Category: Technology
July 5, 2006
Independence Is Good, But We Need to Know Why
Just in time for the 4th of July, Kevin Shockey of Tux Magazine encourages users to “declare their independence from proprietary software.” By comparing the “revolution” of open source software, and desktop Linux in particular, to the American Revolution, he…
May 3, 2006
CPAN (Net::FTP) for Perl Hangs on Cygwin
CPAN is an essential tool for Perl developers. With the “cpan” command, you can install whole Perl libraries effortlessly. However, on many default installations of cygwin, cpan simply hangs:
cpan> install LWP
CPAN: Storable loaded ok
Going to read /root/.cpan/MetadataDatabase…
April 12, 2006
Recovering RAID on Linux in Rescue Mode
The software RAID on Linux works very well. Our backup machine (still using Red Hat 9) uses a RAID‑5 with 6 drives: 4 hot and 2 reserve. When a main drive fails, a reserve is auto-magically brought in (thanks to the “md” daemon).
But last Sunday…
February 24, 2006
Malcolm Gladwell’s started blogging
[Via BoingBoing] Malcolm Gladwell’s books, The Tipping Point and Blink, were extremely compelling, well-informed writing that I think should be mandatory for anyone interested in social change and better decision-making. He’s now started a blog to, as he puts it, “elaborate and…
January 14, 2006
Anonym.os Will Change Your Life
Well, it may not actually change your life, but if you’re in the security field it’s going to make life more difficult.
I’m at the second annual Shmoocon, a “hacker” conference mostly devoted to white-hat efforts and general good-gut-type things.…
January 10, 2006
OMB’s selling of e‑government to Congress
Jason Miller at GCN does a great job in reporting on OMB’s report to Congress which attempts to salvage funding for e‑gov projects. The crux of OMB’s problem is that Congress assigns money to each agency for specified purposes but has…
December 22, 2005
Race condition at my bank
I have a bank account that’s set up so when I withdraw funds from that account by wire or check or whatever, if there’s less in the account than the amount I’m spending, the money is automatically pulled from my line of…
December 15, 2005
Copying Text from Encrypted PDF Files
PDF encryption is sort of silly. If you really wanted to grab the text, you can screen capture each page and then OCR it. So clearly the true intention of the encryption is to deter the 99% of the users…
December 14, 2005
The Promise of Ajax and DOM: Simple Event-Driven Widget-Based Web Applications
As a Web developer, I have a confession to make: I prefer writting desktop applications.
In an enterprise-level Web application, just to get a usable display tier you need to perform gymnastics in JavaScript, CSS, HTML, JSP, Java, and Struts (a similar set of gymnastics…
December 5, 2005
NCI warns users about using IE
According to an email apparently sent to users at the National Cancer Institute (part of the National Institutes of Health, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services) on Friday, an IE bug could allow evil web…