Removing wine menu entries and file associations on Ubuntu
Posted: 20 September 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »From the Wine FAQ, this works for me on Ubuntu Lucid, using Wine 1.2.2:
rm -f $HOME/.config/menus/applications-merged/wine*
rm -rf $HOME/.local/share/applications/wine
rm -f $HOME/.local/share/desktop-directories/wine*
rm -f $HOME/.local/share/icons/????_*.{xpm,png}
rm -f $HOME/.local/share/icons/*-x-wine-*.{xpm,png}
And the file associations:
rm -f $HOME/local/share/applications/wine-extension-*
Finally, if you’d like to remove installed Wine applications entirely for a single user, say, yourself:
rm -rf $HOME/.wine
Life insurers deciding whether to use tracked Web data
Posted: 29 August 2011 Filed under: privacy | Tags: privacy, user tracking Leave a comment »Interesting. So apparently I missed that life insurers are looking at using tracked Web data (such as that collected by Acxiom) to evaluate whether or not to insure people. Of course Acxiom says that it “wouldn’t” share this info with insurers, but it makes more sense to me that they would follow the money instead, changing their rules if necessary.
Acxiom recently told investors it takes in three billion pieces of information daily as businesses seek to “monetize” information about their customers. Some retailers share information about purchases made by people, including item description, price and the person’s name.
Increasingly, information comes from people’s online behavior. Acxiom says it buys data from online publishers about what kinds of articles a subscriber reads—financial or sports, for example—and can find out if somebody’s a gourmet-food lover from their online purchases. Online marketers often tap data sources like these to target ads at Web users.
Wikileaks: Microsoft speaks out against Open Source in Thailand
Posted: 26 August 2011 Filed under: open source 2 Comments »A view behind the curtain — this is what it looks like when the State Department helps to promote proprietary software. From a Wikileaks cable:
Microsoft-Thailand’s Corporate Affairs Director identified software copyrights as a big issue. On the one hand, he praised the Thai government (RTG) for strengthening its IPR enforcement and education efforts, and said Microsoft was “very pleased” that Thailand’s software piracy rate has decreased by two percent a year since 2006. On the other hand, he expressed concern over the RTG’s Creative Economy policy of promoting the “open source” software model over the “commercial source” model as a means to curb piracy.
I guess I’m confused. Wouldn’t promoting open source be an excellent way to combat piracy?
Passwords are like underwear
Posted: 25 August 2011 Filed under: security | Tags: security 1 Comment »Have you ever heard the saying, “passwords are like underwear?” Yep. That’s because
- you shouldn’t leave them lying around;
- you should change them often; and
- it’s best if you don’t share them with your friends.
You’ve heard the advice about choosing good passwords. They should be long — like sixteen characters (!) — contain at least one number, a mixture of capitals and lowercase, and at least one symbol. They shouldn’t contain the name of your pet or loved one, or the date of your anniversary of starting at your place of employment, et cetera.
Then there’s the other bits of advice. For one thing, you’re supposed to use different passwords for different accounts. Your Yahoo e-mail password should never be the same as your bank password, for example.
Also, you’re not supposed to write out your password and put it on a piece of paper in your drawer, or worse, on a sticky note on your monitor.
So, you might ask, “If they tell me to make my passwords basically unreadable and difficult to memorize, change them every 45 days or so, use different passwords for everything I ever sign up for, and never write any of them down in a visible place, will I be spending my life memorizing and creating passwords?”
The answer is… yes, you will.
At present I have over 400 passwords, and actively use maybe twenty or thirty of those. How am I supposed to remember all of them?
The answer: I don’t. I use a password manager to keep all my passwords in one place, and keep them secure. I have created a strong password to protect that database, so I don’t have to remember 400 passwords, I just have to remember one.
Try this out. I can recommend several good utilities if you’re interested.
I personally like KeePass Password Safe. This generates secure passwords for me and allows me to categorize them in an encrypted database. I synchronize that password database between several different computers by saving it in my Dropbox. Dropbox gives you a synchronized folder. When you save files to your Dropbox folder, you can access any of those files, from any of your devices. You can install a 2GB Dropbox for free from https://www.dropbox.com/ (or get an extra 250MB by using my Dropbox referral link).
A buddy of mine at work recommends RoboForm, and has used it for years with success. They have a Pro version (very affordable at $9.95 for unlimited devices), or a free trial you can use. I heard from her recently that with your purchase, they also offer a sync service, which you can use to keep all your passwords synchronized between different devices.
Another friend of mine likes LastPass, the online password manager and form filler. You’ve no doubt heard about their widely publicized security breach earlier this year. However they appear to have remedied the issue quite promptly, and to have learned from the issue.
Swedish Man caught splitting atoms in his home
Posted: 3 August 2011 Filed under: productivity | Tags: security, wow Leave a comment »"Richard Handl told The Associated Press that he had the radioactive elements radium, americium and uranium in his apartment in southern Sweden when police showed up and arrested him on charges of unauthorized possession of nuclear material."
Which directories were archived? Command-line
Posted: 27 July 2011 Filed under: productivity | Tags: command line, linux Leave a comment »I archived a directory. It took two hours, then exited with a non-zero exit status (that means an error). Hmm — I was just testing something; I only cared if certain specific subdirectories were present in the archive. So I needed a way to look deep inside, quickly, and find those particular directories.
GNU tar will let you “test” an archive with -t, but I only wanted a list of the directories archived. Then I wanted that sorted. So…
$ nice tar -tjvf data.tar.bz2 | tr -s ' ' | cut -d' ' -f 6- | cut -d / -f -2 > tardirs.txt
$ uniq tardirs.txt > tardirs_uniq.txt
$ sort tardirs_uniq.txt > tardirs_uniq_sorted.txt
The -tjvf arguments to tar let you look inside, the “tr” command collapses adjacent spaces so that the first “cut” command will output only the sixth (file) field, and the second “cut” command will reduce a directory like “folder/folder/folder/fun.txt” to “folder/folder.” Then “uniq” will remove non-unique names.
Ignoring Ubuntu Upstart for System V compatibility
Posted: 21 July 2011 Filed under: system administration, ubuntu 2 Comments »If you’d like to start an Ubuntu service using the System V-compatible runlevels, use “update-rc.d.” For example:
# update-rc.d ssh defaults
update-rc.d: warning: ssh stop runlevel arguments (0 1 6) do not match LSB Default-Stop values (none)
Adding system startup for /etc/init.d/ssh ...
/etc/rc0.d/K20ssh -> ../init.d/ssh
/etc/rc1.d/K20ssh -> ../init.d/ssh
/etc/rc6.d/K20ssh -> ../init.d/ssh
/etc/rc2.d/S20ssh -> ../init.d/ssh
/etc/rc3.d/S20ssh -> ../init.d/ssh
/etc/rc4.d/S20ssh -> ../init.d/ssh
/etc/rc5.d/S20ssh -> ../init.d/ssh
Alternating row backgrounds / conditional formatting in OpenOffice.org
Posted: 26 May 2011 Filed under: open source, productivity | Tags: openoffice.org 3 Comments »Have you put together an OpenOffice.org table in OpenOffice.org Calc, and wanted to display alternating backgrounds for easy reading? Well, there’s an easy way to do it.
Row backgrounds alternating white and gray 10%
The steps are:
- Create a style for every other row and call it “Even rows.” Make its background “Gray 10%,” or whatever other color and attributes you prefer.
- In your spreadsheet, select the range of rows you’d like to format.
- In the Format menu, click “Conditional Formatting…”.
- Choose “Formula is” in the first dropdown.
- For the condition itself, enter the formula
ISEVEN(ROW()). This formula tests if the current row in question is even or not. If it is, the condition is met and your style is applied. - For Cell Style, select the style you created back in Step 1.
- Click OK. There you go.
Your formula should look like this.
Google Datacenter Security
Posted: 26 April 2011 Filed under: security, system administration | Tags: security Leave a comment »Just saw what basically amounts to a marketing video for Google’s Apps customers, discussing some of the features of their datacenters. They’ve put more thought than you’d expect for these facilities, specifically the “sustainability” aspect — which may involve a little bit of greenwashing, but I suppose it’s a start. To recap:
- Physical barriers and perimeter fencing
- 24/7 security (I bet they have free coffee!)
- Access control with badging and biometrics (such as retinal scans)
- Local law enforcement response
- Video monitoring and “video analytics” (motion and object detection, or video tracking)
- Data protection (encryption would have prevented HealthNet’s embarrassing incident, their second in two years)
- File fragmentation, replication and storage (including “sharding” to increase data security)
- Hard drive lifecycle management (how they destroy drives with a crusher and recycle the pieces)
- Fire detection and suppression
A drive crusher: 
SSH postponed authentication (publickey)
Posted: 25 January 2011 Filed under: security | Tags: security Leave a comment »An interesting syslog message!
sshd[xxx]: 'Postponed publickey for oracle from ::ffff:130.156.249.64 port 9264 ssh2'
As Tom explains,
ssh is just stepping through the client-configured authentication types (enabled in either ssh_config or ~/.ssh/config) and trying them in turn, but acknowledging that a publickey was presented, and postponing its use until after trying the first auth type.
