0 minutes, 17 seconds
These photos were taken over a 24 hour period. Though I didn’t know when I started with the sunset last night (first up below), these photos very much ended up being an homage to my friend Steven and his blog. Primarily I appreciate his pause in the day to take photos of the lake and reminder that your devices are not your master.
1 minute, 16 seconds
This post is a short parable told in three lessons:
Lesson 1: The web is not as temporal as you might think!
Recently a co-worker was travelling and was unable to access her work based email. Instead, she directed folks to email her at her personal email. Being a curious fellow, I clicked over to her personal site to see what she had to say. All I found was “Site in progress, check back later” and link to a very outdated resume. Well, that’s just no fun! Enter the wayback machine! Using this fine site, I was able to see all the text, photos and links she had long since redacted. The wayback machine never forgets, so don’t you forget that.
Lesson 2: Robots.txt can pull Jedi mind tricks.
A natural response to seeing the archive of other sites, is to see what dirt folks might find out about me via the same method. Sure enough, there’s some good stuff! However, the more interesting fact I learned is that my robots.txt of today redacted the archive.org copy of yesterday! This is cool! A while ago I took down my resume and some older, more personal content and as well took a sec to make some broad strokes of search engines shouldn’t index. It was these actions that archive.org took note of. With a wave of my robots.txt hand, indeed these are not the pages you’re looking for.
Lesson 3: The wayback machine is way cool.
Ok, this parable kinda peters out right about here, but still, the wayback machine is way cool. Check out the rad looks plip.com has had over the years! Hrm, maybe that should be “rad”. You decide.
0 minutes, 19 seconds
I’m still very much enjoying coding in the WordPress plugin world. I just added a very simple admin interface to The 404er. So, ya know, for all those tons of readers, go install this on your blog already!
After getting a kick that over 20 people have downloaded the 404er, I got another kick out of the fact that we’re the number one hit for “The 404er” at the time of this publishing.
2 minutes, 14 seconds
I was thinking about getting a safe for the house. Or, maybe, if you’re a thief reading this and as well as my facebook page, I should say I’m thinking of upgrading my safe! So, first I checked out a few on Amazon. OK, $150 gets you a nice safe. But wait! Wouldn’t craigslist be the way to go instead? If it hasn’t been broken into, isn’t a used safe just as good as new safe? In a word, yes, but there’s a few interesting tidbits.
First off, the word “safe” doesn’t really get you much when you search at craigslist for it. Second off, there’s some probably-legit-but-very-shady-looking ads for safes. It’s these ads that prompted this post. The italics text is mine, added for what I think is missing from the ad:
SAFE DOOR -33 x 66 – $4000 – $5,000.00 — OR BEST OFFER — SARGENT & GREENLEAF SAFE DOOR — THE SOLID STEEL DOOR IS 33″ WIDE X 66″ HIGH X 5″ THICK.– You remove and haul away.– Fork lift available to load it onto your truck.– If interested, we can talk about the door caseing, that would need to be saw cut out of the concrete. We don’t have the key and we don’t know the owner, so it is Probably best if you don’t look in the safe when you cut off the door. Please be able to cut the door off in less that 8.18 minutes.
Also, which is it $4000, or $5000 to haul away your door?
Deposit Safe – $400 – Amsec security deposit safe, in great shape. Safe has an electronic combination pad. the safe is locked and I have not had a chance to have my lock guy figure the combo yet. I may be finding more of these safes I also don’t know the combo to, nor know what’s in them. I’ll be selling them by how loud they rattle.
Finally, this last actually looks pretty legit as well as cool. If I had a lot of space, a bigger budget and a big-ass truck, I’d consider it. However, the “when to pick it up” part set off my shady alarm. Use of “recently penetrated”, “I turn over [safes]” and military time, no inline bolding needed:
SAFE FOR SALE – $300 – I am a locksmith and safe tech in the San Francisco Bay Area – and I am always coming across used safes that I penetrate and turn over.
Along those lines, I recently penetrated an old Herring Hall Marvin safe that is down in San Francisco.
I cannot remember the exact dimensions, but as soon as I get them, I will update this post. But this I can tell you, the inside shelves and upper compartments are completely removeable, and the INSIDE HEIGHT is approximately 35″ inches tall.
The safe is on the ground level, and you can park right in front of the place when you come to pick it up. The catch is that it is a restaurant, so you can only pick up the safe BEFORE or after business hours, which is approximately 2330 hours. (11:30 PM).
0 minutes, 54 seconds
Check out this BART sign. Recently, I think, they added then bike status (none bikes during rush hour). Super handy! However, what is not so handy is the rest of the sign info. A bit ago the signs started to show when say the next two Fremont trains we’re coming :
Fremont 1min, 21min
This is not helpful. What is the use case of you standing on the platform and needing to catch a Fremont train but not the very soonest one? Right, none really, or edge case at best.
I think what would be useful would be to always have the next train arriving at the bottom of screen. Even better would be to go all CNN and have a news ticker style of the next trains. This would alleviate waiting for all the “cameras are not a guarantee against crime ” messages to scroll by while you wait to see when your training is gonna arrive.
I spent a few minutes under a sign trying to count how many pixels there is to work with, but my train came too soon. I did see that there is about 9×5 per letter at the smallest font size. Any designers out there wanna take a crack at a redesign?
0 minutes, 30 seconds
Remember way back when we posted 404er? Well, good news! We jumped through the hoops and now our plugin is officially on the WordPress site. Clearly the readme needs to be updated so the page is a little more full featured.
Soon, when we’re indexed, you can search for us by name at your nearest WP admin control panel. Here’s a ‘recently changed’ listing showing the 404er:
Noteworthy is that WordPress.org has really gone above and beyond to help developers. We get a full SVN environment, lots of PR on their site, detailed yet easy to read docs and best off, a really rich code base to code against. Thanks WordPress!
1 minute, 34 seconds
As a fan of security and strong passwords, I read with interest Lifehacker’s article about how easy it is to hack passwords. In general the article is right on the money and I agree with it’s message. However, I took issue with the article on two points.
The first point they’re talking about how easy it is to either guess or brute force your passwords. Guessing and forcing passwords can be done over the Internet with out needing to compromise your (the victim’s) computer. However, the last step is “simply” to get at the cookies on your local machine:
But wait… How do I know which bank you use and what your login ID is for the sites you frequent? All those cookies are simply stored, unencrypted and nicely named, in your Web browser’s cache. (Read this post to remedy that problem.)
– Lifehacker Mar 30, 2010
For me this is crossing the line from informative into fear mongering. Yes, once you have logged into some one’s computer as the user they surf the internet as, it is indeed trivial to read cookies. No, this can not be done over the Internet. No this is not a simple step to make.
The second point (now that I’m not drafting this on my phone and am using a real computer) I see that the original article was published in 2007! Just about all the info in the original article still holds true 3 years later, but I find awkward when the article on Lifehacker has items like this in the article:
EDIT: You might also want to listen to my interview on Connecticut Public Radio about password security.
Which made me think it was a Lifehacker edit in 2010, but was in fact an edit from John Pozadzides in 2007. Speaking of Pozadzides, his blog looks pretty right on and I don’t really have any beef with him (in that totally anonymous Internet beef kind of way), but I mainly take issue with fear mongering, especially when in comes to cookies.
Update: This article seems to be making the rounds on a lot of sites.
Update 2: There’s a great comment from Wangston below.
0 minutes, 24 seconds
After seeing a post over on Engadget about the new Jolicloud, I decided to check it out. It quickly became apparent that it is just Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) with a different skin and a nice Jolicloud app. Looking at some forum posts and the comments on the above Engadget link, my opinion isn’t too novel or new. What is dissapointkng is that Engadget fronts like this is something more amazing than UNR’s latest release, which I run and like.
Me? I’m waiting for Meego 1.1 which is expected to drop in October.
0 minutes, 54 seconds
I know, I know you have been waiting to hear how it is going with new OS on the netbook. Well my dear readers, I have some good news and some bad news.
First the bad news. The bad news is that Meego really felt snappier and more polished. Though there’s a lot of overlap in software like Evolution is standard on both, something about the simplicity of Meego won out. Both come with a simple window manager and both can be easily extended with new apps, but Meego was more of what I wanted and less of what I didn’t. Example: auto hide task bar on Meego is nice because screen real estate is so precious. This I want. Ubuntu entire open office suite, this I don’t want. Also, Meego loads apps faster (eg Chrome) and boots waaaay faster.
Now the good news: the sleep problem is fixed and AIM totally works. The sleep fix was very satisfying, just follow the included script on superuser totally worked. Snap the lid shut and it goes right to sleep. Click the power button and it springs back to life in under a second. In general Ubuntu is quite nice.
I wonder how EasyPeasy is doing these days?
0 minutes, 54 seconds
Meego, as I mentioned before, is really really cool. I was able to get all my apps installed and even managed to get my Google calendar, mail and contacts syncing by just adding it via the email client under IMAP (BTW – Meego, you should really highlight that feature!). All the apps even appeared as a native icon alongside the pre-installed ones which is a really nice touch. Alas, the lack of a working AIM client is just too much. It’s my primary IM network and it just bugged me that it didn’t work. Which is too bad, because Meego is so close to being perfect. Well, too about AIM and about sleep.
So, what to do? After reading Mr. Doctorow’s latest post, I was reminded about good ol’ Ubuntu. Sure enough, there’s a Netbook remix. Let’s give it a whirl! USB key is prepped and primed and install is imminent.
Also – I love love love (yeah, 3 times) Pendrivelinux.com!. This is a super easy way to create bootable USB drives (aka live “CDs”) of your local linux distro. The old days of some crazy fdisk silliness is gone. Now it’s just point and click. Love it.
Stay tuned for my Ubuntification!