Tux Love : November 2008 Archives

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November 26, 2008

Installation hell : StarOffice 9

You might think that a company sending out review copies of their latest product would try to get everything right. Simple things like making it easy to install for instance, so that reviewers could get straight to what they should be looking at with the minimum of fuss. You might think that, but you'd be wrong.

A few weeks ago, under strict embargo and via FedEx from New York, I received a review release of StarOffice 9 -- the corporate incarnation of OpenOffice 3. Being Linux, Mac and Windows compatible, I foolishly anticipated an easy installation. But I was wrong. The Windows bit worked all right. I haven't tried the Mac. But where the wheels came off was under Linux -- all the more galling when you consider that StarOffice is the offspring of Sun Microsystems who are about as venerable as you can get in the Unix/Linux world.

Target Linux System 1: Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit (freshly installed)
After inserting the DVD I received a nice prompt asking if I was prepared to let the disc run automatically. I agreed. This was followed by a message saying "Cannot find the autorun program."

Instead I browsed to the Linux installation folder and clicked setup. A command prompt window opened to inform me "Error: Failed to extract Java Runtime Environment."

So I browsed the documentation and read about manual installation using alien (more about that in a moment). First I had to sudo apt-get install alien. Then I tried the command. Another howling failure. "Error: Current host architecture 'amd64' does not appear in package architecture's list (i386)."

No 64-bit version, huh? Game over.

Target Linux System 2: Kubuntu 8.04
As supplied, SO9 came only in RPM format -- ideal for Fedora and Mandriva and other RPM-based systems, but not so for my Debian-based ones. No worries, the accompanying README advised;

1. Change to the directory that contains the rpm packages for StarOffice.
2. Type the following command: sudo alien -i -k *.i586.rpm

which I duly did, foolishly failing to check the contents of that directory first.

Alien is a useful tool. It converts the incoming package into binary format and, with the addition of the -i switch, installs it.

Forty minutes later it was still chewing through packages. Strange. I investigated and discovered that the RPM directory contained copies of StarOffice in English, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Swedish, Polish and Portugese. 253 files, nearly half a gig in compressed package format, and, thanks to the command thoughfully provided by Sun, I was merrily installing the lot!

Fuming, I let it finish, which it eventually did, before presenting me with this message;

Clicking the Details button provided a mass of installation and error messages. I copied them into working word processor. They totalled a mere 43 pages!

After uninstalling everything I did briefly consider trying to isolate just the English language files, copy them to hard disk and install from there, but who wants to have to work that hard? Especially when you can download OpenOffice 3 -- in the language and package format of your choice -- in a matter of minutes?

Target System 3: Windows XP
It installed! It worked! I might even have considered reviewing it but by this time I was so pissed off with StarOffice that objectivity had gone out the window. So I uninstalled it again. Oh-oh...

It did uninstall. Eventually... And via using a curious mix of German and English dialog boxes...

Conclusion
The principal difference between SO9 and OOo3 is that in paying for the former you get 60 days technical support. I suspect many Linux users will need that just to get the damn thing installed!

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 5 )

November 20, 2008

Hidden Linux : Easy GRUB editing

I've written before about tweaking GRUB manually. Forget all that. I've recently discovered a great integrated GUI way to manage your Linux bootloader.

QGRUBEditor and KGRUBEditor are actually two versions of the same great GRUB editor. The latter, based on KDE-4 libraries, is the one currently in active development, but unless you've upgraded to KDE-4 or don't mind downloading a ton of dependencies, the former works just fine.

Rather than a lot of useless blather, I'll let the screenshots do the talking. Note particularly the convenient way to create your own splash images in the GRUB Settings view!

(Click for a larger view)

(Click for a larger view)

You'll find screenshots of KGRUBEditor here.

<--Previous Hidden Linux Next Hidden Linux -->

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

November 14, 2008

The economics of spam

Thinking of starting your own spam network like these three enterprising Kiwis? You might like to read Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion first. It's the rather dry title of a fascinating paper on the economics of spam.

Using a parasitic infiltration of an existing botnet’s infrastructure, we analyze two spam campaigns: one designed to propagate a malware Trojan, the other marketing on-line pharmaceuticals. For nearly a half billion spam e-mails we identify the number that are successfully delivered, the number that pass through popular anti-spam filters, the number that elicit user visits to the advertised sites, and the number of ”sales„ and ”infections„ produced.

The results? Very interesting...

After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted — a conversion rate of well under 0.00001%. Of these, all but one were for male-enhancement products and the average purchase price was close to $100. Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period or $140 per day for periods when the campaign was active. However, our study interposed on only a small fraction of the overall Storm network — we estimate roughly 1.5 percent based on the fraction of worker bots we proxy. Thus, the total daily revenue attributable to Storm’s pharmacy campaign is likely closer to $7000 (or $9500 during periods of campaign activity). By the same logic, we estimate that Storm self-propagation campaigns can produce between 3500 and 8500 new bots per day.

Under the assumption that our measurements are representative over time (an admittedly dangerous assumption when dealing with such small samples), we can extrapolate that, were it sent continuously at the same rate, Storm-generated pharmaceutical spam would produce roughly 3.5 million dollars of revenue in a year. This number could be even higher if spam-advertised pharmacies experience repeat business. A bit less than ”millions of dollars every day„, but certainly a healthy enterprise.

But then the authors go on to examine how much of that is profit:

Anecdotal reports place the retail price of spam delivery at a bit under $80 per million. This cost is an order of magnitude less than what legitimate commercial mailers charge, but is still a signiﬁcant overhead; sending 350M e-mails would cost more than $25,000. Indeed, given the net revenues we estimate, retail spam delivery would only make sense if it were 20 times cheaper still.

And don't forget to add in the maximum fine for spamming in NZ: $200,000.

And yet, Storm continues to distribute pharmacy spam — suggesting that it is in fact proﬁtable. One explanation is that Storm’s masters are vertically integrated and the purveyors of Storm’s pharmacy spam are none other than the operators of Storm itself (i.e., that Storm does not deliver these spams for a third-part in exchange for a fee).

Like any other, spam is a business. If idiots didn't buy the stuff, it would simply go away.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

November 7, 2008

Hidden Linux : Scripted video encoding

When it comes format-shifting videos or ripping DVDs, there's a mind-numbing variety of programs to choose from. (Just check out this list!) But I invariably find myself drawn back to xvidenc.

In essence, xvidenc is just an interactive shell script built around the many, many, (many!) options available from the MEncoder command -- which itself lies at the heart of movie player MPlayer. Here, for example, is a not untypical MEncoder command ...

mencoder "/media/shared/infile.flv" -o "/media/shared/outfile.avi" -vf softskip,harddup -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=140:aq=4:vol=2.2:mode=1 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=1200:me_quality=6:vhq=1:threads=1:max_bframes=2:bvhq=1:nopacked: quant_type=h263:noqpel:nogmc:trellis:nointerlacing: chroma_me:nochroma_opt:hq_ac:nolumi_mask:rc_reaction_delay_factor=0:rc_averaging_period=100:closed_gop:autoaspect

That was actually generated by xvidenc after prompting me with straightforward questions such as ...

Select the Audio Codec [default is MP3]:

... and ...

Would you like to convert the final encode from AVI to MP4? [y/n]:

... through to more technical ones such as ...

Would you like to use Pre/Postprocessing video filters? [y/n]:

... and ...

Would you like to use Automatic Brightness/Contrast? [y/n]:

Along the way xvidenc makes its own intelligent selections, so in most cases it's just a matter of hitting <Enter> to stick with the default.

You need to give the xvidenc command a couple of parameters when you kick it off; the number of passes and a predefined quality preset (xvidenc --help will list them all).

xvidenc -1p -p nq

In this case I'm opting for 1-pass encoding using the Normal Quality preset. After that, the script takes over and you're away ...

<--Previous Hidden Linux Next Hidden Linux -->

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

November 3, 2008

Consumer alert: More flaming battery problems

Dell, HP and Toshiba are once again recalling dodgy laptop batteries manufactured by Sony. Just like a similar recall back in March 2006, the 2.15Ah Lithium Ion batteries may overheat and cause a fire.

Apparently only 100,000 are affected this time -- a fraction of the earlier recall which affected 4.1 million batteries. Here are the links if you think you might be affected:

And while you're waiting for your replacement battery, check this out to see what happens when one cooks...