tail -f findings.out

I’m all about security practices on my remote server systems. On my firewalled desktop systems, however, I’d rather err on the side of convenience. I prefer to not have to type my password to use sudo or gksudo (graphical sudo). If I type my password to login to my account once, I want to have access to everything unfettered thereafter.

While there are plenty of posts on how to get sudo without password going, I never could seem to find information on how to do this for gksudo as well. So here’s how to do that.

First open the gconf-editor (gnome configuration):

Once that opens, go to /apps/gksu, and check “save-to-keyring”:

This will remember your password for gksudo, so you won’t get any more auth popups.

I recently had occasion to upgrade one of my home PCs. I went with a Core 2 Duo for the processor, and decided to give 64-bit Ubuntu (9.04, Jaunty Jackelope) a shot. I found it quite easy, with only a few adjustments needed to my usual system setup steps. General recommendations aside, I wanted to share a few particular application notes I found useful.

• Adobe Air: I love Pandora One, TweetDeck, and a number of other Air applications, so getting this working on 64-bit was a requirement. While there aren’t any 64-bit packages for Air on Linux, the 32-bit version works just fine. I was a bit dismayed when I saw the lengthy instructions Adobe has listed for this process, but I must admit they did work perfectly. So grab the eyedrops and hit up this page. Be sure to follow the step at the end for 9.04, otherwise the Air apps won’t be able to connect to the internet on a 64-bit system.
• Pandora One: You have to subscribe to get access to Pandora One, but rest assured it works just fine on 64-bit Ubuntu.
• Java: This used to present some complications for Ubuntu users, but following this guide I had things running in no time.
• Flash: All I needed to run was “sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree”. Flash in Firefox worked perfectly.
• TweetDeck: TweetDeck is a great application to keep better track of your Twitter feed. v0.30.5 works just fine on 64-bit Jaunty.

While the benefits of running a 64-bit OS aren’t as substantial for most desktop tasks, there is still a performance boost across the board. And at least for the applications I love and use everyday, the packages are definitely at a stable state for running under 64-bit.

Juniper’s SSL-based VPNs are wonderfully easy to use. Windows and OS X users simply sign into the VPN website, click Connect, install the Java-based app (if it’s the first time) and are good to go. On the Linux side, it seems Juniper didn’t quite expend the effort to make it so easy. I’ve heard it works fine on RPM-based distros, but it doesn’t work on Ubuntu without some preparation. The steps below are what I needed to do to get it working. This tutorial got me part of the way, so if you run into issues you might want to check it out.

Here’s what I had to do the first time:

• Set up the Sun Java Runtime Environment and configure the system to use it. This guide explains how to do this.
• Set up the Firefox Java plugin. You’ve probably already done this, but check this page if not.
• Ubuntu doesn’t have a password on the root account or enable it by default. However, the install will ask for root’s password. Your sudo password will not work, as the install script dumbly switches to the root user. So set it beforehand (”sudo passwd root”) and remember it.

At this point I was able to login to the VPN site, click Connect, and complete the install. After the app installs, if all goes well, you should see something like this:

[EDIT, 2010-01-23: Commenter Jld9za helpfully reports that on Ubuntu 9.10 the following DNS and continual re-install issues aren't encountered. If you are on 9.10 or later you should be good at this point. If not, keep reading.]

Once I was connected, I could sign into things over the VPN by IP but not by name. This was due to the VPN install adding an entry to /etc/resolv.conf after my current nameserver entry. This was /etc/resolv.conf before connecting to the VPN:

And after:

Once I switched the VPN entry to be first, all worked fine:

You have to remember to switch the nameserver order in /etc/resolv.conf every time you connect. This is fairly annoying, but haven’t I found a way around it yet.

There one other problem with this setup. You have to put in the root password every time you connect, because it claims it has to reinstall a service each time. This is the popup that appears after hitting connect every time after the initial install:

Taking a look inside the script referenced (~/.juniper_networks/network_connect/installNC.sh):

After I installed the client for the first time, ~/.juniper_networks/network_connect/ncsvc did exist. This is what prompts the re-install each time. I’m not sure why they have to initialize this every single time. I thought I could get around it by changing installNC.sh, but it gets recreated every time you click Connect. So currently you have to type in your root password for each connection.

I don’t normally post on non-technical topics, but Pandora has been such a wonderful addition to my technological experience that I felt it pertinent to share here. In case you haven’t heard of it, Pandora is a service that allows you to create and shape your own streaming radio stations. Pandora has become quite popular since its founding in 2000, now with tens of millions of listeners. I hadn’t heard much about it a year ago, and now I see people using it all the time.

To create a new station, you seed it with an artist or a song. So far I’ve run into very few songs and artists I wanted to hear that weren’t on Pandora, and I have a few… obscure tastes. Pandora will then create a station based on music similar to the one you entered and start playing it. That similarity is powered by the Music Genome Project, Pandora’s secret sauce. Technicians record characteristics about all the songs in their collection, allowing them to provide you with finely-tuned recommendations.

I didn’t have any expectations when I first tried it out, but after a week of voting suggestions up and down, I began to notice a wonderful thing. Pandora was playing songs I had never heard of, but immediately loved. I’ve discovered many new artists and songs that I would never have likely come across otherwise. In fact, I liked some of them so much that I actually started buying songs. Aside from the occasionally lucid Amazon suggestion, I’ve never encountered a service that aligned so accurately with what I like.

Pandora’s prospects are even brighter with the recent settlement of a long-standing music royalty battle. Resulting from this was the decision to cap free account usage to 40 hours a month. I listen to Pandora a lot. Nearly all day at work on my laptop, at home on my PC, and from my Blackberry Storm while in the car. As a result I hit the cap before the middle of this month. It was time to ante up, support a great thing, and get a paid account.

Enter Pandora One. It’s $36 a year, and offers a decent set of features:

• No monthly listening cap
• No ads in the web interface
• A smaller, pop-out browser interface
• Skins for customizing the appearance
• 192Kbps streaming
• A desktop application for browser-less listening
• No limit on skips
• Longer timeout

The desktop app is wonderful. It’s built on Adobe Air, so it works on all major desktop platforms. It has a small footprint, almost all the functionality of the browser interface, and looks pretty slick:

Since I’ve been using Pandora, I don’t think much about where my music is or the process of collecting new additions. Pandora can be wherever I need to go, and it will keep bringing great music to me, both new and familiar. Instead of putting any effort into the process of having and using a music collection, I can simply listen and only take any action when I like or dislike something. This has been an interesting change to explore, and I think it’s a positive one.

Excel 2007 is an amazing tool. I normally find Microsoft’s software unintuitive, annoying, and slow. But for quick numeric analysis tasks or advanced reporting, Excel can do amazing things. Before utilizing all this reporting and analytical firepower, you have to get some data into Excel. One method that allows for a very flexible setup is pulling data in from a web query. You can direct Excel to pull out one or more data tables from any URL-accessible resource. Here’s how:

• In a new or existing workbook, go to Data in the Ribbon, then select “From Web”:
  
• Then in the address field, enter the URL of the table you want to pull in. But first, watch and laugh as the MSN homepage loads by default and throws runtime errors in Microsoft’s own software. Always a good time.
• Once you enter the URL and press Go, the tables available will load in the window below. Click the yellow arrow to the left of the table you want to import. It will turn green.
• WARNING: If the report contains HTML you want to render, like links, you need to perform an extra step. Click Options in the top right of the query window. Change formatting to “Full HTML formatting”:
  
• Then click OK
• Once you have your table selected, click OK at the bottom, and the data should be imported.

Now a new sort of infrastructure becomes feasible. Web resources serving up raw or slightly processed data in the form of HTML tables connect to backend data sources. Spreadsheets pull down the latest data, which then powers advanced reporting and analysis functionality built into the spreadsheet. This allows a central source of data to feed a variety of individual approaches to crunching that data, without a steep learning curve or expensive reporting system.

In all fairness, OpenOffice’s Calc does offer the ability to import data from a web query. However, I continuously had problems with it not working with certain URLs. I’m not sure if the intended use case was different, and OO Calc only supports importing certain types of documents. But any arbitrary page with a table on it that one could view in a web browser would work fine with Excel every time. And this makes things a lot easier.