I run both my computers on Arch Linux, a “rolling release” distribution, meaning that new software is pushed live with only a minimal amount of testing. Under most circumstances this does not cause any problems, for over two years the same install of Arch has worked flawlessly. That is, until today. As the machine booted up: kernel panic, ugh.
Depending on the issue that caused the panic, there are various things that can be done at to rectify it, raging from chrooting to preforming a complete reinstall. Unfortunately none of them are terribly attractive, being time consuming and inconvenient.
Considering that the main cause of there kinds of issues are minor data corruptions, the solution is obvious: install two or more operating systems. The machine with the issue has both Arch Linux and Ubuntu 8.04 installed, So when Arch panic occurred I just rebooted into Ubuntu. Unsurprisingly it booted up perfectly.
Depending on how you set the system up, the secondary OS can be used for a verity of things. At the very least it will give you a web browser to look up a solution to the problem, however you can already do that using a Live CD. The biggest advantage comes when both OS’s have the same software installed and the user data is stored on its own partition. If one OS fails, just boot the second one and carry on as if nothing has happened.
Even if you are a Windows user there are still advantages to doing this. Although the chance of being able to fix a broken Windows install from another OS is basically nil, it still gives you a secondary working OS. Considering that most Windows users are not very tech-savvy, it would at least give them ability to get on the internet.
Secure and platform independent password management systems like LastPass reduce the need to remember a large number of passwords, but they still have one problem, the master password becomes a single point of failure. Obviously the master password must be extremely strong. But as you know, strong means random, and random means hard to remember. Its a double edged sword.
There are a few well know work arounds, such as using the fist letters of each word in your favourite song. This is less less than ideal because your favourite song is unlikely to be completely private knowledge.
There’s a better way. Using simple memory devices any password straight from a random password generator can be memorised with only minimal effort.
The method
To start with, you need to get a good random password from somewhere, i’m using 15 characters taken from the password generator at grc.com. Anything will do as long as its random.
R8zf57j3hCrLtDK
Next break it up into small 3 to 4 character tokens, look for patterns that remind you of things or stories. These can originate from the whole token, or part of it.
- R8z (R8 sports car)
- f57 (Fn suggests fighter planes)
- j3h (Nothing comes to mind)
- CrLt (CtRl aLT)
- DK (Donky kong)
Now combine the individual tokens into a small and silly story. This will include all of the tokens in there enumerated order. In case you could not come up with something to go with one of the tokens, just incorporate it literally.
An R8 sports car with a painting of a f57 fighter on the back and a number plate starting with 3 j’s crashes into a house, and damaging a computer. Later the occupant presses control-alt-delete in an attempt to get it working, but it just “BSOD’s”, displaying an image of Donky Kong.
Finally you just need to memorise all of the tokens, that can easily be done using a Spaced Repetition System (SRS). Each token will have its own card, put the number onto the front and the front of the card, and its value onto the back. Use the SRS to practice the tokens until you can recall them from the number. The first time it will only take a few minutes.
Come back and practice again after a few hours. Some of the tokens will come back instantly, others will not. Practice until you can recall them all again. Repeat this proses until you stop forgetting.
You have now memorised the password, to use it just recall the story, which will remind you of, and order the individual tokens. Easy.
In total, this technique will take about 15 to 30 minutes over two or three days. This is very little considering that you will be able to use the password for a long time with little chance of it being cracked.
There is no disputing it, electronic waste is a massive problem. Every year hundreds of millions of electronic devices are replaced. But as electronics contain toxic chemicals and heavy metals like lead, they are extremely difficult and costly to dispose of.
Disposing of E-waste using Land fills or incineration simply results in the release of the toxics, which get into ground water and the atmosphere. Recycling is not the solution either, the toxic chemicals mean that recycling electronic waste is an extremely expensive and hazardous operation.
A lot of e-waste “recycling” companies are actually just resellers. They take the waste and sell it to 3rd world countries with lower wages and standards for worker protection. Where people get payed pitiful amounts to deal with the waste, getting poisoned in the proses.
The ironic thing here is that most of this “waste” is actually still perfectly usable. The only reason why it is even considered waste is marketers manipulating people into thinking they need the latest X, when in actuality there old one works perfectly fine.
The desktop computing industry is a prime example of this: People buy a computer, use it for a year or two. By this time computer hardware has evolved substantially and there original computer is starting to feel slow, so they upgrade.
For the vast majority of the population, computers are only used for browsing the internet and basic word processing, neither of these require much processing power at all. Modern computers are actually over powered to the point where they run idle 99% of the time. So where is the slowness coming from?
Its a fundamental software architecture problem with the way that Microsoft Windows is designed. The OS uses a large centralised database, otherwise known as the registry to store program settings. Program uninstallers never clean the registry properly, meaning that it gradually fills up with useless junk, causing the system to slow down.
Solving this problem is trivial: periodically re-install the OS. Unfortunately this solution is not known to most people, who assume the system is broken, thus they replace it.
So whats the solution to E-waste? Don’t upgrade systems for the sake of it.
Today we all live in a society that thinks the only way to do things with computers is to use visual tools, unfortunately this also applies to the world of web design and development. Although there are visual HTML editors, the only thing they are good for is generating large amounts of unmaintainable code. Although it may look like it at first, the problem is not with these tools but with the way the web evolved over time.
HTML was originally designed for sharing physics research documents at CERN. Right from this stage, the basic operation of the language was to attach meaning, not style to the textual content. This allowed different parts of the text to be marked as different logical structures such as paragraphs and headings. This paradigm is widely known as “what you see is what you mean”, or WYSIWYM.
For a system designed to transmit textual documents, this makes a lot of since. If the program displaying the document knows that some content is a heading, it can automatically display all of the headings in a pre-set font and size automatically.
After HTML and the internet was released to the public however, entrepreneurs started to see the potential of the internet and wanted more control over the display of pages. These early web designers discovered that tables could be (mis)used to create page layouts, but there was still no way to specify fonts and colouring. Netscape, one of the popular browsers at the time, took it upon themselves to solve this problem, resulting in the addition of the `font’ and `center’ tags. Together these allow the font, colouring and centering of various page elements to be specified.
Around this time, the first visual HTML editors started to appear. These programs used nested tables and the Netscape formatting tags to emulate the “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) paradigm popularised by visual word processors. Here lies the root of the problem with visual HTML editors, the language is based around the WYSIWYM paradigm, not WYSIWYG. In order to achieve there purpose of allowing HTML to be edited visually, they made a lot of compromises, in-lining styling information all over the code. In lining styling information completely breaks the original advantage of the language, the separation of content and styling. Because of this, websites created by these early design methods can only be described one way: completely unmaintainable.
Unsurprisingly this did not continue for long, a solution was developed in the form of Cascading Style Sheets(CSS), a way of externally specifying the styling and laying out the various elements of a web page. Microsoft jumped on CSS with version 6 of its Internet Explorer browser, unfortunately for the WYSIWYG html editor, they did not comply with the standard.
While HTML and CSS continued to develop for many years, with the rise of browsers like Firefox and Safari, Internet explorer 6 managed to hold onto most of the browser market. Because all the other available browsers implemented the newer HTML standards, while IE6 was still dragging behind it made it extremely difficult to create web pages that work across multiple browsers. To make things even worse, when Microsoft came out with version 7 of Internet Explorer in 2006, they still failed to comply with the standard.
To work around the oddities of Internet Explorer a number of hacks were created. Unsurprisingly the visual editors attempted to adopt the use of these hacks into there code output, which ultimately just resurrected the problem of in-lined styling and consequently the output of unmaintainable code.
WYSIWYG only works when you can grantee that a display device will display something in a given way. Because of all of the differences between browsers this is not the case. Currently it is completely impossible to implement a WYSIWYG HTML editor that both works and produces clean code. If at some point in time all browsers implement the same standard (which is highly unlikely as Microsoft always lags behind massively with Internet Explorer) then it would be possible to implement a working visual HTML editor. But even if that does become the case, you are still better off hand-writing your HTML/CSS.
The thing is, the web is an extremely flexible platform. If you use a visual HTML editor, you are directly constraining yourself to the subset of the platform implemented by the tool. If any new design techniques are developed after the tool was published, you cannot use them without hand editing the code. What’s more, meny of the techniques used in modern web design, for example CSS sliding doors, are impossible to represent in a visual manor.
All you need to design and develop for the web is a plain text editor, preferably one with syntax highlighting and auto indent. You can find many excellent text editors available on the internet for free, such as notepad++, Emacs and Vim.
If you are using Dreamweaver as it attempts to make editing static HTML websites less of an impossibility, stop living in the past: use a content management system.
Have problems with eye-strain and headaches? You are not alone. For a number of years I also suffered from these problems. That is, until I found out what was causing them: excessively bright monitors and black on white colour schemes.
Logically this makes perfect scene, if you are spending all day staring at a white computer monitor, you are basically staring at a rectangular light bulb. Try staring at a light bulb for 10 plus hours, your eyes will start to hurt, the same is true of computer monitors.
The first step towards solving this problem is to do a rough monitor calibration. Modern LCD monitors come set to maximum brightness by default, unless you are working outside or in a greenhouse, this is far too bright. Although it sounds complicated, this step is as simple as it gets: Open up the brightness settings using the buttons on your monitor. Next reduce the brightness until the monitor stops glaring. At this point your monitor will match the level of ambient lighting where your computer is located. Don’t be scared to reduce the brightness a lot, I have to set my monitor to 20% brightness before it matches the ambient lighting here.
Now that your monitor’s brightness is matched to your ambient lighting, we can move on to the second problem, how do you get rid of white backgrounds? The following sections describe the process for the operating systems that I know how to theme. It should also be possible on other systems like Apple OSX and Linux/QT, but I have no experience with them.
Microsoft Windows
On the whole, it is notoriously difficult to customise the visual style of Windows, although it is possible to some degree.
On Windows XP[*]: right click on the desktop and select properties. Then go to the appearance tab. This only works with the “Windows Classic” theme, so select that from the “Windows and buttons” menu. Now that is done click on the advanced button, bringing up a window that lets you set the colours of the different elements of the interface. Just go through these and choose some dark colours.
The main problems with this come from applications that set ether the font colour or background colour, but not both. This makes such an application unusable because it displays unreadable black on black or white on white text. Two applications that suffer from this problem are skype (black on black text) and any website displayed in Internet Explorer that does not set foreground/background colours. Also there are a collection of applications that completely ignore the system colours.
Linux/Gnome
If you are using Linux/Gnome, things are much easier and also don’t have a side effect of breaking things. Open the system menu, select the preferences item then click on appearance. Next select one of the themes that you like and hit the customise button. In the window that pops up select the colours tab, then set some dark colours.
You can also find plenty of excellent dark themes for download on Gnome Look.org. These can be installed using the install button in the themes window.
Fixing the web
The only browser that I am aware of that can change website background colours is Firefox. In Firefox, open the preferences window, select the content tab and click on the colours button. If you disable the check box to allow pages to set there own colours, you can set your own in the 4 colour selector boxes above.
What about the web? That mainly fixes the OS, with the exception of a few applications, but what about the web? Unfortunately many websites suffer from the white background problem. If you are using Firefox you can go into the menus and set your own colour scheme. Although doing this does break the functionality of some websites. Alternatively, you can customise websites using the Stylish add-on. Many of the popular websites already have dark user themes avalalbe for use with it.
Footnotes
[*] It should also be possible on Windows Vista/7, however as I don’t use ether of those OS’s, I cannot say how.
