How to Synchronize Current Time in Ubuntu

As some of you might aware, the time kept by computers (or other timepieces such as clocks) are not accurate as there are various factor that causes time drift. Quartz inaccuracy, temperature, quality of the equipment, power from battery, mechanical wear and tear and so on.

These minor drift while might not seems to be significant, it will give you inaccurate measure of time. This might affect your other productivity work as the time kept by your computer is not accurate to the last second. Plus, certain application such as Stellarium and GPredict depends heavily on the time kept on your computer to give accurate result.

How to get accurate time in Ubuntu
You can ensure your computer gets the most accurate time by synchronizing it with an NTP server .

To do this you need to right click the Tray Clock in Ubuntu, and selects “Adjust Date & Time”.

Adjust Date and Time

A dialog will appear, press “Unlock” and enter your Administrator password to enable the menus.

Adjust Date and Time

Answer “yes” to install NTP packages. If your computer is connected to the internet it will be automatically synchronized with an NTP server.

Bonus :You can select the nearest NTP server to your place for faster synchronization, as shown on the picture. The nearest NTP server to Malaysia is maintained by SIRIM – mst.sirim.my.

NTP Time Servers in Ubuntu

Synchronize Time using command-line
Alternatively you can synchronize time by using ntpdate command-line tool, which is covered previously in this blog.

Beware of the Fake GMail Administrator email

GMail users, a word of warning, I’ve discovered a new phising email designed to steal your Google account password and credential.

Here’s how the email looks like.

Fake Gmail email

Fake Gmail email

Gmail users are advised not to fall into these type of scam as the scammer can use your Google account for all sort of nasty things. Please change your Google Account password as often as possible

CenterIM and Finch – ncurses based Instant Messenger for Linux

Sometimes you can’t avoid it, you might have to work with computers without GUI such as on a dedicated server or when you are working on a remote computer.

Nevertheless for some reason you might find a need to communicate with other people through yahoo messenger or MSN, and when you don’t have the fancy XOrg, then this might be the solution for instant messaging on a console environment.

No. 1- Finch
http://pidgin.im

Finch is a console base frontend to libpurple which is used by Pidgin (formerly gaim). As such Finch shares a lot of similarities with its GUI counterpart, including the account settings.

finch1.jpg

finch21.jpg

Finch tries it best to be consistent with Pidgin, down to the account setting interface. The navigation interface is a bit confusing at first, but once you’ve mastered it you can easily switches the chat screen from one person to another.

The best thing about Finch is, it can be extended using plugins as Pidgin. Finch also can double-up as an IRC client if necessary though there are more suitable alternatives such as irssi and BitchX for the CLI environment.

No. 2- CenterIM (CenterICQ)
http://www.centerim.org/

Another ncurses-based instant messenger client that I find handy is centerim which supports ICQ, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC, Jabber, LiveJournal, and Gadu-Gadu IM protocol.

centerim.jpg

centerim2.jpg

centerim3.jpg

At first glance, Centerim seems to offer more configuration options than Finch. The text interface also has more contrast and easily readable than Finch. What makes it more interesting to use is that you can decide the placement and the size of ncurses interface more independently than whats offered in Finch.

The chat and buddy interface is much more intuitive than Finch and the user can navigate through the multiple interface with relative ease. This is mainly attributed to Centerim places hint on the interface so the user knows what to do in order to keep the conversation going.

My Thoughts
Overall I would prefer to use Centerim over Finch in any given time because centerim interface is much more easy to navigate and use compared to Finch. Although Finch can be customised or extended with its plugin architecture, that is hardly useful to me compared to a useful user interface

[tags]pidgin,im,yahoo,yahoo messenger,ym,gaim,centerim,icq,msn,google talk,gtalk,internet,chat,chatting[/tags]

Using htaccess to stop Bad Bots from stealing bandwidth and crashing your server

Few days ago my site was hit by a bunch of really bad bots which crawl my site continuously until it overloads my web server. Now I’m publishing a way to block these so-called bad robots from ruining your website by their crazy crawling method.

Assuming you are using Apache Http server, create .httaccess file and append this line to the newly created file.
Continue reading “Using htaccess to stop Bad Bots from stealing bandwidth and crashing your server”

HP Officejet 5680 – How to Send Fax from Ubuntu Linux Computer

This serves as a continuity from my previous post, I got myself a new and flexible Printer – HP Officejet 5680 All in One.

HP Officejet All-in-One Under Ubuntu
Its all seems rather easy at the way I left off, the printer is fully functioning by just plugging it to my Ubuntu pc, the scanner works well without I having to do anything special, the phone is fully functioning (yeah it is included with the printer) and I am able to send and receive fax without a hitch, something that I cant do without installing 350MB of companion application (half of it was crapware) under WIndows Vista.

Everything worked, what left to do?
What left to do is figuring out how can I send fax directly from Ubuntu (or other Linux base operating system) using only digital files (*.txt, *.pdf, *.ps, *.jpeg), so I don’t have to print those files and fax them one by one anymore.

HP Linux Imaging and Printing project
Through googling, I found that Hewlett Packard (HP) has published open source software tool to deal with their printers. Free and Open Source drivers and printer-specific application directly from manufacturer, which is very cool!

Fortunately Ubuntu already installed HPLIP tools by default with CUPS in my machine. The next step that I should take is to run ‘hp-setup’ as root to configure my printer port and run the ‘hp-sendfax’ application to send the faxes.

Both of these tool requires python-qt3 package which is available from Ubuntu software repository.

Now I can fax my pdf documents directly without having to print them first, a huge saving over ink and paper cost.

hpfax11.png

hp2.png

Conclusion
If you are planning to get a new printer, then I would suggest you get a HP printer. Not only because HP printers are reliable, but they also comes with Free and Open Source drivers and applications for the Linux based operating system. Well that’s a good reason to get HP printers.

Please visit HPLIP project website for more information about HP printers support under Linux based operating system.

[tags]hp,hewlett packard,printer,linux,opensource,ubuntu,foss,drivers,hardware,scanner,officejet[/tags]