—Jody Drake (aka Darla Drake), Nasser Ghoseiri, and Sonny Vleisides—spent millions of corporate revenue on all kinds of things, including saunas and guns, while ignoring many customer orders that went unfulfilled or were significantly delayed.

“The FTC alleges that one corporate defendants and three individual defendants have taken in over $50 million by operating a scheme that required consumers to pre-pay for machines that would allow consumers to ‘mine’ for Bitcoins, a new virtual currency,” the complaint states. “Defendants either never delivered these machines or delivered them so late that they became obsolete.”

Vizio takes 4K mainstream with launch of $999.99 P-Series TV | The Verge

Vizio has just announced that the P-Series 4K LED HDTV line we first saw way back at CES is now available. And it starts at only $999.99 for the 50-inch model,

4K content is getting easier to come by, too; Netflix is still your primary source, but its catalog is growing (albeit slowly) and Amazon plans to offer 4K video later this year. Both of those apps can be streamed on the P-Series. The main takeaway is this: 4K TVs aren’t new, but Vizio is here now. And when a $999 4K TV has floor space at Walmart, that’s (hopefully) going to push companies to move even faster in getting 4K movies and TV shows out there.

The post Bitcoin Trolls | Tech Talk Today 63 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Xamarin Sham | CR 120

chris — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 14:33:35 +0000

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Developers all over the web are chiming in on the short comings (or lack there of) of Xamarin’s tools. Have developers been sold a hope and a lie?

Plus why Android continues to come in second for developers, your feedback & more!

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Dev Hoopla: Massive Issues with Xamarin?

Anonymous Open Letter to Xamarin – Please Stop Abusing Your Monopoly

Anonymous Open Letter to Xamarin – Please Stop Abusing Your Monopoly

I’ve been using Xamarin for the past half a year almost fulltime, developing an application for both iOS and Android. Everything in this letter is based on my personal experience with the technology.

I’d really like to know what the priority list is at Xamarin, because it seems that Cool Thing To Demo is way up high, and Working software is hiding down in the corner where nobody sees it. I just hope that someone at Xamarin is actually reading the error reports that Xamarin Studio generates.

Does anyone there actually use Xamarin Studio, or is it just something you guys sell and never try yourself? Throwing exceptions on Undo/Save is something no editor should ever do, period. Please stop adding new features and go fix some bugs. There are hundreds of them just in the UI of the editor.

Xamarin makes me sad, here is my message to them

TL;DR: I love C# more than any other language, but Xamarin is HORRIBLE. I wish it and mono were never invented. It’s a disgrace, completely broken and buggy and just the most broken thing in the entire universe, but I still use it.

Why? Because I can write for 2 platforms as if it was one. haha, not really … but because I work on small apps, I don’t have to write all the business crap twice. That is good about Xamarin, that is the only thing. They can actually compile plain C# … hooray. If only the rest of the crap expensive broken Xamarin crap library actually worked as advertised.

If you don’t believe me, go to https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/ and look at the bugs, or look at mono release notes. Just look at the list of shiny features of Mono (https://www.mono-project.com/docs/). Well half of that crap is either broken, or was never implemented, or just doesn’t work as documented. Everything is just a lie that should make it look good. Xamarin does thousand things, they release new iOS SDK the same day Apple releases it … wow … if only they waited a year and then released a working version instead. They make thousand cool features, but they’re all broken.

Bug 21995 – Memory leak when navigating a page off of a navigation stack

Dev Hoopla: Why Android WIll Never be First

Apple announces record 10 million iPhone 6 and 6 Plus sales in opening weekend

Apple has today announced that it sold 10 million iPhone 6 and 6 Plus units in the first three days of sales. This includes the 4 million units sold in the first 24 hours of preorder sales.

For comparison, Apple reported 9 million iPhone 5s and 5c sales in the first three days. This means the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus set a new record by over a million units. Apple is unlikely to give any more color regarding iPhone sales performance until its quarterly earnings call in October.

Sprint says iPhone 6 debut was its most successful iPhone launch yet

Thanks to all the @sprint employees today who contributed to the most Succesful iPhone launch in our history It's a privilege to lead Sprint

— MarceloClaure (@marceloclaure) September 20, 2014

Sprint’s newly appointed CEO Marcelo Claure shared on Twitter over the weekend that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus debut marked the most successful iPhone launch in Sprint’s history.

List of best-selling mobile phones – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

iOS 8 adoption hits 30% after first weekend of iPhone 6 sales, iPhone 6 usage outpaces 6 Plus

While iOS 8 adoption was lagging behind last year’s release at just 15% before the official launch of the new iPhones on Friday, it’s now hovering at approximately 30% after record first weekend sales for the new iPhones. That stat, which comes from research and analytics firms Fiksu, Mixpanel, Appsee, & Chitika is below the almost 50% of users iOS 7 had this many days into launch last year.

The post Xamarin Sham | CR 120 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Relatively Laid Out | CR 72

chris — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 11:34:53 +0000

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With big Google and Apple events on the horizon we look at how Google’s early investment in relative UI layouts will be paying dividends in Android 4.4 KitKat.

Plus: Your emails, our php follow up, a few near-term predictions, and even an RMS rap.

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Mike’s Moto X Review: Moto X Review | dominickm.com
Healthcare.gov violates the GPL

Crystal Ball Time

Nexus 5, 10 2 release date October 24: Android 4.4 KitKat OS to launch at NYC Google event with new devices | Christian News on Christian Today

Google has sent out invitation to its press event to release the Nexus 5 and Nexus 10 2 on October 28, 2013.

How long will Google keep burning money on Motorola?

losses at Google\’s Motorola Mobility have accelerated despite three rounds of layoffs that slashed around 6,000 workers. The division is now on pace to bleed $1 billion a year out of the search giant\’s bank account. And yet Google\’s stock topped a record high $1,000 a share today as investors showed renewed confidence in the company\’s future.

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The post Relatively Laid Out | CR 72 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Then They Fight You | Plan B 8

chris — Tue, 28 May 2013 15:46:04 +0000

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The funding methods around Bitcoin are under attack, and we chat with TheGenesisBlock.com’s managing editor about what this means for the future of Bitcoin, and more.

Plus picking the right wallet for offline cold storage, a look at BitAngels the distributed Bitcoin angel fund, our concerns with Ripple, your emails, and much more!

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OKPAY takes Bitcoin hiatus

Although OKPAY themselves provided no rationale for their decision, OKPAY’s trust in the viability of bitcoin in their system may have been shaken after an OKPAY user reported on bitcointalk.org that they had successfully double-spent over 211 BTC to OKPAY and a seperate address controlled by the user during the block chain fork of 12 March 2013. The same user also reported that an approximately 65 BTC he had sent separately to OKPAY was not successfully credited to the appropriate account. Somewhat of a standoff ensued, but was resolved with OKPAY refunding the 65 BTC only after the customer returned the double-spent 211 BTC. OKPAY support staff confirmed the situation on a bitcointalk.org forum thread started by the double-spender.

Canada becomes bitcoin-friendly

We now have our first answer from FinTRAC. Generally, it views bitcoin exchanges as entities that do not have to register, identify clients, and report under the money services business rules.

Next Generation Bitcoins with Ripple – YouTube

Primer Interest Producer Bob English and Perianne traveled to the Bitcoin conference in San Jose, California over the weekend. They got a chance to speak to many of the movers and shakers in the up and coming crypto-currency realm. Bob interviewed Chris Larsen, CEO and co-founder of OpenCoin, which is developing Ripple.

60+ Investors Band Together To Form BitAngels, The First Multi-City Angel Network & Incubator For Bitcoin Startups | TechCrunch

BitAngels is launching (what it believes to be) the first multi-city angel network and incubator created to invest exclusively in cryptocurrency startups. Fittingly, in the spirit of Bitcoin, it\’s a distributed network of angels and entrepreneurs and one that was hacked together in a few days after the Bitcoin 2013 Conference.

BitAngels brings together a posse of angel investors who are looking to help entrepreneurs turn their Bitcoin side projects into full-time jobs. To do that, the angel network pooled together about $6.7 million in Bitcoin, which it will invest in approximately $20K chunks.

BitAngels is not a formal fund, so the Bitcoins are soft-circled, not in escrow, but all 60 angels that have joined thus far (the number of angels has almost doubled in the past week) are all accredited investors with extensive experience investing and, naturally, have a lot of Bitcoin.

Why Bitcoin Won’t Probably be a Reserve Currency in our Lifetime

Trace Mayer on Prime Interest May 24, 2013.

— Greg Managing Editor of The Genesis Block.COM —

DHS Inquiry Leads to Lowest USD/Bitcoin Trading Volume In Months
> Bitcoin trading volume has plummeted since news broke that the Department of Homeland Security issued a seizure warrant that stopped all activity between Dwolla and the Mt. Gox exchange. As of today, the 5-Day moving average of USD trading volume is at the lowest level in at least a year and a half (the data is a bit spotty beyond that), other than the last week in December 2012.

In addition to total market volume declining, Mt. Gox is losing footing as the dominant player in the space. As of May 17, Gox was doing roughly 81% of total USD bitcoin volume. Today they did just 59%.

Bitcoin Trading: Are We Primed For A Major Move Higher? – The Genesis Block

Yesterday we wrote about the low volatility after Mt. Gox\’s accounts were seized. The following graph from that article illustrates how we haven\’t seen volatility this low on Mt. Gox since December of 2012.

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The post Then They Fight You | Plan B 8 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Just Ship | CR 33

chris — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 11:50:11 +0000

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When is the time right to launch your project? Mike and Chris discuss how understanding your market can be key to answering that question, building a community, advertising, and when to just ship it.

Plus: Things to tell your IT guy, QA war stories, and a batch of your feedback!

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New Coder wants to when he is considered to “know” a language.
Luke asks:

“How is it you come to figure out the right tools (languages) for the right job, and once you do that, what\’s the anticipated \’study time\’ that needs to go into learning to use the language well enough to feel like you can actually do what you\’ve set out to do?”

Eric shares a development contest
Hayden wants to know what I think of JavaFX
mdominick.com – Give Duke a Break

Brian’s War Story

Hello Michael and Chris,

I work in a medium sized development shop with about 20 developers working on what\’s essentially an enterprise client side app. I have always considered our process for releasing bug fix updates as being rather backwards and poorly executed. Essentially our head of \”QA\” will send an e-mail one morning to all developers that the code is \”frozen\”.

He will then do a build, test it for 4 or 5 days and then send an e-mail to everyone that the code is \”unfrozen\”. During this \”frozen\” time the developers are still expected to continue fixing bugs but rather than check in their changes they are supposed to \”sit\” on them, usually for several days, until the \”unfrozen\” e-mail is sent out. At this point a free-for-all of code check in commences with all sorts of conflict and collision shenanigans.

That said, there is nothing physically restricting the checking in of code. If a developer doesn\’t see the \”fr eeze\” e-mail or simply forgets after a few days then \”QA\” unleashes their wrath on the poor sod. I\’m sure you can see all sorts of problems with this joke of a build/test/release process and I am even a little embarrassed just describing it. I would like to offer some suggestions to my superiors about ways to improve this and was wondering if you guys had any thoughts or suggestions.

One, perhaps obvious idea would be to switch to using Git as we are still using the ancient CVS for source control. However I\’m still very much a novice and trying to learn it better in my spare time. How would you suggest to use Git in a way that we can improve our build/test/release cycle? Do you have any other thoughts or suggestions to bring our release cycle up to a more sane and reasonable, not to mention modern process?

Thanks for your thoughts and thank you for the awesome show you do each week.

Sincerely,
Brian M.

Launch!

How do you know when your project is ready to launch?
Is this really a bug?
- Bug? or new feature?
Do I have to be 100% bug free to ship?
- Is that even possible
What market?

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The post Just Ship | CR 33 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Smell of Bajor | STOked 111

chris — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:21:17 +0000

Some big news in the world of STO this week, Chris covers that at the top of the show. Then it’s a look at the new featured episode “Of Bajor”. Does this new mission add more “trek” into the game?

Plus: Mav is back with Community feedback, you’ve wrote in to tell us about your latest issues in game, and we address the two major ones we keep hearing about!

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Bugs That We Would Like Community Feedback For:

De-Teaming bug in STFs. Randomly during the STFs the team is disbanded forcing everyone to re-team. If there are KDF players involved, the FED players cannot invite them and vice versa effectively splitting the team. This seems to happen more frequently if the optional objective has failed.

STF Prototype (MK XII) Loot Problem. Over the course of the last two weeks it has become apparent that these are not dropping at all or the drop rate has been nerfed in some way. We would like to know if the community are seeing the same lack of loot as the Jupiter Force have identified.

The post Smell of Bajor | STOked 111 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Revisiting the Moon | SciByte 27

chris — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:32:49 +0000

We take a look at new satellites orbiting the moon, bugged bugs, unicycles, a comet that survived it’s brush with the sun, 15 minutes of science fame, another update on the poor Phobos-Grunt satellite and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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Moon meets GRAIL (Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory)

The low down
Launch : Sep 10, 2011
Nearly identical spacecraft both about the size of a washing machine, only differentiated by the needs for one spacecraft to lead while the other follows
The pair of science satellites fire up their critical braking thrusters for insertion into lunar orbit on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day
GRAIL’s goal is to exquisitely map the moons interior from the gritty outer crust to the depths of the mysterious core with unparalleled precision
Significance
The data collection phase of the spacecraft will last 82 days, starting in March, and could be extended for another two months if the solar powered probe survives a power draining Lunar eclipse in June of 2012
In the coming weeks and months the spacecraft will gradually lowers to an orbital altitude of 34 miles [55 km] and trim their orbital period from 11.5 hours to nearly 2 hours.
The spacecraft will maintain an orbital period in a near-polar, circular orbit
The data from GRAIL will alter our understanding of how the moon and other rocky bodies in the solar system formed.
The pair of spacecraft will transmit radio signals back to Earth that will be able to measure the distance between them with a precision withing a few microns, that’s about the width of a human hair and about the diameter of a red blood cell
That means as the spacecraft orbit the moon the gravity of the moon exerted on the probes will cause the velocity and the distance between the probes to change
Gravitational influences on the probes are visible surface features and unknown hidden concentrations of various materials.
The data gathered will be able to make a high-resolution map of the gravitational field of the Moon
From the gravitational fields scientists will be also to make some determinations of the Moons internal composition
We might be able to answer major questions about the Moon, like why are the impact basins on the near side of the moon flooded with magma (seen as the ‘man in the moon’) while the far side of the moon does not have these features
* Of Note*
The probes also include MoonKAM(Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students), four cameras equipped on the spacecraft, that will be used by middle school students to photograph selected targets on the Moon in an attempt to motivate kids to study Math and Science
NASA hosted a contest inviting schools and students to submit new names. The probes will be christened with the winning names some time after the second orbit insertion
The experiment is very similar to the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE), which has been mapping Earth’s gravity since 2002.
Multimedia
YouTube VIDEO : Grail “Go” for Launch Poll
YouTube VIDEO : GRAIL Launch
YouTube VIDEO : GRAIL Spacecraft Separation
YouTube VIDEO : Post Launch Interview WIth Launch Director Tim Dunn
YouTube VIDEO : GRAIL Spacecraft and Vehicle Flow
IMAGE GALLERY: GRAIL mission @ NASA
Social Media
Twitter Results for NASA GRAIL
Further Reading / In the News
GRAIL Naming Contest @ NASA
Two new Moons join the Moon – GRAIL Twins Achieve New Year’s Orbits @ UniverseToday.com
Most Anticipated Space Missions of 2012: Photos @ news.Discovery.com
First GRAIL Twin Enters Lunar Orbit – NASA’s New Year’s Gift to Science @ UniverseToday.com
First of NASA’s GRAIL spacecraft enters Moon orbit @ PhysOrg.com
NASA’s Twin Grail Spacecraft Reunite in Lunar Orbit @ NASA.gov
NASA GRAIL Mission Page
NASA Launches Twin Spacecraft to Probe Inside the Moon @ Space.com
Twin GRAIL satellites ready for NASA lunar launch @ NASAspaceflight.com
Twin probes to circle moon to study gravity field @ PhysOrg.com
GRAIL Lunar Blastoff Gallery @ UniverseToday.com

— NEWS BYTE —

Bugged Bugs

The low down
A new technology is being designed to use an insect’s kinetic energy to power things that could be mounted on their backs such as miniature cameras and microphones.
The process of harvesting an insect’s kinetic energy from its own wing movements is known as ‘energy scavenging.’
Insects can be released into a building that is either too dangerous or when the gaps in the rubble are too small for human or search animals.
Significance
The devices would use the insect’s kinetic energy to power things such as miniature cameras and microphones that can be mounted on their backs
Research team has already created a device that is able to harness the energy created by the wing movement of the Green June beetle
The research team is hoping to be able to conduct the first insect test flights at some point
* Of Note*
A main drawback developing Micro-Air-Vehicles (MAVs), is the limited weight and volume available for power supply
Energy scavenging from the insect provides a power source that lasts the insects lifetime
Further Reading / In the News
Researchers hope to use bugged bugs for search and rescue @ PhysOrg.com
From DARPA: cameras mounted on beetles, powered by their wings @ dvice.com
Bring in bug squad: insects may help in rescues @ Sydney Morning Herald
Don’t tread on me, I’m a hi-tech life-saver! Insects could be used to help find survivors during disaster rescue operations @ dailymail.co.uk
University of Michigan
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Balancing Unicycles

The low down
Perhaps the most well-known self-balancing unicycle is Trevor Blackwell’s Eunicycle, which also uses the OSMC.
Although this one is not the first electric unicycle it is much cheaper than it’s predecessors
Stephan Boyer, a student at MIT who has created an electric unicycle that not only does some self-stabilizing, but is an actual functioning vehicle which he uses to get himself around the school campus.
Basics : custom MIG-welded steel chassis; 450 Watt electric motor; Two 7 Ah 12 Volt batteries’; 5DOF intertial measurement unit; OSMC H-bridge; ATmega328P microcontroller
Significance
It’s not much bigger than a plain-peddle unicycle
It can zip along at up to 15 miles per hour and go for 5 miles [8km] before needing a recharge
Gyro components inside only help to keep the rider from falling forward or backward
Like a Segway – you lean forward to accelerate, and lean back to brake
It integrates readings from the gyro and accelerometer using a complementary filter.
It uses angle estimate fed through a PID loop (with no integral term) at 625 Hz for forward/back balance controls
It has a duty cycle of 1.22 kHz connected to an H-bridge
* Of Note*
The code was written in C, and is in the public domain.
There is a bit of a learning curve, just as there would be learning to ride a bike with no hands
It currently has a hand held ‘kill switch’
Multimedia
YouTube VIDEO : ‘Bullet’ Self-Balancing Electric Unicycle
YouTube VIDEO : Trevor Blackwell’s Eunicycle
IMAGE : ‘Bullet’ laying on ground @ web.mit.edu
IMAGE : Close up on curcuit board @ web.mit.edu
IMAGE : Sitting on the ‘Bullet’ @ web.mit.edu
IMAGE : Standing with the ‘Bullet’ @ web.mit.edu
Further Reading / In the News
MIT student builds self-balancing electric unicycle @ PhysOrg.com
Self-Balancing Electric Unicycle @ stephanboyer.com
MIT scholar builds a self-balancing unicycle to roll fast and furious around campus (video) @ endgadget.com
MIT student creates self-balancing unicycle for campus transport @ dvice.com

Comet LoveJoy

* Of Note*
Comet Lovejoy, the little comet who, after after surviving a brush with the sun, has been gracing our friends in Australia with a show
As astronomer in Esperance, Australia has been documenting Comet Lovejoy
This 32sec time-lapse video covers a 5 hours time period and was taken as the comet starts to fave
This might be the last time we ever see this comet
Even the International Space Station has joined in with photography and video
Multimedia
YouTube VIDEO : Space Station Commander Captures Unprecedented View of Comet
VIDEO : 5 Hours of Beautiful Comet Lovejoy in 30 Seconds @ Vimeo
IMAGE : Lovejoy from the International Space Station @ UniverseToday.com
Further Reading / In the News
5 Hours of Beautiful Comet Lovejoy in 30 Seconds @ UniverseToday.com
Stunning! Comet Lovejoy Photographed from the Space Station @ UniverseToday.com

A dose and science reality

The low down
Recently there has been a trend in some scientific journals for shorter, faster and more frequent publications
Significance
If it is applicable to have a concise publication for an experiment it is fine
There are real risks in this trend toward shorter papers.
The main risk is the increased rates of false alarms that are likely to be associated with papers based on less data.
It does increase the number of citations an author would have, and thus somewhat increase influence
Smaller experiments have greater statistical deviations, and you can have flukes in the data
* Of Note*
Editors of Journals find surprising results, often from the shorter papers resulting in smaller experiments, particularly exciting
This is not saying that all fields of study are the same or that all papers and research is like this. It is simply that certain fields are seeing a trend towards this.
Mainstream media then picks up on those hot stories, often proliferating results that later turn out to be different from the original experiment
Further Reading / In the News
The perils of ‘bite-size’ science psychologicalscience.org

SPACECRAFT UPDATE

Phobos-Grunt

* Last time on SciByte*
SciByte 20 (Nov 8)
SciByte 21 (Nov 15)
SciByte 23 (Nov 30)
* What’s New? *
Currently projected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in early January 2012, estimates right now put it at approximately Jan 15.
Animation which recaps what has happened with the spacecraft so far, and what is expected to occur during the uncontrolled re-entry.
A few pieces, including one experiment, will most likely survive the re-entry.
If the capsule falls in water, which is highly likely, recovery would be highly unlikely.
Multimedia
YouTube VIDEO : New Re-entry Animation
Further Reading
Video: Phobos-Grunt Re-Entry Animation @ UniverToday.com

SCIENCE CALENDER

Looking back

Jan ~6/7/8 1851 – 160 years ago – The Earth spun: Scientists had long tried to measure the drift of the Earth rotation by dropping object from great heights, but the experiments happened too fast and had too many complications to make an accurate reading. Foucault had an insight, and after weeks spent in his cellar he swung a 11 lb [5kg] pendulum from a 6.5 ft [2m] cable. He saw a small clockwise motion in the pendulums apparent swing. The pendulum was going straight, it was the Earth that was moving. Foucault refined this experiment and derived geometric ways to account for and measure the latitude of where the pendulum was. He demonstrated his discovery on 31 Mar 1851 for Napoleon.
Jan 10 1968 – 43 years ago – Robots invade the moon: Surveyor 7 marked the end of the American series of unmanned explorations of the lunar surface, and was to be followed by the landing of an Apollo crew. Its mission including taking TV pictures after landing, determine relative chemical element abundance and manipulate the lunar material. It was the only Surveyor craft of the series to land in a lunar highland region. The TV camera returned 20,993 pictures on the first lunar day. A total of 21,091 pictures were transmitted to Earth. Surveyor 7 was the fifth and final spacecraft of the Surveyor series to achieve a lunar soft landing. The lander also successfully detected laser beams transmitted from Earth.
Jan 4 2004 – 7 years ago – Martian Spirit Rover : Launched on June 10, 2003 the Spirit Rover rover bounced it’s way onto the Martian surface on Jan 4, 2004. Of the Spirit / Opportunity rovers Spirit landed first. On May 1, 2009 Spirit got stuck in an area of soft soil, 5 years 3 months 27 Earth days after landing, a whopping 21.6 times the planned duration of the mission. Spirit rover provided the highest resolution images taken on the surface of another planet. on March 9, 2005 the solar panels jumped from 60% original power to 93% followed by the sighting of dust devils teh following day. It was the first sighting of dust devils by the Spirit or Opportunity rovers. In March of 2004 is took the first photo od Earth from the surface of another planet.
YouTube VIDEO : Discovery, Innovation and New Destinations Highlight " 2011 @ NASA ”

Looking up this week

You may have seen …

Quadrantid meteor shower : Is a brief, but eye-catching, light show. Quadrantid meteors are the leftover crumbs of a shattered comet that broke apart centuries ago,

Keep an eye out for …

Wed 4th : Earth is at it’s closest point to the Sun
Sat Jan 7th : The bright stars around the moon are just stars this time, no planets [Aldebaran to the upper right, Betelgeuse to the right/lower right; Castor&Pollux to the lower left]
Mon 9th : Full Moon

The southern hemisphere should, Keep an eye out for …

After a few requests, and finally finding a few sites I am able to start having some information for our listeners in the southern hemisphere
Jan 5 : The soon to be full moon will be sitting above the star cluster Pleiades, on most dark sky nights people can see 6–7 stars although some people can see more
Jan 6 : the reddish-looking star above the Moon is Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation Taurus
Venus is setting low in the southwest about two hours after the sun sets
Jupiter is in the northwest at dusk, setting around 1am
Mars is rising due East around 12:30 am
Saturn is rising due East around 2am

More on whats in the sky this week

The post Revisiting the Moon | SciByte 27 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.