The World of a Penguin

It has been a lot of writing about that Microsoft offered "marketing money" to Swedish partners that become member in the OOXML standard group i the Swedish standard organization (SIS), which votes for Sweden in ISO. The Swedish computer news magazine Computer Sweden has now translated one of their articles to English that describes what happened. By allowing this kind of scenes happened ISO will play out its role as an serious standard organization. Unfortunately this will hurst both consumers and the industry. What will happen the day screws following the same standard are incompatible? Update: Computer Sweden has a new article (in Swedish) about the voting. SIS has found that one company voted twice, which means that the voting is invalid and has to be redone. A new vote will probably not conducted before Sunday when the ISO voting take place. This means that Sweden will not vote in the ISO voting. No vote is better than a yes vote.

This is another reason to not use proprietary software. It's much better to do it the Open Source way. Take a look an all the places you can download Ubuntu from. These are independent and you will be up and running without the single point of failure I feel sorry for all the people that have to call daddy Bill for an OK to take another "beer."

Yesterday I got to annoyed on all the brute force attacks against my computers ssh-server. I know that I am definitely not alone. To prevent brute force attacks on ssh I installed denyhosts. Denyhosts log all login attempts logged in /var/log/auth.log and blocks IP-addresses that tries to login but fails repeatedly. To install denyhosts on ubuntu you have to activate universe and then just select the denyhosts package. Then you are ready, the package starts the application automatically. No configuration needed. But, denyhosts have a nice feature that you can upload your blocked IP-addresses to a server on the net and download what addresses other blocks. This feature is not activated by default. To activate it remove the #-char from the line in /etc/denyhosts.conf: #SYNC_SERVER = http://xmlrpc.denyhosts.net:9911 Then restart the server: sudo /etc/init.d/denyhosts restart 24h later denyhosts block more than 1400 IP-addresses.

Me and my wife have been traveling for the last two weeks. First visited we my wifes sister in London, UK. Then we took the channel train to Paris, France. We visited all the famous buildings. From Paris took we the TGV-train to Strasbourg. We rented a car in Strasbourg and drew around in Alsace and bought wine. As the finally of the trip we took the night train home. Unfortunately we were hit by a cold some where in France so I may write some more another time.