by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 30, 2006 | Usefull Things
TaoSecurity pointed me to a new release of the (IN)SECURE Magazine, previously I was unaware of this magazine but having read the latest issue I can really recommend it to anyone interested in security.
The articles are well written and in depth, the magazine has some ads but they are well done and not intrusive at all. The article list for this issue number 5 are:
- Web application firewalls primer
- Review: Trustware BufferZone 1.6
- Threat analysis using log data
- Looking back at computer security in 2005
- Writing an enterprise handheld security policy
- Digital Rights Management
- Revenge of the Web mob
- Hardening Windows Server 2003 platforms made easy
- Filtering spam server-side
You can see it covers a wide range of topics, covers Windows, Linux and FreeBSD so there certainly is something for everyone in here. Check it out.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 29, 2006 | Uncategorized
Podcasting is all the rage these days and I can see why, there are some really good stuff out there, at the moment I really enjoy the Ricky Gervais podcast. Mostly its 3 guys talking absolute bollocks while being pretty funny about it, incredibly mindless fun.
On the video casting side there isn’t as much that I enjoy though I’ve only really checked into 4 or 5 shows. Now everyone seems to think that this is the future of entertainment, independent guys making tv shows or radio shows bypassing all the networks, syndicates and all that crap. I can see the value in that argument as well and for most of the videocasts this holds true, short, focussed niche type shows that you either enjoy or don’t and it’s very easy to just move on to the next thing.
One show though stands out to me in it’s incredible level of annoyance and outright insulting of its viewer base and that is the Photoshop TV show. Now this show has received a lot of raves in the past and this is the 2nd time I tried to watch it. The Photoshop related content is great, the tutorials are at many levels from beginner to advanced and the guys know their stuff, they’re a bit keyboard shortcut happy which makes it hard for people to know how what they are doing relates to the tons of Photoshop menus but that not the end of the world.
So what’s the problem? Like all of the podcast world they obviously have massive bandwidth bills to pay and they do this by promoting a number of sponsors, nothing wrong with that at all. The problem though is that the signal/noise ratio of the show is off the scales. As a little investigation I took their latest show and cut out all the advertising related content but leaving their inane chatter in. I was left with 2/3 of the 30 minute show. Cut out the chatter, startup jingle, ending jingle, competitions etc and you end up with less than 1/2 of the 30 minutes.
Apart from the signal/noise ratio they are obviously trying hard to look professional in the editing together of the show, things flow nicely into each other and so forth. Problem again is that the continuity of the thing is just crap. Person A hands Person B a PowerBook to do a Demo on, screen movie shows a XP box. Person B is done with the presentation and he is stood with a Windows Laptop in-front of him. Why? Why do they need to go and do silly things like that just put the box you’re going to use in-front of you and get it over with, don’t show of Apple kit cos it’s sexy or is this just another product placement deal?
Each week they give viewers some kind of homework assignment to review websites etc, well this week there were 3 websites – one from each presenter. The 2nd recommended website was from a training center where the person recommending it is teaching a class. The 3rd one was a recommendation of the website for one of their sponsors! Immediately followed by a ad for the particular sponsor as well. During the show the one guy was constantly pushing a book he wrote, giving copies away telling you to buy it, where to buy it etc. Shameless self promotion.
So I left a quick comment on their blog, something along the lines of:
The photoshop content of the show is great, pity its spoiled by the 1/3 advertising content, not even the worst of TV shows are that bad with advertising.
Naturally they didn’t approve my comment and it never showed up, nice one. I’d love to see how far television would get if for a hour show you end up with this level of absolute noise? The slashdot/digg crowd always go on a total freak out about the likes of Tivo moving towards not letting them skip over ads but then they stand for much worse from this grass roots tech that is supposed to save the video/audio entertainment world? I’m not sold.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 18, 2006 | Uncategorized
Today the new Intel based iMac’s went on sale in London, I happened to be working about 5 minutes walk from the Apple Shop in Regent Street so I popped in and picked one up. I tried to call but the phone was never answered not even after 10 minutes of ringing.
The shop staff were busy setting up the new iMacs on the floor but the 20″ was already sold out, I got a 17″ model. Apple Store London does not yet have RAM for the machines but I guess I can just pick up some DDR2 SDRAM from a PC dealer.
So far I’m very impressed with the machine, the screen is absolutely stunning, the build quality and packaging is excellent and the everything is certainly a lot faster than on my old 800Mhz G4 machines ๐
The big question is of course software compatibility, below my experiences with 3rd party applications so far.
It seems anything that installs a preference pane and requires that to work will be out of luck, so far that’s SynergyKM and Growl.
Firefox works great, Safari (a universal binary) outperforms is in all respects but it works and its a lot faster than my iBook or G4 Powermac runs it so thats a good thing.
Thunderbird works great, like Firefox I’m keen to see a universal binary though.
AdiumX works perfectly, slight delay here and there which will no doubt be fixed with a universal build.
You Control: Desktops works OK, sometimes screen flipping is a bit slow and sometimes it doesn’t change active desktop to the application when selected using alt-tab.
Quicksilver being a universal binary works flawless.
Eclipse does not work, but I didn’t try to hard to get it going so who knows.
GLTerm does not work at all, I guess it’s screen card dependant.
Office:Mac works ok, it’s not screeming fast but its usable.
NetNewsWire works perfectly through rosetta.
UPDATED:
Adium X 0.88 is a universal binary and it works great, it also includes a universal binary of Growl complete with working pref pane ๐
Mozilla has some unofficial binaries as part of their “Deer Park” program, Camino, Thunderbird and Firefox are available. They work great, quite a bit faster than the power pc versions.
SynergyKM has been updated to be a universal binary, it works a charm.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 29, 2005 | Usefull Things
Google has become more than a traditional search engine to me – it’s become a means of navigation by keyword, like a application launcher on a traditional desktop.
This is of course not optimal, each time I want to generate a random password I used to just search for ‘random password’ and find the first available on line tool and just use that. In time I would know what to search for to find a specific tool I want to use and just repeatedly perform those searches. Not very fast but it worked in some way.
Enter YubNub a full blown command line for the web, users can define a keyword such as ‘g’ any query into YubNub for ‘g something’ will do a Google search for ‘something’.
To take my example of the password generator above further you can define (and someone has indeed done this) a ‘passwd’ command that is a front end to Winguides.com’s password generator. Simply typing ‘passwd 8’ into YubNub will give you 8 character passwords, not too shabby. The idea is sound and I like it, so what’s wrong?
Well lets say my company has it’s own policy for passwords that I’d need to use, I still want to use the web as my command line to this kind of tools but I’m stuck with YubNub’s ‘passwd’ not complying to my policy. I could in theory define a ‘rippasswd’ command that points to an internal server to produce my passwords but that is just bad for many obvious reasons. What you really want is your own version of this, and indeed you can download the YubNub source code and run your own. For most users though I think the full YubNub on their own systems might be overkill or you might just not be a Ruby on Rails fan.
There are other alternatives – one very notable one from Yahoo! called Open Shortcuts – this lets you do something similar by prefixing your keywords on their toolbar with a ! so you could search for “!passwd 8” and achieve the same goals. Yahoo goes a bit further you can create your own ‘passwd’ keyword overriding any existing one which effectively fixes one of the major problems I had with YubNub, except now you have to really be using the Yahoo toolbar which is not an option Yahoo is well known for their very very bad practices with delivering all sorts of nasties onto your computer along with their toolbar, so while the idea is great it isn’t viable.
Back in August I could not sleep one Friday evening and I wrote a self hosted keyword query system very much like YubNub except it is not intended to be open to everyone to add/edit keywords. This is specifically intended to host on your own machines – think company or personal intranet – it allows you to add your own keywords, it has a normal YubNub inspired user interface and also at the moment a Firefox Mycroft search plugin.
You can see my install of it at cmd.devco.net. Having used it now for 5 months I can safely say I cannot imagine my online life without it ever again, it has become as essential to me as Google itself. Looking at my stats I’ve done 2500 queries against it with only 1600 of them being Google, that means it has saved me from the search-click-click-click pain of using online tools that I had before. You can see which commands I have defined on mine here. I am going to release this as opensource to everyone soon, at the moment it requires Postgres but I intend to make it use SQLite instead and polish up the documentation etc a bit first.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 28, 2005 | Code
After returning from a few days away to Cornwall I got a bit fed up with the formatting issues that exist with Google Maps and Firefox, I discovered a post on the Google Maps EZ forum about fixing it.
In order to fix this I added a new configuration option in the map section of the configuration file called divwidth. You will need to add your own option to your config file to upgrade to the latest version, simply replace the gmap.inc.php file with the new one found in the tarball.
The latest version can be found here: http://www.devco.net/code/gmapsphp-current.tgz. Full updated documentation can be found here.
