Gimparoo!

I do a lot of coding in C, Perl, HTML, CSS, and coming this semester, Java. I’ve used vim pretty much exclusively, but have recently started wanting to use my mouse when it’s feasible. So, I started looking around and being disappointed for one reason or the other with each of the offerings. First, I tried TextWrangler which almost did it except I didn’t like the way it handled Perl syntax highlighting, and I didn’t like the automatic indenting implementation. I tried a couple of the commercial selections such as TextMate and SubEthaEdit, but seriously, if I have to pay for them, I’ll just stick to vim. Then I found Smultron. It does a nice job of syntax highlighting and the automatic indent is implemented just the way I like. There is page after page of customization options. It’s also open source, which you all know I love. When I’m accessing my server remotely, vim will still work of course, but for homework and projects, I’m giving Smultron a try.

This post does not have anything to do with the GIMP. If you don’t care about Linux server administration, you should just skip this post.

I run a very small Ubuntu LAMP server that I use for small tasks such as Perl and C programming and a personal wiki. This morning, I was checking out /var/log/auth.log, and noticed multiple login failures for user ‘root’ from a strange IP; specifically 60.28.201.57. A whois lookup revealed that the IP was from China. The activity is typical of brute force cracking, so I started to get a little worried. Thinking I’d have to bite the bullet and install a firewall, something I didn’t want to do due to the very small amount of resources this server has, I did an apt-cache search for ‘firewall’ and began the tedious process of reviewing the results.

Well, I didn’t have to look long. Not far down the list was an entry called ‘denyhosts’ with the description: an utility to help sys admins thwart ssh hackers. Well this is exactly what I’m trying to prevent, so I went to their website and read up. It sounded perfect, so I went ahead and installed it. Immediately after install, I got a system message saying I had email. The email informed me that IP  60.28.201.57 had been added to the deny list. Wow! That was fast, and easy. I literally didn’t have to do anything. That’s the kind of tool I like! It’s also FOSS, and in the Ubuntu repositories.

In short, if you host a LAMP server, even if it’s not Ubuntu, I highly recommend DenyHosts as a simple solution for preventing this type of attack.

So, I really love OpenOffice.org, and version 2.3 is pretty sweet. Does anyone know of any good resources for templates? I know about the ones on kde-files.org, but there’s not a whole lot there, and I’m not finding much else. If you’ve got a good resource, please clue me in. Thanks!

PortableApps.com announced yesterday the release of their portable version of the Gimp 2.2.13. From the announcement:

This new release updates the included GIMP to 2.2.13, adds Vista compatibility, correctly cleans up GTK’s bookmark and thumbnail files and features a greatly improved startup speed thanks to the new launcher’s plugin processing. And, it’s now packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite.

If you don’t have a portable computer, or if your only computer is someone elses, having PortableApps is the next best thing, seriously. Go check it out!

Charles Tilford (a.k.a. listentoreason) sent me a tip about another photograph editor called LightZone for Linux. I haven’t had much time to experiment with it, but it looks to be a pretty sweet little package. This is $250 software on Windows or Macintosh but free for nerds linux users. Score! Here’s a quote from their homepage:

Drawing on principles behind the photographic Zone System and traditional darkroom film photography, LightZone 2.1 makes it simple and easy to bring out the true tone, color and contrast often hidden in digital images. Designed by photographers for photographers, LightZone 2.1 offers a rich set of powerful, yet easy to use digital editing tools. LightZone’s editing tools help reduce the noise often found in high-ISO digital images, correct color shifts and white balance errors, selectively sharpen or blur images or parts of images, remove dust spots and boost overall color to create beautiful, breath-taking images, letting the true talent of the photographer shine though.

Note: it’s not open source, but it is free. Take that for what you will. I’ll be checking it out sometime this week depending on my free time.