Michael Tabolsky :: Weblog Archives

September 13, 2006

Michael Tabolsky

Why Desktop Linux Will Not Take off, and Why You Don't Want It to

A great article on OSNews.com worth reading for every GNU/Linux evangelist or enthusiast. Really, said good enough.

Keywords: foss, propaganda, linux

Posted by michael.tabolsky at 08:40 | 0 comment(s) | Send to a Friend

Michael Tabolsky

Guard rail

Finally there is some activity on this issue on the Italian top level...

Al Senato infatti l'alleanza rosso-verde di "Insieme per l'Unione" dichiara guerra alla barriere di contenimento old style installate lungo strade e autostrade. "Troppo spesso - spiega il senatore Mauro Bulgarelli, primo firmatario del Ddl - purtroppo queste barriere di lamiera si trasformano in vere e proprie 'lame' ed il bilancio dei motociclisti morti o mutilati ogni anno da queste pericolosissime infrastrutture è drammatico".

Le moto, ricorda Bulgarelli, rappresentano una quota compresa tra il 10 e il 20% di tutti i veicoli circolanti in Europa.... more on repubblica.it

Keywords: italia, bikes

Posted by michael.tabolsky at 08:42 | 0 comment(s) | Send to a Friend

Michael Tabolsky

Some MS...

Q: Now, what all the MS haters will do? And, more important:

"When you have a monopoly
What're your customers going to do?"

"The guy at the keyboard of a Windows Vista box,
using Microsoft Office at work, and Windows Media
Player at home is not the customer, he is _the product_.
The customers are Dell, AOL, media licensing conglomerates, and so on.

from here

Keywords: flame wars, religion, ms

Posted by michael.tabolsky at 08:46 | 0 comment(s) | Send to a Friend

Michael Tabolsky

Skype on linux from proxied office

Since the new beta is out, I wanted to give it a try.
Works much better than previous one.

However, when I came this morning to the office I decided to connect this thingy using the corporate HTTP proxy.
For the rest of the applications I usually use little library "transconnect" that does transparent HTTP CONNECT socketing when LD_PRELOADED. For most of apps works just fine, but skype does not like it.
After some initial stracing and tcpdumping, I realized that skype parses firefox and opera configs. Well, this indeed looks like searching for proxy, especially if taking to account that it does do HTTP CONNECT on windows. Bingo, google also said that skype is looking for proxy settings there. Ok, configured proxy in both files, nothing works, skype still sends SYNs to public IPs. The same mail from some list I've found mentioned http_proxy ENV variable, well did not work either, and then I read at the end of this mail, that skype does not know to authenticate to proxy. Another bingo. A 30 sec proxy-in-the-middle install on local host, and launching `https_proxy=localhost:8080 ./skype` brings it up connected after the thingy understands that SYNs directly "shall not pass here".

Testing the sound, all seems good so far.

Keywords: skype, linux

Posted by michael.tabolsky at 08:54 | 0 comment(s) | Send to a Friend

Michael Tabolsky

EICMA 2006 - Salone Internazionale del Motociclo