Ever been curious about the history of the Union’s largest state? A local radio station has produced a 50-part series of short spots covering the highlights of our 50-year history as a state to celebrate the bicentennial. It’s a good listen, and they’ve made it available as a podcast.
29 August 2009
27 August 2009
Security Through Obscurity in the News
Shortly after my previous post regarding security through obscurity, I spotted an article on ZDNet detailing a new vulnerability affecting Cisco wireless routers. If not for the reference to “skyjacking” in the title, I would have stopped reading halfway through the article and dismissed the whole thing as nothing more than a spot of sunshine lighting up a “vulnerability” in a network’s obscurity.
24 August 2009
Take Note: Cryptic Error Messages Help No One
I’m a techie. A nerd, if you prefer. When my computers break, I like to fix them. I will spend more hours than most people would consider sane Googling for answers to my current woes rather than take my computer to someone who gets paid to do the same thing (and likely already has, and thus can fix my problem in a fraction of the time).
I’m also a programmer, but at the same time I’m human – that means my code is imperfect. Being that PHP has been my bread-and-butter for the last 5 years or so, and of course the previous sentence’s statement that I’m a fallible programmer, I’ve of course seen this ever-so-famous error message:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM in /foo/bar.php on line 42
Take note: If you’re providing error messages (and you should be!), make them meaningful to the person reading them!
T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIMs aside, today I was stumped by another cryptic PHP error message. Let me tell you about it. (more…)
20 August 2009
Security Through Obscurity – Over-demonized?
Anyone who has spent any real time dealing with computer systems’ security has heard the phrase, “Security through obscurity is no security at all.” While I won’t make false claims that I’m an expert in the field of computer security, today I will apply common-sense and some basic best practices and explain when this axiom is, in fact, false.
12 August 2009
RAID 10 with mdadm
If I had to pick one fault of Linux, it would be that for almost everything, the Linux user is inundated with hundreds of possible solutions. This is both a blessing and a curse – for the veterans, it means that we can pick the tool that most matches how we prefer to operate; for the uninitiated, it means that we’re so overwhelmed with options it’s hard to know where to begin.
One exception is software RAID – there’s really only one option: mdadm. I can already hear the LVM advocates screaming at me; no, I don’t have any problem with LVM, and in fact I do use it as well – I just see it as filling a different role than mdadm. I won’t go into the nuances here – just trust me when I say that I use and love both.
There are quite a few how-tos, walkthroughs, and tutorials out there on using mdadm. None that I found, however, came quite near enough to what I was trying to do on my newest computer system. And even when I did get it figured out, the how-tos I read failed to mention what turned out to be a very critical piece of information, the lack of which almost lead to me destroying my newly-created array.
So without further ado, I will walk you through how I created a storage partition on a RAID 10 array using 4 hard drives (my system boots off of a single, smaller hard drive).
9 August 2009
New blog! (…yes, again…)
So, here I am again, with yet another new blog. This time, though, I’ve finally broken down and installed a ready-made one instead of trying (yet again) to motivate myself to actually develop one from scratch. Which has always been a great learning experience, but they never become feature-complete and always seem to suffer from various this-and-thats that I just don’t have the time nor motivation to repair.
So, let’s make someone else develop my blogging software for me! Hooray, outsourcing!
This time around, this blog will be an amalgamation of my own random thoughts, myriad little things that happen to me, the occasional techie article, and, of course, my own little brand of opinionated blogging.
Enjoy!
