If you have a linux machine and haven’t ever made use of sed (stream editor) you’re missing out on a great automation utility. I’ve saved myself probably 20 hours of manual editing with about an hour of work TWICE today. Here’s how…. over on the North Carolina Genealogy site I was opening forums for each county in the state of North Carolina (100 counties.) Now, I could have gone through and typed out a description, slug (address) and name for each one, but that looked too tedious. So…
Tag: SO
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Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon coming
The release date for the 7.10 Ubuntu release is coming soon. I’ve installed a beta into a virtual machine to see what’s what and so far haven’t had much time to play around. I seem to recall the localization question being new in the installer, but then it’s been a while since I used the ubiquity installer (used the alternative install to setup software raid based systems.) But… other than that I haven’t poked around with it much. However, I have read that the 8.04 (April 2008) release will be codenamed Hardy Heron and will be a long term service (LTS) version. I’m MORE interested in that given that I have one server running the previous LTS release 6.06 dapper drake. I’ll be interested in upgrading it to a newer LTS EVENTUALLY, but I don’t know if I’ll jump for the upcoming April release or wait… but I did find some promising instructions for upgrading to Fiesty (7.04). It’s good to see that kind of detailed how-to as opposed to just an upgrade option on the cd so you can do it from within the OS.
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Offline web browsing script
In the US and Europe and many more developed parts of the world we take our internet connectivity these days for granted. (And some go into panic attacks when it’s not available…) In some parts of the world though internet connections are not as wide/broad and peak usage times can make for very slow viewing, or can interfere with other vital communications. Linux excels at SO many things and this is something we could use linux to help with…
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Flashing bios pain in the neck….
One of the “project machines” I’ve had that’s been retired from other service was to become a “storage server” this week. The twin 250GB drives had arrived and I was ready to setup a RAID1 array (mirroring essentially…) in software and use Ubuntu 6.06 as the base operating system. I had already wiped the other drive and removed the drive, plugged in the new ones (master on the primary and secondary channels) and…. BIOS only reads 136GB. Shoot…. it was a relatively recent system (maybe 3 years…) SO…. BIOS update was my best bet I thought.
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The pendulum swings… looking at Audio hardware
I’m such a sucker for technology sometimes…. I’m into too many things it seems. I do computer repair which can keep things fairly busy, I keep up with this and a slew of other websites which is another job in itself. (Not to mention the genealogy hobby (or addiction/affliction?)) We’re fairly involved at Church… and then there is piano and music. I’ve been teaching piano now for about 9 years which is hard to believe in itself and over that time other obligations have taken their share of time, but now the pendulum is swinging back where I’m really getting in more time to try to improve my playing in one particular area. Towards that end I wanted to get some recordings of a few other pianists to dissect their approaches….. well, that’s taken me to another place – audio hardware.
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Vista’s fatal flaw?
Backwards compatibility. It’s something that many vendors strive for and Microsoft is certainly one that has placed a value on making things backwards compatible for third party software. According to this story at Sci-Tech Today, Symantec thinks this eagerness to be backwards compatible may be a big issue for Vista’s security. They expect several “privilige escalation” vulnerabilities to be found and say that if those such vulnerabilities are discovered in the prompt for user consent…. well essentially all of the systems security precautions could be undermined. The whitepaper on the details talks about several issues that have been patched at this stage in the Vista development process, but the main question is how many are out there?
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Network Security – so https and ssh are immune to arp spoofing right?
When a machine has been arp spoofed, ALL network traffic from it is likely passing through a “hostile” machine. So, NO, https and ssh traffic is not immune, it is travelling through a hostile machine. However, it should be encrypted. There are a few exceptions though. SSH version 1 is a broken encryption scheme and should be avoided like the plague. As far as I know SSH 2 should be safe. Pay attention to complaints about the host identification not being able to be verified….