Friday, September 25, 2009

New ClamAV Live CD update

I updated the ClamAV Live CD to 0.95.2 today (finally). I have been wondering what I want to do with this project the past few months. When I first created the CD, I wanted it to be as small as possible so that I could put it on a 128 MB thumbdrive (or 150 MB mini-cd), so I worked extremely hard trying to get it as small as I could. I needed the CD to run on computers with as little as 128 MB of ram! I also didn't know it would be such a popular tool when I released the iso on my website, so I never included documentation on how to use it, prettied it up, things like that. I liked it the way it was, completely minimal and still gets the job done.

I have, however, gotten requests from a few people (five or so) that ask for it to be more user friendly. I am torn between the ease of use vs portability aspects of the project, so I ask you fellow Ubunteers your opinion. Of those who have used it, do you like the minimal approach, or would you prefer a prettier, more user friendly/graphical tool? Maybe two versions? If I went with the more graphical tool, I would look to utilize the full extent of a normal CD, so I would be including many more tools and such.

Thanks for any feedback!

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

AudibleManager in Ubuntu

So, it turns out that the AudibleManager software that Audible.com uses for it's audiobooks runs in wine for the most part. The one part that doesn't work is the one part that makes the actual software useful to install, and it looks like it is a bad API implemenation of InternetCrackUrlW() within the Windows inet libraries. It is taking a TLS session and assuming it is SSL, making an SSL request on the audible servers, with no SSL port being used on the Audible servers in the first place, causing a time out on authentication.

A few patches have been proposed on the bug page (http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16831), but I was hoping that the last patch that seems to work had been employed into the latest stable version (it hasn't, quite a disappointment), so even using the wine apt repos rather than the ubuntu ones doesn't fix this for you. You have to patch it yourself.

No esta bien. And I am a big fan of audiobooks, so, please, no posts on how Audible.com is evil for it's DRM.