Our family has been tasked with drawing a picture for each letter of the alphabet in an alphabet book for my soon-to-be-born niece. The letter ‘d’ was available, so it was obvious to me what should be drawn. I know when she starts flipping through the pages of the book, she will love this page [...]
I’m going to try to keep this post short (many of my regular readers will know how long winded I can be). However, with my recent post of setting up Mutt to support both PGP/MIME and S/MIME, based on the account I’m using, I figure a followup post on their similarities and differences might be [...]
If you have two accounts that you use with Mutt, and one of them you would like to use your OpenPGP key for signing mail (PGP/MIME), and the other you would like to use an OpenSSL certificate for doing the same (S/MIME), then this post is for you. Before beginning, however, you need to have [...]
I have chosen the path of system administration for my career. It’s been very rewarding, and I really love my job. However, there are times when I make stupid mistakes that cost others money. I’m sure we’ve all been there. It’s stressful, embarrassing and can really shake you up, if you mistake is bad enough. [...]
Recently, I’ve made the switch from GNU Screen to Tmux for my remote terminal multiplexor. I still prefer GNU Screen for serial connections, however (something the Tmux developers don’t seem to think is important). So, when getting it setup, I wanted my hardstatus line to imitate my GNU Screen hardstatus line as closely as possible. [...]
I will be attending the Ohio Linux Fest this September (in about two weeks) giving a talk on “Password Theory and Breaking Encrypted Filesystems”. The talk covers some theory on what exactly makes a “secure password”, including some mathematics, entropy, random number generators, shadowed passwords, salts, rainbow tables and cryptographic hashes. I end the talk [...]
It’s been over 3 years since I wrote the original article about pimping out Irssi, with various themes, scripts, aliases, etc. Well, I figure it’s probably time for an update. After all, if you know anything about me, you know I’m an IRC junkie with Irssi, and currently having a love affair with Bitlbee. Aliases [...]
This blog is now fully mobile. If you visit http://pthree.org with your mobile browser, you should be taken to a mobile version of the site. It’s only using browser detection, rather than domain mapping, as I’m not in the mood to create A records for m.pthree.org, which only ends up making the URL longer anyway. [...]
This post comes from Matt Taggart, who put together a document about the best practices for using OpenSSH. A lot of the points brought up in that document rang the bells of common sense, and are so good, it’s worth blogging about in hopes that the points mentioned therein reach as many as possible. I’ve [...]
I just recently received the Bitlbee 3.0.3 update in Debian Sid, so I thought I would checkout the changelog, and see if there is anything I would get excited about. And indeed, there is. Very much so. Here’s the relevant changelog: Version 3.0.3: – Fixed Twitter compatibility. (The API call used to get the following [...]
Tagged identica twitter bitlbeeWhat’s that you say? Cryptic message hidden in Morse Code. Can you crack it?
This post is a quickie to see what the current generation is like these days. I’m an old fart (not as old as many reading this post), but I remember when 5 1/4″ floppy drives were “standard”, and 3 1/2″ were the new fad. Then came Iomega Jazz drives, and the like. CDRW hit the [...]
I posted this to my local LUG this morning, then realized that it would make an excellent blog post, so I’m cross posting it here for a wider audience. For those who know me, know I’m anal retentive about my mail. It started probably 4-5 years ago, when I discovered the difference between the IMAP [...]
A photo of me and my library of math books that I studied to walk with a Bachelor’s of Science in Applied Mathematics. As of April 22, 2011, I have a Bachelors of Science degree in Mathematics, with an emphasis in applied math, and a minor in Computer Science, with an emphasis towards software development. [...]
When I was a kid, I had this fascination with cryptography. I learned and used, as most kids to, the Caesar cipher first (using my trusty Captain Crunch Decoder Ring), then later learned and used the Affine cipher. It was great for passing notes in class when I was in elementary and secondary education. I [...]
