From Stephen E. Arnold’s The Google Legacy: How Google’s Internet Search is Transforming Application Software (Infonortics: September 2005):
The figure Google’s Fusion: Hardware and Software Engineering shows that Google’s technology framework has two areas of activity. There is the software engineering effort that focuses on PageRank and other applications. Software engineering, as used here, [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, history, science, security, technology | No Comments »
From Ellen Siever’s “What Is the X Window System” (O’Reilly Media: 25 August 2005):
X was intentionally designed to provide the low-level mechanism for managing the graphics display, but not to have any control over what is displayed. This means that X has never been locked into a single way of doing things; instead, it has [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech help, technology | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “My Open Wireless Network” (Crypto-Gram: 15 January 2008):
A company called Fon has an interesting approach to this problem. Fon wireless access points have two wireless networks: a secure one for you, and an open one for everyone else. You can configure your open network in either “Bill” or “Linus” mode: In the [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, business, technology | No Comments »
From Tim O’Reilly’s “Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing” (O’Reilly Radar: 26 October 2008):
Since “cloud” seems to mean a lot of different things, let me start with some definitions of what I see as three very distinct types of cloud computing:
1. Utility computing. Amazon’s success in providing virtual machine instances, storage, and computation [...]
Posted on October 31st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
You can use the watch command, but it unfortunately isn’t available for Mac OS X. At least, from Apple. Sveinbjorn Thordarson (great name!) has a version of watch that you can download and compile on your OS X box. It’s available at http://www.sveinbjorn.org/watch_macosx.
Or, you can use this shell script:
while true ; do foo ; sleep [...]
Posted on October 2nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech help | No Comments »
As some of you may have heard, Google has announced its own web browser, Chrome. It’s releasing the Windows version today, with Mac & Linux versions to follow.
To educate people about the new browser & its goals, they release a 38 pg comic book drawn by the brilliant Scott McCloud. It’s a really good read, [...]
Posted on September 2nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
According to this announcement, a Linux client for Dropbox should be coming out in a week or so:
http://forums.getdropbox.com/topic.php?id=2371&replies=1
I’ve been using Dropbox for several months, and it’s really, really great.
What is it? Watch this video:
http://www.getdropbox.com/screencast
It’s backup and auto-syncing done REALLY well. Best of all, you can sync between more than one computer, even if one is [...]
Posted on September 1st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, tech help, technology | No Comments »
ImageMagick
mogrify -strip *.jpg
JHead
jhead -de *.jpg
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Posted on July 25th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech help, technology | No Comments »
From Holt Sorenson’s “Incident Response Tools For Unix, Part Two: File-System Tools” (SecurityFocus: 17 October 2003):
Various commands change the MAC [modify, access, and change] times in different ways. The table below shows the effects that some common commands have on MAC times. These tables were created on Debian 3.0 using an ext2 file system contained [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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If you want to add a device like an external hard drive to your /etc/fstab file, it helps if you know the hard drive’s UUID. If you use K/Ubuntu, the following command will display the UUID, along with other useful information.
$ sudo vol_id /dev/sdo1
Password:
ID_FS_USAGE=filesystem
ID_FS_TYPE=ext3
ID_FS_VERSION=1.0
ID_FS_UUID=4857d4bb-5f6b-4f21-af62-830ebae92cff
ID_FS_LABEL=movies
ID_FS_LABEL_SAFE=movies
Related posts
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Ubuntu Edgy changes to fstab
The X [...]
Posted on July 26th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech help, technology | No Comments »
I upgraded my Ubuntu Linux desktop today from Dapper to Edgy. It appears that in /etc/fstab, LABEL= no longer works, and you must now use UUID=.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=278652
So my fstab now looks like this, for instance (these are all external drives):
UUID=a3d8a126-a7fc-4994-9675-748ed62c3109 /media/music xfs [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech help | Comments Off
From Christian Seifert’s “Analyzing malicious SSH login attempts” (SecurityFocus: 11 September 2006):
First, we analyzed the login names that were used on the login attempts. During the sample period, there were 2741 unique account names ranging from common first names, system account names, and common accounts to short alphabetical strings captured by the system logger. Of [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | Comments Off
On Saturday 17 April 2004, I received the following email from someone I didn’t know:
> Hello,
>
> I am not sure who you are but our security detected a Netsky virus in an
> email that you sent. Whether a personal message or a spam, please make
> attention to the fact that you are spreading viruses and [...]
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | Comments Off
Saw this in an email sig:
Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
Mac OS X: Where do you want to go tomorrow?
Linux: Are you coming or what?
Related posts
My reply to those “You sent a virus to me!” emails
I for one welcome our new OS overlords: Google Chrome
Virtual-machine based rootkits
Unpatched Linux, 3 months; unpatched Windows, 20 [...]
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: technology | Comments Off
From Joel Spolsky’s “Biculturalism” (Joel on Software: 14 December 2003):
What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, technology | Comments Off
From Peter Seebach’s Standards and specs: Not by UNIX alone (IBM developerWorks: 8 March 2006):
In the past 20 years, developers for “the same” desktop platform (”whatever Microsoft ships”) have been told that the API to target is (in this order):
* DOS
* Win16
* OS/2
* Win32
* WinNT
* WinXP
* and most recently .NET.
Of course, that list is from [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, tech help, technology | Comments Off
From David HM Spector’s Unfinished Business Part 2: Closing the Circle (LinuxDevCenter: 7 July 2003):
The UNIX world is the result of natural evolution, not the outgrowth of a planned community. UNIX is a lot like New York City: dynamic, always reinventing itself, adapting to new needs and realities. Windows is a lot like Celebration, USA: [...]
Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | Comments Off
From Samuel T. King, Peter M. Chen, Yi-Min Wang, Chad Verbowski, Helen J. Wang, & Jacob R. Lorch’s “SubVirt: Implementing malware with virtual machines
” [PDF] (: ):
We evaluate a new type of malicious software that gains qualitatively more control over a system. This new type of malware, which we call a virtual-machine based rootkit (VMBR), [...]
Posted on June 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | Comments Off
From Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’s “Longhorn ‘Wave’ Rolling In” (eWeek: 20 October 2004):
The questions led into a discussion of Linux, with Bittmann observing that there’s a market perception that Linux is more secure.
“It’s just not true,” Ballmer responded. “We’re more secure than the other guys. There are more vulnerabilities in Linux; it takes longer for Linux [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security | Comments Off
From Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, & Shun-Tak Leung’s “The Google File System“:
We have designed and implemented the Google File Sys- tem, a scalable distributed file system for large distributed data-intensive applications. It provides fault tolerance while running on inexpensive commodity hardware, and it delivers high aggregate performance to a large number of clients. …
The file [...]
Posted on April 8th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off