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Protesting SOPA/PIPA

Starting Jan 18, 2011 at 00:00 UTC, this blog will be joining many others to protest SOPA and PIPA. I strongly oppose the views outlined in the bill, and with a Google Pagerank of 4/10, with almost 650 RSS readers, and about 1,500 hits to my site per day, I’ll be taking advantage of these [...]

Encrypted Mutt IMAP/SMTP Passwords

Rather than storing your IMAP and SMTP passwords in plain text on disk, you can store them encrypted using GnuPG, OpenSSL, the GNOME Keyring, or any other method of password storage encryption. It still requires a “master password” from you to decrypt the file(s) on the fly, and set the appropriate passwords, but then it [...]

My Google Voice Rant

So, I’ve been a Google Voice subscriber for about 2 years. I have one of the most awesome phone numbers you can get: 686-8086 (it has an inside geek reference to x86-based CPU architectures, and also to my PGP key ID of 0x8086060F. Awesome, eh?!). I’ve used it for SMS text messaging, receiving calls, and [...]

Making Sense of Hashed Hosts in ~/.ssh/known_hosts

I don’t expect you to follow this post completely, but it’s so amazingly cool, I have to blog it. Consider the hashed sections of ~/.ssh/known_hosts file for (recent) OpenSSH clients, not including the public key parts: |1|kFJT5z0x3ndyutgZ4E5pRk+ORBA=|hzXvdYUudo+qK9BGlFWtSAUXlXc= |1|8wo1+FO0hkATPgQZoeNHeIlvAjw=|dt/a9jz9CnLKP72j+Jr8MKMjgEE= |1|pvBQEKEGLnH0RCJr+8Dmqqnvlrs=|fJJvjyG/TmHFnuIX57nDThq/C4M= |1|HKV4DzgDkajXoUHf9B82JBu7J10=|c/K+MdJvWaZeJFs/W7iqhqo0wvE= |1|rtvQhRVnNanQZYkLUMbjoBGNhn0=|0U6a1LUQqLL6P1T2Wji3VWw69pw= |1|0ziSYi4c+xBXGEBZcNN1LMhYUc4=|qRSN5GSPyQi+fmaVz2zNwkmKoy8= |1|6nv6Vpk3AYgICHxJGVgVdsYRuq0=|fBNOIz1l3RW+N61jyDPunKX9n7E= |1|+b4uA+Mq7RHRAFW21qv8aO3rIRs=|1eizMri01IxEKrXquBnwTYP61Ow= |1|BkB0PZu2qtsLID/Ibe/D68gANQU=|qW6uAzcpecOOKNI4zEvngyfpGkI= |1|n+QrRn7QXeAJ5hRe2M8v8IspihE=|EqUxXdSeIF1cl1fQjl5zILebkGY= |1|BOKuKnWojy028tJf9Y671lws0d0=|SuBQJmJZp5JNVYG/rP9yb9ZhJcE= |1|WACsxtodOiM89kf4rNPLgF1CXZ4=|UTccVeLDZJF3wlH8V05XJNlsOBw= |1|o6FFoirXYblM7wBMdeJDYGMPI58=|5jJB7T7itY702ZHHByXtSpGk9SE= The column fields are similar to [...]

Boycott GoDaddy

I generally don’t jump on boycotting bandwagons, usually because they are severely misguided and misinformed, and they’re usually interested in spreading FUD more than just reporting the issue at hand. However, on December 29th, 2011, I will be transferring all of my 15 domains away from GoDaddy, because they support the SOPA and Protect IP [...]

Expand URLs in Irssi

If you’re an IRC junkie, and spend hours a day in Irssi, then this post might be useful to you. It’s all the rage these days to shorten URLs with fancy URL shortening services. Heck, even I have one. They are certainly nice to have, when links are exceptionally long, such as search result URLs, [...]

A Note About Removing Files With find(1)

I’ve seen on the internet, and elsewhere, that when there are too many arguments for rm(1) to handle, that the following command will suffice: % find /path -exec rm -rf {} \; While certainly functional, it’s not optimal. If there are thousands of files (as is often the case at my job), this command is [...]

Steganography

I have been familiar with steganography for a number of years. In fact, back when I was in middle school, I developed a fascination for encryption, and hiding messages, mostly so I could pass notes back and forth to classmates during class. It wasn’t long before I found “invisible ink”, which is a form of [...]

Burgers As A Service

There is this burger shop near my home that makes the most amazing burgers, fries and shakes. Bar none. The burgers, of which there is quite the variety, each have their own “secret sauce” that gives each burger its own unique flavor. The fries also have various dipping sauces you can order, each of which [...]

Tab Completing Aliases For Multiple Accounts In Mutt

In mutt, you can setup multiple accounts, and use account hooks (complete with key bindings) to change to those accounts. I have a Gmail account and a work account. In my Gmail account, I use goobook to access my Google Contacts, and I can successfully tab-complete the addresses when composing mail. But, I have not [...]

Unknown Scheduled Downtime

Someone is purchasing our house, and we have to be out by the 28th of November. We will not be in our new house until Dec 3rd, at the earliest. During that week, I don’t know where to host my server to maintain a constant connection. Hopefully, I can find a solution, but worst case [...]

Use QR Codes For Accessing Wireless Access Points

If you have an Android device with a camera, you can install the ZXing Barcode scanner [1] which supports the following method. It is my understanding, however, that other barcode scanners do not support this, so as cool as this is, it may only serve a very limited audience. The ZXing app doesn’t even support [...]

Google Wants To Track Your Physical Location

From http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/greater-choice-for-wireless-access.html: We’re introducing a method that lets you opt out of having your wireless access point included in the Google Location Server. To opt out, visit your access point’s settings and change the wireless network name (or SSID) so that it ends with “_nomap.” For example, if your SSID is “Network,” you’d need to [...]

Rejected And Legal

Some of the roles I fill at work are: storage architecture, cloud engineering, system administration and backend coding. When approaching my tasks head on, it’s always important to me that standards are adhered to. From PEP coding style to adhering to an RFC for mail server. Unfortunately, I think I’m a dying breed, or something, [...]

Use wget(1) To Expand Shortened URLs

I’m a fan of all things microblogging, but let’s face it: until URLs become part of the XML, and not part of your character count (which is ridiculous anyway), shortened URLs are going to be a way of life. Unfortunately, those shortened URLs can be problematic. They could host malicious scripts and/or software that could [...]