There is an interesting article at Linux.com on the top ten administrator utilities in linux. Titled “My sysadmin toolbox” it goes into some detail on some of the good standby’s that if you’re interested in learning command line linux, you ought to take a look at. The one that I hesitate on is pwgen which is a utility for generating random passwords. I’ve always read that if you can create the password with a program, it can be broken the sameway. However, I bet the passwords generated with pwgen are better than those that most users pick out (fred or mynewcar for example…)
Month: November 2005
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Linux livecd 6 month followups
If you’ve ever given away linux livecd’s and wondered if they were ever tried, you might be interested in reading this newsforge article about a guy that followed up with several livecd recipients about 6 months on. It’s interesting to see what he found. There were a limited number, but it is interesting.
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Some companies unable to secure your data
It’s sad, but true. Some companies are just plain irresponsible with your data. Whether it be credit card information, or address and phone number there are those that aren’t good about keeping their databases private. The securityfix is reporting that a recent survey found 12% of people had been notified by companies that they did business with over a breach of security resulting in data loss. Apparently 20% of those, closed accounts subsequently.
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Google announces analytics for web sites
Google has rolled out another free tool for site owners. Google Analytics was announced today. Using technology acquired from Urchin, this free service (limited to 5 million page views a month), sits on your webpage as a little javascript “bug” of sorts and tracks information on visitors to your site.
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klax KDE 3.5 RC1 screenshot tour
KDE 3.5 RC1 has been out long enough that there’s already a series of screenshots… (11/11/05 was the announcement). Screenshots are available here. The screen caps were taken from the KLAX livecd.
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OSWD.org is back up
I’ve just looked and noticed that oswd.org (Open source web design). They currently boast 715 free templates. In their absense several other sites have sprung up to fill the void they had left… openwebtemplates.com is one such recent entry. There’s also openwebdesign.org with over 1300 templates. There are several sites that seem to be mirroring the original list of zipped templates from oswd.org, but I don’t find any others with thumbnails, openwebdesign.org appears to have the complete list.
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Netscape 7.1 download file could not be saved
I’ve run across this a couple of times and to save me a few more Google searches….
Under Netscape 7.1, trying to download a file, there is a long message (with a temporary file address), and the following…
(long path to file like c:\windows\temp\….. ) could not be saved because the source file could not be found. Try again later or contact the server administrator.
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The wolf in sheeps clothing, software that claims to be anti-spyware, but installs more spyware on your pc
The bad news is that the spyware situation for home pc users can be murkier every day. I remember a particular user who once installed an antivirus program because a popup appeared claiming to have found viruses on his drive, next thing he knew he was having all sorts of spyware problems, viruses found all the time (to “prove” the antivirus component was running.), etc. etc.
Spyware Confidential has the story on the latest wolf in sheeps clothing, something called spyaxe. This link shows a screenshot of one fake warning. One problem is how to describe to people how to identify legitimate versus illegit popups and warnings.
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Getting rid of an old PC – wipe the hard drive!!
I’ve said it before and mentioned DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke) as my favorite tool for this, but Sunbeltblog is mentioning this and it’s worth reminding you. When you replace a PC, you might keep the hard drive around for a short period to make sure you have all your data, but PLEASE plan on finding some way to delete or wipe or nuke or destroy ALL the data on the drive.
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Free OpenOffice.org training videos
For those of you that can’t be dropped into an application and “wing it” learning by doing, newsforge has announced some openoffice.org training videos that are now available for free download. So, if you ever wanted or needed a video walkthrough for you or someone else on OpenOffice it looks like that need has been filled. They’re actually excerpts from a video cd that comes from an upcoming book on OpenOffice, entitled Point & Click OpenOffice.org.