delirial

Well, it’s no surprise. Sooner or later, every application gets cracked and released. The “bad” thing about this one is that, while legit customers are still waiting to buy their paid versions of Adobe Photoshop CS3 (the newest installment of the popular image manipulation software), software pirates are already able to download it for free.

In a matter of 4 hours, over 700 users have already downloaded the software from a single site.

While I don’t necessarily endorse piracy, I do like the message that Pirate Groups implicitly send to software development companies: “Activation schemes are not effective.” Millions of dollars get spent by companies trying to make their software more secure against software pirates. Yet, all they manage to achieve is make their paying customers uncomfortable, and software pirates spend 30 more seconds while they generate a pirated activation key.

How can companies stay ahead of software pirates when it’s easier/faster to download the pirated version than to be a legit owner? Microsoft tried their WGA program, which has proven to be completely ineffective against piracy, and the holy grail of consumers’ dissatisfaction.

A group has finally been able to crack the Windows Vista activation scheme. And it is nothing like the ‘brute-force’ hoax that appeared two days ago!

I must admit though, I’m actually impressed by the fact that it took so long for a decent crack to surface. I guess all the developers in the windows team should feel really proud. I remember my friends were already downloading XP before it hit the shelves. It’s already been over 2 months since the Vista release and no one had been able to come up with a successful method for activating it.

Now the world’s most secure OS (the one that was claimed to be the holy grail for stopping software pirates) is just another piece of software that will be distributed via DVD-Rs, P2P, etc, etc. Not that it wasn’t being distributed already, but pirates had been unable to activate it until today and that was holding back a lot of people.

So, how did they do it? Let me quote…

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Glade has become a relatively popular tool for developing user interfaces for GTK+. The cool thing about Glade is the fact that it generates the interface in an XML dialect that can be imported by several programming languages, including C/C++, Python, Mono and Ruby among others.

A programmer can design an interface in Glade, and specify signals (events) for each of the components in the graphical user interface. Using tools like ‘ruby-glade-create-template’, one can have the method signatures generated automatically, then just fill in the blanks and end up with pretty nifty applications. Pretty neat, huh?

The problem? Finding the necessary information to get started.

In this tutorial we will use Ruby and Glade in order to generate a simple, but graphical, ‘Hello World!’ program. I’m assuming you have Glade 3 installed on your system and all the necessary libraries (libglade, et al).

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Over a year and a half ago, one of my best friends (who happens to be a professional graphics designer) was hired by a company and, as part of his sign-in deal, got brand new Mac loaded with Adobe’s Creative Suite 2 and several other applications for his home. A hell of a deal, if you ask me.

Knowing that he had a CS1 license that he wouldn’t bee needing anymore I convinced him to trade his license for a couple of seasons of Stargate: SG-1. Long story short, I was finally able to drop that old Photoshop 6 that I had downloaded off Kazaa (shame on me) and go ‘legit’.

I was a happy man. I now owned the weapon of choice for graphics proffessionals and would be able to create even cooler signatures for my forums and performs edits on my photos.

Enter Linux & The Gimp:

My days as a Photoshop user didn’t last too long. Several months ago, I decided to jump on the Linux bandwagon. I tried to get Photoshop to work in linux with wine, but I was not successful, so I was left with only one option: The Gimp

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I guess that if you are here you already know what GIMPshop is. If you don’t, here’s a quickie:

“GIMPshop is a modification of the free/open source graphics program GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop. Its primary purpose is to make users of Photoshop feel comfortable using GIMP.” — Wikipedia

Now, what do we need to install GIMPshop? The Gimp!

Let’s get started.

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By the end of September 2006, my career as a student was coming to an end and the search for a job was inevitable.

I went to my college’s ‘Job Fair’ armed with a kickass resumé and over three years of part-time experience under my belt. Landing subsequent interviews and, eventually, job offers wasn’t too much of a problem because my research experience and part-time jobs really worked in my favor. I did my fair share of research about the companies that would be visiting us. Among the top contenders featured: IBM, HP, Microsoft, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs and Allstate.

One of the companies that caught my attention was Cascades Technologies (CTi): a Virginia-based company that was moving part of their development to Puerto Rico. Read the rest of this entry »

In short: ‘nothing in particular’

Welcome to delirial.com.

This blog is basically just a place where we can post random articles, rants and tutorials about our favorite (and not so favorite) technologies such as:

• Ubuntu
• Beryl
• Linux
• Ruby
• Rails
• .NET
• SQL
• The Gimp
• Vista
• etc.

We hope you will enjoy the contents.