justinmaccarthy

Channel4 (www.channel4.com) shows some great documentaries but alway late at night. Tonight they showed a documentary called “All the girls I’ve loved Before”, by Henrique Goldman , a Brazilian film director. In his film Goldman interviews his former loves, 6 very different women (and one who refused to be interviewed) from several countries, who talk freely straight to the camera without interruption from Goldman, about their relationships with him. It was really interesting to see the director through and ONLY through the eyes of the women in his life (..well plus a few auxiliary charactors). Nicely shot, and edited.

Really interesting and utterly charming.

1) Install a firewall.

The good news is that WindowsXP comes with a firewall. Of course its disabled by default.

Step one is to install it.

Learn How to install the firewall

2) Install a virus checker and run it.

There are several good virus checkers. Unfortunatly I haven’t found a good free / open source virus checker. So you’ll have to add a yearly subscription to a Virus checker into your Cost of ownership for Windows.

Actually, Grisoft have a free virus checker for home users, www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php
I haven’t used it myself. Anyone got an opinion?

3) Turn off all those services you don’t need.

WindowsXP has a load of stuff running that 99% of home users do not need. Why? Well Microsoft like to be able to show customers that you can just plug your PC into a network and everything will just work. Of course the don’t demo how easy it makes things for people who want to get onto your system.

Some bloke called Blackviper has a complete list of the what you need and what you don’t
here.

4) Don’t use Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer is more full of security holes than swiss cheese. It’s better to use a 3rd party browser. Firefox is the one I would recommend
Get it free here Mozilla.org.

5) Don’t use Outlook (or Express) or ensure its patched.

Ditto, for OutLook, use something like Thunderbird.

6) Install MS updates

Microsoft has a service to update your system with patches etc. Its called windowsUpdate and you should have a link for it in your Start menu. Run it regularly to keep your system patched.

I came across a good explaination of the various quirks of the OS X shell.

Read it here

I was setting up VNCserver on one of RedHat boxes, and was getting a gray screen with a cursor instead of gnome.

I checked the log and saw this line :

“gnome-session:you’re already running a session manager”

After searching the web, its seems I had an old entry in my Session manager var..

$ echo $SESSION_MANAGER
local/babbage:/tmp/.ICE-unix2345

I just deleted that and restarted VNCserver, and everything worked fine..

I really don’t know enough about windows managers….

A year ago, I turned on Channel4 late one night expecting some mind-numbing “best 100 …” shows, but ended up watching one of the most uplifting documentaries I have seen. I then promptly forgot what it was called. But thats ok, cus google didn’t.

The Other Final ( http://www.theotherfinal.com/ ) is the story of a football (soccer) match between the 2 worst teams in the world:

Bhutan (pop: unknown. between 1 and 2 million; fifa ranking: 202nd ): A secluded kingdom 7500ft above sea-level in the Eastern Himalayas, between China and India. The Prime Minister claims the citizens value GNH (Gross National Happiness) over GNP.

Montserrat (pop: 9,245 ; fifa ranking: 203rd ): Much of this island was devastated and two-thirds of the population fled abroad because of the eruption of the Soufriere Hills Volcano that began on 18 July 1995

Now I am not of fan of football, but it doesn’t matter, this story is about the diverse people and culture of the world, and getting together to enjoy sport. The resulting documentary is beautiful.

If you get a chance to watch this documentary, grab it.

Also…

If you are a nerd you might also like the bbc Radio 4 documentary series – SILICON VALLEY USA
Listen online here http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/siliconvalley.shtml

I just installed YellowDog Linux on my new powerBook. I had partitioned the drive already so, it was very simple (apart from forgetting what video card I had!!) but it all seems to have just worked. YellowDog is RedHat based so if you’ve installed that before, you’ll be on familar ground.

If you have never used linux and you got a PowerPc check yellowdog out!!

YellowDogLinux