Technical Stuff

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/linux-infection-proves-windows-malware-monopoly-is-over/2206?tag=content;feature-roto That is right.  This zdnet guy has once an for all proved that M$ is just as secure as Linux.  That's right you read it here, and I completely agree. I mean everyone knows that the 3rd party package in question is a fundamental piece of Linux.  That this freeware IRC server could be compromised 8 months ago and then installed on a Linux box just shows that software can been modified to have a back door.  And clearly this is the same thing as the vendor provided web browser in Microsoft being poorly designed and integrated into the OS in such a tight knit fashion that simple web surfing exploits own the machine. Now that I know this, I'll be stopping by Best Buy on the way home to purchase Windows 7 to replace my Linux installations and finally have the kind of security that I've always dreamed.

 Stolen from: http://lifehacker.com/5557424/make-misspellings-stand-out-even-more-in-firefoxs-spell-check?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+lifehacker%2Ffull+%28Lifehacker%29 Enter About:config in the Firefox address bar. If it pops up an alert, tell it that you know what you're doing and proceed. Search for ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle . If you find anything, skip to step 5. If your system is like mine, you found nothing. That means you have to add this configuration value. Right-click the main portion of the window and select New > Integer . Now, enter ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle to create a setting by this name. Now you can set the value of this setting to one of several options: 0 for no highlighting, 1 for a dotted line, 2 for long dots, 3 for a single straight line, 4 for a double underline (like you see above – that's my pick), and 5 for a squiggly line, which is the default.  Cool.  The double lin...

I'm working on building my new Fedora 13 laptop (Studio XPS 16 which is awesomely fast) Anyway, in trying to de-duplicate a lot of files that I have spread across my old Fedora server and Mac Mini. The worst offenders are my MP3 files that I've downloaded and in many cases imported into iTunes.  So I've been using locate and xargs to compare file sizes and make sure I have 1 good copy of every MP3. Many songs have special punctuation like "'" in them which causes xargs problems.  But since I'm using locate and not find, I had to replace newlines with NULL (\0). Here's a quick little hack for that. locate -i "ring of fire" | perl -e 'while (<STDIN> ) { chomp $_; print $_ . "\0" }' | xargs -0 -I {} ls -l {}

Newer versions of Gnome seem to lack a quick link to window control.  Namely, window focus.  Blame too many years of twm and X11, because I love the focus to follow the mouse.  I even run xmouse or whatever under winblows. In fedora 13, I installed gconf-editor with yum and then ran the utility. Under /apps/metacity/general there is an option for focus_mode.  Setting it to "mouse" makes the world just a little bit happier.

I am finally going to upgrade trusty 8200 Dell Inspiron laptop.   I bought it back in 2002 or 2003 and thanks to maximizing the RAM and Linux I've been able to use it for years.  I'm going to miss the 15" 1600x1200 screen that it had. Thanks to HD TV high resolution screens are a thing of the past, and getting high resolution on a small (~15") screen is all but impossible ( HDTV Ruined LCDs ).  However, I did manage to find the Dell Studio 16 XPS with 1920x1080 resolution. Ordered components for new laptop 1 224-6716 Studio XPS 16 Notebook 1 317-2361 Intel Core i7 720QM 1.6GHz (2.8 GHz Turbo Mode, 6MB Cache) 1 317-2366 8GB, DDR3, 1333MHz 2 Dimm 1 320-8330 15.6 inch Wide Screen 16:9 1080p Full HD WLED LCD, W/2.0 MP, XPS 1645 1 421-1010 Dell Webcam Central v1.4 1 421-0188 Facial Recognition 1 320-8350 ATI Mobility RADEON HD 4670 1GB 1 330-5460 DELL RESOURCE DVD,BACK-UP,XPS 1645 1 341-8989 500GB 7200RPM Free Fall SensorSeagate Hard Drive 1 320-8351 ...

Always being a wanna-be programmer, I'm only now learning development tools. Subversion is cool in itself, but when I was just starting with it a few months ago I wasn't googling tags correctly and only found parts about how cvs tags didn't work. Inspired today, I decided to search again and found the right information this time. For me a compressed tag with date, rev #, and id are good enough.  So all I had to do to get this working was to add a line in my PERL script under a comment: $Id$ and then change the svn property for the affected files with: svn propset svn:keywords Id lib/* now when I commit files, they automatically get updated with the latest tag. There are other more useful settings but this was my little discovery for today.  Since I'm forced to work under winblows and that means I have to use Cygwin to be productive at all, I haven't explored how to make this the default yet.

The team captain for one of my hockey teams sent out the playoff schedule.  Unfortunately whatever method he used to forward the message, attached the original message in a raw mbox format.  Because it contained an attached m$ word document, it arrived at my Gmail inbox in base64 MIME format and Goggle didn't parse the attachment. Luckily, openssl has base64 encoding built in and with a little massaging I was able to decode the playoff schedule. First, save the raw attachment.  Delete all the lines before the actual base64 code.  Delete all of the lines after the base64 code.  Hint: don't even save the base64 header information. Next, tell openssl to decode that file: openssl base64 -d -in srcfile -out sched.doc