Mon, 29 Nov 2004
SXIP Single Sign-on
I've heard the name SXIP (pronounced
'skip') mentioned on a couple of different privacy forums (and in the
Web2.0 coverage) and decided to have a closer look at what it provides. The
short version, I promise!, is that SXIP wants to be a single sign-on
provider and help with filling out forms based upon your chosen
persona.
For the longer version of the who, what and how I'd suggest first listening to the IT Conversations SXIP show and then spending five minutes with the SXIP Demo. After a whirlwind play I've decided that I like the 'Activity Log' page (and the SXIP In and SXIP This metaphors are just corny; but in a good way) but I'd also like to be able to click through and see what information I provided to a page using SXIP. On a more positive note the interface to autofill forms is both clean and intuitive.
My verdict? It is interesting but it has the chicken and the egg problem, I won't delve too far in until everyone else does. Oh and the page seems to redirect a lot in the background when you authenticate, considering all the phishing that goes on these days that may alarm people.
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Posted: 2004/11/29 11:58 | /sites | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 27 Nov 2004
Land-mining Servers
Heres the shell of an idea I've been mulling over recently, we all know
that compilers on server are bad don't we? The common wisdom (and this
is often disputed by people who use source based systems) is that people
shouldn't be compiling up new versions of software on the production
servers. By omitting the compiler suite and required header files you force
compilation to occur elsewhere.
The second reason, and I'm not so sure about how current this is, is that you deny an attacker an easy way of hiding their tracks. By leaving applications like GCC off the servers you force them to precompile rootkits and trojans to suit your system. This is where having a diverse operating system ecosystem pays dividends.
So ignoring all the special cases and caveats lets put those two basic facts together:
- Legitimate users shouldn't be compiling on servers.
- Attackers will attempt to use any compilers installed on the server.
So lets trojan GCC or something else essential in the tool-chain. Having complete access to tinker with everything is, after all, the defenders main advantage. So what do we actually want it to do? The low hanging fruit would be to send an alert (via pager / mobile phone and syslog) so we know that either the procedure has been broken or the system is under attack.
While being notified is the bare minimum we should strive for we may want to take it even further with some automated defences. To me there are two obvious approaches, firstly we can either kick them off and lock out the connecting IP address, which runs the risk of leaving the server open to either a DoS or that the cracker can re-exploit the same hole they previously used to regain access.
The other approach is to tinker with the tool-chain and ensure that it doesn't generate correct binaries. Maybe forcing it to cross-compile to a Power-PC format instead of X86. What does this gain us? At the least it will stop them compiling and then using their collection of tools to screw the system while letting them think they have working tools; this has the side effect of breaking some autorooters and raising the barrier of entry. If we are lucky they will be unskilled and either leave the server or spend enough time trying to get them working that the response team can catch or kick them.
Lastly, and this one requires the most prior planning, it would be possible using either existing honey-net applications or custom code to send the source to another more secure machine (such as a loghost) for future analysis.
This is more a brain dump than an actual plan of action but I do think it's worth considering. Especially if your production servers are all managed in batches.
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Posted: 2004/11/27 14:09 | /security/tools | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Simple Link Information -- Short Script
I've added a short Perl script called linksinfo to the miniprojects page.
When invoked with an absolute URL it will parse through the HTML and pull out links.
The text in each href tag will then be displayed. If you use a '-l' then it
will also display the target of the link.
Why?: This is the first of a couple of scripts I'm writing to help maintain certain meta-data about a website I'm responsible for.
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Posted: 2004/11/27 13:39 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
A Grand Don't Come For Free -- The Streets
I dislike most modern music (I'm 24 and I'm turning into my
grandfather!) but a couple of songs from The Streets last album were good
so I decided to give their second a chance; very wise choice.
The songs themselves cover a pretty diverse area, from the upbeat backing of "Fit but you know it" to the down trodden lyrics of "Dry Your Eyes" the CD contains a number of little gems. What really hooked me on the album was the fact that all the tracks fit together. If you listen to the album from start to end each song adds to the overall story. It's something I've not heard done before and combined with Mike Skinners sharp and occasionally witty lyrics its managed to worm its way into my very short top albums of the year list.
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Posted: 2004/11/27 11:47 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Preview Google Ads For Your Site
For one of the projects I'm working on I needed to see which type of ads
Google would choose to bestow on certain pages. A co-worker pointed me at
Try Before You
Sell at the (unofficial) Google Weblog. While this is quite handy (and
easy to use in a bookmarklet) I did find it a little cumbersome.
So filled with the drive of an early morning and bacon sandwiches I decided to put together a right click extension for IE. But after a quick search it seems Google have beaten me to it with the AdSense Preview Tool. While it's not perfect, no uninstall mechanism beyond editing the registry by hand, it does give a nice window full of information for the current page.
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Posted: 2004/11/27 11:25 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 23 Nov 2004
RADIUS Servers -- A cast of... well two.
In my quest to learn how RADIUS works and the correct way of running my own
server I picked up both the O'Reilly RADIUS book and
GNU RADIUS, A Reference Manual. Neither of which are exactly
ground breaking books.
Now I've almost finished the O'Reilly book I thought it would be a good time to get my hands dirty and have a play, so I looked at XT RADIUS; which hasn't been updated since very early in 2002. Then I looked at Cistron RADIUS, which is in a slightly better state as it still has bug fixes made for it but no active development of new features. And then I tried to look at PerlRADIUS which doesn't even seem to have a valid home page these days!
So the point of this post? If you have stumbled upon this blog via my previous RADIUS posts (as my logs indicate a number of you have!) I'd suggest looking at FreeRADIUS or GNU RADIUS. I'll probably post at a later date about my experiences with these and which one I've adopted as my own implementation of choice.
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Posted: 2004/11/23 22:47 | /security/tools | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 22 Nov 2004
Radius: Securing Public Access to Private Resources
I read a lot of books, some of them are inspiring, entertaining and
relevant. Some are dull, overly terse and yet still useful; The O'Reilly Radius book is more akin to
bad dental surgery.
What really annoys me is that I can't think of a better way of presenting such as dry topic, the book provides detailed coverage that is just as easy to read and understand (and as fascinating) as the original RFC version. It then introduces the basic uses of FreeRadius.
If you need to learn about RADIUS I'd suggest the RFCs and the man pages that come with your server instead of this title; and spend the saved money on caffeine, you may well need it!
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Posted: 2004/11/22 23:02 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Test::URI -- Running out of things I can't test!
If you are not already subscribed then it may well be worth subscribing to
the CPAN
RSS feed. It's very easy to let little gems like Test::URI slip through.
The downside of course is that I am slowly running out of things I can't test!
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Posted: 2004/11/22 22:53 | /perl | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 21 Nov 2004
GLLUG Needs You!
GLLUG, the Greater London Linux User Group, had a user meeting yesterday.
It had about twenty people turn up. While this may not seem too bad this is
a group that has peaked at 120 people at a single meeting and had a
thriving mailing list.
After the three main talks the GLLUG admin team, and a few bystanders (including me), had a chat about what we can do in the future to try and reverse the trend of diminishing numbers. While the topic of the groups use as Linux becomes easier, mainstream and better supported will have to wait for another post in the short term we decided to go for:
People owning a certain task for a specified meeting date, this way everyone knows ho should be doing what. If the person can't o it then the responsibility can be reassigned. This also means that the the entire team doesn't have to get involved in every meet.
Sponsorship to help cover the costs of speakers travel. GLLUG doesn't charge an entrance fee so it has no money of its own. Certain speakers, who don't mind giving up a Saturday of their own time, are rightly dubious about paying their own travel expenses to come into London for the day, the fees should be pretty small per meeting so if we can cover these the realm of potential speakers available to us opens up.
Less passive and more active meetings. GLLUG has a number of talks in one room and a lab available to help people who have specific questions by running through the tasks with them. One of the desirables that came out from the meeting is that people would like to see workshops / hand on tutorials in addition to the talks. If these happen on the same day or different ones is still open to discussion.
Oh yeah, I'm in charge of the March meeting so if you are a London based Linux person I'd appreciate your attendance. Details of the speakers and a confirmed date will be available by the end of February. Honest!
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Posted: 2004/11/21 14:08 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 19 Nov 2004
Find Duplicate Filenames -- Short Script
I've added a new script to the Unixdaemon Miniprojects Page. This short chunk of shell and awk,
imaginatively named
Find Duplicate Filenames, does
exactly what you'd expect. It scans the mounted file systems and
prints a list of files and the number of times each name (with the path
part stripped) was found.
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Posted: 2004/11/19 00:15 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 18 Nov 2004
Poland Helps Halt EU Patents
As many of my incredibly intelligent, talented and loyal readers will
already know the European Union and the asshats lobbying for it are trying
to get Patents bought in. Apparently the economy and IT industry haven't
had enough problems recently so they'd like to add a new, all-encompassing
one.
As you may gather I'm not a huge fan of patents and I'd hate to see Europe adopt them, something which has come way too close to happening a number of times; but now we have Poland!
The Polish government, my new best friends, have withdrawn their support from the European software patent directive and helped (hopefully) to torpedo its introduction.
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Posted: 2004/11/18 23:11 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 15 Nov 2004
ch{mod,grp,own} --reference=file
It never fails to surprise me how I can use a program almost every day
and yet still stumble on to previously undiscovered options.
Yesterday I discovered the '--reference=file' option while reading the
manpage for chmod. When used this option takes the current permissions of
the specified file and applies them to the other files specified on the
command line. It's also accepted by chgrp and chown.
Note: If you're going to use this in production please consider the potential race condition.
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Posted: 2004/11/15 23:46 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 14 Nov 2004
The BileBlog -- What Every Community Needs
I love The Bile Blog, it captures the crude yet funny
humour that way too many geek / techie hangouts no longer contain. For
those of you that have never been lucky enough to stumble upon it the aim
is to provide a public mocking for stupid projects, ideas and even
people.
Every community needs one of these.
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Posted: 2004/11/14 19:40 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 13 Nov 2004
My (Tech) Reading List
I go through a lot of books, after looking at my reading pile recently I
realised something has changed in my reading habits, I don't get through
entire books anymore. I just seem to get through the first half, know
enough to muddle through and then get on with that ever I needed the
knowledge for.
So in an attempt to start clearing the pending pile I'm going to focus on a batch of books at a time. My reading list for the next couple of months is going to be limited to the following:
- Radius
- Hardening Apache
- Kerberos The Definitive Guide
- Postfix The Definitive Guide
- Threat Modelling
- Programming Ruby (2nd Edition)
- LDAP System Administration
- Managing Raid on Linux
- Linux Security Cookbook
- Building Secure Servers with Linux
- Network Security Hacks
- Windows Forensics and Incident Recovery
- DNS on Windows Server 2003
If I need a small amount of knowledge on a subject I'll either use an O'Reilly Hacks book, Cookbooks or go back to the all-knowing Google.
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Posted: 2004/11/13 13:56 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 12 Nov 2004
Installing FireFox Extensions
One of FireFox's best features is it's community of developers and the
third party extensions they create. While it's always been pretty easy
to install these, over time, this mechanism has grown to be more secure
and less user friendly; a common trade-off. The checks it made (for
example you could only install new extensions from certain sites by
default) were rational they forced people to either download and
install or dig around in the Options screens until they found the
correct settings.
With the release of version 1.0 the process has become a lot simpler. If you try and install an extension from a site that isn't in the current list of acceptable download sites a bar pops up under the toolbars and explains what's happening. On the far right is an "Edit Options..." button. If you click this then the 'Allowed Sites' dialog box appears with the URL already entered. All you need to do is think about the consequences and either hit allow or cancel. And it doesn't need a restart.
Well I was impressed.
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Posted: 2004/11/12 20:42 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Upgrading to FireFox 1.0 -- Extension Updating
I've just upgraded my main machines web browser to FireFox 1.0 and I was
pleasantly surprised by its ability to upgrade some of the third party
extensions I use. While I've historically bitched about the changes in the
extension mechanisms and packages it seems that all the pain was for a
good reason.
On the first run of the new version I was shown the extensions that wouldn't work and then prompted to search for upgraded versions. Twenty seconds later and over 75% of them (I use some very old extensions that have had development stopped as better solutions became available) were upgraded and working nicely. Very impressive.
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Posted: 2004/11/12 20:42 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Code Brews -- Time to 'borrow' an Idea
Over at Longhorn blogs Bill Evjen has posted an entry
about Code Brews, an event where a small group of techs
meet up and, by the sound of it, have a cross between a show and tell
and a number of short tutorials. I have to say I'm very jealous.
Now that I'm working as a full time sysadmin I don't get to spend any real time writing code so just to keep my hand in I read a number of developers blogs to keep abreast of the emerging ideas. I think Code Brews would be an excellent way to combine good company and neat tech into a single night while actually learning something without the grief of having to start from scratch on your own.
Maybe it's time to look at Skype / VNC / Video conferencing and doing this kind of thing remotely.
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Posted: 2004/11/12 20:42 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wrong Numbers are Never Engaged.
If you don't believe me then pick ten random numbers from a phone book and
try it for yourself!
I don't like phones, despite the fact I now have four in my life, work mobile, personal mobile, home phone and work desk phone, I don't think they add anything to my life; instead I think they make it worse.
My home phone isn't plugged in, it (and the line) are there for external calls because it's cheaper to pay for the calls and the line than it would be for making the same calls via a mobile. Now on to my personal mobile, I have this with me most of the time but it comes with a lovely feature called vibrate (and not in that way...). My friends can call me when ever and if I'm asleep or busy I can ignore it without disturbing anyone else. And then easily see who I missed.
My work phone is a Treo phone/PDA combination and, while being quite bulky, has a permanent GPRS Internet connection. It's great to have (the company pay for the calls ;)), it lets me have Net (and by extension SSH and Terminal Services) access from almost anywhere and has a killer feature, almost no one has the number for it!.
And now on the phone that drives me nuts, my desk phone in the office. It rings when someone tries to call me. Considering most of my work is mental and requires at least a little concentration this is a bigger annoyance than you may think. But not only that, it rings when someone calls ANYONE ELSE in the company and they either don't answer or they have busy lines.
When you actually think about it phones are amazingly rude, they sit there and make noise until you pay them immediate attention. If you ignore it then you either drive other people nuts or you get a little 'chat' on why professionalism requires you to answer your phone. Note for the world: first person to raise this issue with me will never dance again.
So if phones are inventions of the devil what's the solution? For me it's email. It's non-intrusive, it gives you an audit trail (never underestimate this one!) and you can respond to them with the attention they deserve, when your schedule permits. Phones... BAH!
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Posted: 2004/11/12 00:16 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
KT Tunstall -- False Alarm EP
I made some noise on the subject of the great KT Tunstall on Jools Holland
appearance a little while ago. After spending some time looking around I've
finally managed to get my hands on her False Alarm EP.
The CD contains four tracks, False Alarm, Heal Over, Miniature Disasters and Throw me a rope. While the first two are respectable songs in their own rights the latter two are an excellent taster of the album to come (in December now, allegedly due to a family of mice in the printing facility...).
Miniature Disasters is my favourite song of the four, upbeat backing with great vocals (which reminded me a lot of Stings work from about two years ago) and well worth the cost of the EP on it's own. The last track, Throw me a rope, is a good showcase for the singers voice as well as a touching song in it's own right.
I think the EP release was a great idea, it provides an accessible, and quite cheap, intro to the singers style and abilities. Now to book a ticket for her ICA gig...
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Posted: 2004/11/12 00:00 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 10 Nov 2004
Google FireFox Home Page
If you've not yet seen Googles
FireFox home page then it's worth a look. I'm not sure why they've
decided to do it but as a big FireFox fan I'm just
happy to see it get more coverage. It's a shame that they've not replaced
the front page for a couple of days to really spread the word.
It's also worth noting that a number of plugins don't work correctly with the newly released FireFox 1, if you have any that you constantly use it's well worth installing the new version side-by-side with your current version for testing. Hopefully with the new version 1 release this should become a rarity and the plugin installer should settle down.
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Posted: 2004/11/10 00:20 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 05 Nov 2004
Visualising del.icio.us Bookmarks with extisp.icio.us
Frequent readers of this site will know that I really like del.icio.us,
it's become one of my near daily tools and, thanks to the API, it's become
a lead generator for me. While it's interesting to find people with similar
interests to you it can be a lot of very tedious work to get a good
overview of someone's interests and see if they mesh with your own;
enter extisp.icio.us.
This online application generates a visual representation of the tags you use and increases the font size in proportion to the number of links you have in a certain tag. To show it in action have here is my own dwilson del.icio.us bookmarks. Pretty easy to see where my interests are focused isn't it! While this isn't exactly a world changing tool it does it's one job well.
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Posted: 2004/11/05 00:17 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 04 Nov 2004
The Tao Of Motivation -- Quick Book Review
I'm currently doing two short evening courses, ten weeks each, and on the
reading list for one of them is The Tao Of Motivation. This isn't my usual type of book,
while my reading list is pretty diverse I would typically only read a book
like this for the humour value.
The book explores some of the basic principles of motivation including how to deliver praise, (very basic) NLP and visualisation. These are covered, in no great depth, against the backdrop of a man named Alex who is on the out of his company because he lacks motivational skills. While the coverage is very shallow it is quite broad and provides a number of interesting points to think about.
The other aspect of the book that obtained my attention is the number of small errors that crept into the last thirty or so pages. The first two thirds of the book are actually very tightly edited but the last section suffers from what I assume is simply a lack of reviewers; the errors are not exactly subtle and should have been caught.
How much did I get from this book? I guess I'll know in a couple of months time when I've had a chance to work through its principles 'in the field'.
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Posted: 2004/11/04 23:48 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 02 Nov 2004
Unixdaemon (and blog) Google Site Search
Using the very excellent Blosxom
Google Site Search plugin I've added a Google search box to the left
hand column. The search itself will only return results for the
blog.unixdaemon.net and www.unixdaemon.net domains (assuming the "Search
Unixdaemon.net" option is selected). This is a new addition so there may be
a few teething problems for the first few days.
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Posted: 2004/11/02 23:56 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Debian Packages via Bittorrent
Arnaud Kyheng, a very bad man (but in a good way :)) has released an early
version of Apt-Torrent. I'm not sure why but this seems like a
madcap idea to me. The basic principles behind it, take the load away from
the generous hosted main sites and distribute it a little, are sound and
valid but it just seems odd to me. Still I feel the need to give it a
twirl.
Update: In the email based discussions I've had with people about this the one killer issue seems to be the security issue of down-loading packages from random sites. This is a false problem, the tracker (which contains the package data and checksums) can be hosted on a trusted site, if you don't trust the Debian servers why are you using the distribution, this way any packages you download can be verified against a known good baseline.
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Posted: 2004/11/02 22:01 | /operatingsystems/linux | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Books, Early chapters and Wheel Reinvention
How many books for beginners exist for your programming language
/technology of choice? I'm assuming that if you are reading this site
you are a tech of some description and so have some exposure to coding,
if not stay with me ;) How many times, and in slightly different ways,
has the same basic introduction to Perl, Python, TCP, Linux or Java been
written? Now include the how-tos, on-line articles and tutorials. I'd guess
a lot.
With the invention of the Creative Commons license you can now choose to distribute your own work under a relaxed set of rules. For example you can allow full use except for commercial purposes, permit your work to be published any ware but restrict modifications etc.
I'm going to go off on a tangent for a couple of second. Most publishers (in the tech world at least) put a sample chapter books online to drive up interest in the book. Now I'm going to make an assumption and say that this can't actually hurt the sale of the book otherwise they wouldn't do it.
Now I've thrown that into the mix lets combine the two ideas. A publisher puts the first chapter of their beginning books online under a Creative Commons license, the exact one can vary based upon how altruistic they are, putting this chapter online has cost them nothing more than it would to put it up as usual. This is where it gets interesting; to me at least.
The people writing the books, articles and how-tos can now draw upon the professionally edited chapter to add a beginning to their own work, this saves them the effort of re-inventing the wheel and providing yet another intro chapter. From the publishers angle they get some extra (and free) PR from people reading any of the resources that use the chapter. If the chapter is actually good quality then people will read it and hopefully go and buy the book.
O'Reilly has a service called Safari that allows college tutors to pull together material for their students, imagine the gain that could be made from opening a few sample chapters like this. Even with just the basic details of TCP/IP the number of sysadmin how-tos, networking guides and network programming books that could reuse the work is staggering.
Does this idea have holes in it? Yep. Does it warrant thinking about? I think so.
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Posted: 2004/11/02 21:35 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
The Nature of the Beast: Sysadmins
While I'm in this navel gazing mood (which shouldn't last very long) I
thought I'd say a little bit about the oddness of being a system admin in a
corporate environment; it might be the same in academia but I've never done
that.
Firstly you have the contradictions, in most companies, and heavily so in a small team/company, you are supposed to be open and approachable. But you also have to manage your time, their requests and the sanctity of the live environment. Saying 'no' a lot doesn't make you very popular. It is also this last one that causes the most grief, ensuring the service is running correctly becomes your responsibility. You have to become seriously paranoid, pessimistic and suspicious about any changes that need to be made while also understanding that the system is there for a reason; to be used.
I've mostly had this discussion with management and developers, the quality assurance team normally provide some support, once you've had a failure and 'requested' that whoever wants the change added is present for as long as you are things typically get better. For a while anyway.
Something that also deserves a mention is the sheer agony of joining a new company where not everything is perfect, or as we call it, all of them! You have to be prepared for everything to go wrong. Inconsistent naming, multiple copies of config files (and of course you need to edit the one in the non-standard location), lack of documentation and being expected to work at the same speed as the people that have built the system all add up and combine with the paranoia, pessimism and defensive instinct.
Being a good sysadmin and a well balanced person seem to be mutually exclusive goals. No wonder there are so many social groups for geeks, not only do we need to escape from the server room but we need to socialise with 'our own kind' ;)
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Posted: 2004/11/02 21:13 | /career | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Drive, Motivation and Restlessness
"You described them as teenagers."
"But I don't think teenagers are the way they are because of their age. It's
because they have nothing to lose. They simultaneously have a lot of time on
their hands and yet are very impatient to get on with their lives."
Quote: Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon
This is an odd thing to post about online, especially considering that this is a public blog and that I know at least two of my co-workers read this site on a semi-regular basis, but I need to get this off my chest and see where it leads me; and it's my site dammit! I've recently been suffering from a lack of motivation, while I've still been working my way through the daily task list I seem to have lost the ability to get 'in the zone' and clear a weeks worth of simple work in a day and a half. I can't even remember the last time I looked up from my desk, found it was nine thirty and thought "just another hour and then I'll leave."
I've spent a fair bit of time on the tube (for the foreign readers -- a moving torture chamber you share with hundreds of other people while travelling underground with the heating on) thinking about the reason behind this and I'm not sure I've found the problem. I'm actually working in a team of nothing but seriously clued people for the first time in ages and so I should be too busy learning new stuff to actually notice how un-motivated I am; but it never seems to work that way.
Is it the fact that I'm not really learning anything new? While I am learning how the new place does things and how the systems work I'm learning more about their conventions and habits rather than anything really new and shiny. Again I can't even remember the last time I worked on something original inside of work or out.
That leads me to another point, I always considered myself lucky to get paid to do what amounted to my hobby. From my early days in IT as a developer to my more recent roles as a systems administrator I've always tinkered with the same kind of technology at home as I did at work (although typically a generation or so ahead) but the downside is now becoming apparent; what do you do at home when your hobby gets dull?
So now the whiny bit is over where to from here? Firstly I'm going to try and recapture some of the enjoyment of what I do and lose some of my preconceptions and change my perception a little, the Stephenson quote at the top of this entry appealed to me when I re-read it for pretty much that reason. Secondly I'm going to try and get involved in projects that actually have an end. It's nowt but a hunch but I suspect working on open-ended projects that never seem to finish or have any real milestones has a negative effect on me. Thirdly I'm going to start playing with unfinished hacks, script and projects. Just not on the production system; honest!
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Posted: 2004/11/02 20:53 | /career | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 01 Nov 2004
Small Annoyances
What do VMWare Workstation, Windows Media Player and the Windows Volume
Control have in common?
They each annoy me on a daily basis.
I use VMWare on a daily basis, it's a top notch product that saves me a lot of grief whether I'm writing applications, testing programs for release or playing with services/daemons such as Apache or Postfix and conducting what-ifs but I've recently noticed a small glitch that is driving me nuts. When ever I open a new VMWare instance and I'm listening to music the volume goes up by a fair amount, I've never noticed this before so it may be new or it maybe I've just never noticed over the hum of the servers and the whine of the project managers.
Next up in my list of small annoyances is WMP, why does this application ALWAYS try and 'help' me by changing the window size? It either maximises the window if it's a newly opened instance or it almost maximises if the window was already open anything under a full screen.
Lastly in this little rant is the Windows Volume Control applet, when you open this the widget that gets the focus, by default, is the volume control balance. Now this may not seem like an annoyance but if i hit the scroll wheel on my mouse, and I always have a scroll mouse, then its setting changes and not the more logical volume. Lets look at usage patterns for a second, what is more likely in day to day use, you need to alter the setup so the right speaker is a little quieter or that you actually want to change the volume?
None of these are really show-stopping bugs or stop me from using the programs but the really annoying part is that if they were open source I could change the code and make it all better, even if only for myself.
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Posted: 2004/11/01 19:18 | /tools/gui | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
New NetBSD Logo
The NetBSD project
has recently adopted a new logo, the new NetBSD logos
are decent enough if a little uninspiring and 'safe'. I've always been a
fan of the old NetBSD logo.
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Posted: 2004/11/01 19:03 | /sites | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Unixdaemon PacketstormSecurity RSS Feeds -- Dead
Way back on the second of September I wrote a blog entry informing everyone
that I'd be turning off
Unixdaemon Packetstorm Security feeds in favour of people using the
Official Feeds.
Well the time has come.
The HTML on their site has changed again, breaking my script, so now is as good a time as any to stop the feeds. I'll be putting up a 301 at some point today. Thank you for using the feeds and I hope they proved useful.
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Posted: 2004/11/01 10:24 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
