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Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (1) : Jun 30th, 2010 by Wyatt Walter

Who’s More Closed Than Apple and Adobe? AT&T

There’s been a significant amount of chatter lately around the Adobe v Apple we’re-more-open-than-thou pissing match, but AT&T has proved once again that vendor lock-in and control in the software industry is nowhere near as bad as the cell phone industry (heck, Verizon will even disable GPS devices in phones to make sure users have to pay for their navigation service).

AT&T has done so by announcing it is nearly doubling its early termination fees on smartphones and netbook data plans. This announcement has some seriously unfortunate timing after rumors of an iPhone able to run on the Verizon network emerged once again and seem to have been validated by AT&T’s rate hikes. As if the fee hikes weren’t enough, AT&T also seems to have taken a really idiotic stance on how it will keep its customers as well.

The money quote from the Wall Street Journal from this last week is that “about 80% of AT&T’s customers are on family-talk plans or business-discount plans, which are very ’sticky.’” That’s it? That’s the reason AT&T isn’t scared? Because it’s a big pain to switch away? Because I’d have to switch more than one phone at once and that would be annoying? How about: “We’re not scared because we have better coverage and our customers know it” or “We’re not scared because our network is faster” or even “We’re not scared because our customer service is the best”? Instead, we get: “We’re not scared because it’s way too freakin’ expensive to switch.”

Why doesn’t AT&T list any of those reasons as the primary reason? Well, I think the answer is obvious. I work about 2 miles from the Apple headquarters, where you would think coverage on the iPhone with its exclusive provider would be top-notch, if nowhere else. But, alas, I drop calls and don’t get audio on calls all the time. This just doesn’t happen with my Verizon phone (I have an iPhone from work and a Verizon phone for personal use).

All right, now that the rant is over, when I imagine AT&T execs making this decision, all I can think of is:

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Filed under Rants : Comments (0) : May 23rd, 2010 by Wyatt Walter

Enabling VNC to Ubuntu Desktop via SSH

Over time my desktop has become a box that just sits in the corner that I boot up using wakeonlan and SSH to when needed. Tonight I wanted to jump onto the console to test a few things, but really didn’t want to go through the trouble of hooking up the monitor that now is connected to my laptop (waay too much work, I know :) ). Anyway, it turns out enabling VNC isn’t too bad over SSH.

First, enable it for your user:
gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled true

If you’re like me, you probably enabled it at one point, set the password, disabled it and forgot what you set the password. To set it, we use the base64 utility to convert it and set it using gconftool:
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/remote_access/vnc_password $(echo -n 'dontstealmysupersecretpassword!'| base64)

I then just connected with my VNC client (I used Chicken of the VNC from my MacBook) by connecting to the IP of my desktop on display 0 and the password I had set.

Troubleshooting
If you’re like me even more, you probably ran into trouble getting connected. If you’re having troubles getting connected, you can see additional settings for the GNOME remote_access using the gconftool-2 utility:
gconftool-2 -a /desktop/gnome/remote_access

There are a few key settings including “local_only”, “enabled” (of course), “prompt_enabled” (makes VNC not prompt on the desktop to allow connection – something that would obviously be a problem if you didn’t have access to the console to begin with!), and “use_alternative_port”.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : May 8th, 2010 by Wyatt Walter

Install Killall on Ubuntu JeOS

I am playing with a new install of Ubuntu 10.04 in a minimum virtual machine and noticed there was no killall utility installed. In case you run into this, don’t fret:
sudo apt-get install psmisc

The package to install from wasn’t overly obvious, but not difficult to install :)

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : May 6th, 2010 by Wyatt Walter

Is Facebook Going to Start Forcing Us to Make Some Info Public?

To say that Facebook has come under fire for its privacy (or lack there of) would be an understatement. They’ve been opening up users’ data to the world with changes to privacy settings after the introduction of several new features. All of that seemed to come to a point for me today when I logged in to my profile and was greeted with a new feature to find pages I might be interested in linking to. Handy? Well, maybe. The feature scans your profile for key elements and finds pages “for you” so you can join. Problem is, it does things like search hometowns, jobs, etc. which is all the information in our profiles that we’re trying to keep private in the first place. Keep in mind that pages are public to the world, and for me personally, I’ve become very selective in the pages that I link to. But what was scary were the options at the bottom of the prompt:

If you’ll notice, there’s a very important option that’s missing: “No”. Perhaps this is a misconception due to a poorly-worded prompt, but it was a bad one to screw up at this stage in the privacy game.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Apr 28th, 2010 by Wyatt Walter

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