Ramblings & ephemera
My book, Linux Phrasebook, which is still selling well & still just as useful today as when it came out in 2006 (& will be for another decade or two, given how consistent the Linux command line is), has been translated into Russian. You can find it at this Russian website, where I found out [...]
Posted on November 29th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, language & literature, personal, tech help, technology | No Comments »
From Munir Kotadia’s “NSW Police: Don’t use Windows for internet banking” (ITnews: 9 October 2009):
Consumers wanting to safely connect to their internet banking service should use Linux or the Apple iPhone, according to a detective inspector from the NSW Police, who was giving evidence on behalf of the NSW Government at the public hearing into [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
Image via CrunchBase
From Doc Searls’s “The Most Personal Device” (Linux Journal: 1 March 2009):
My friend Keith Hopper made an interesting observation recently. He said one of Apple’s roles in the world is finding categories where progress is logjammed, and opening things up by coming out with a single solution that takes care of everything, from [...]
Posted on August 11th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
Back in 2004 or so, I was asked to write an outline for a college textbook that would be used in courses on Linux. I happily complied, producing the outline you can see on my website. The editor on the project loved the outline & showed it several professors to get their reactions, which were [...]
Posted on June 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: on writing, personal, security | No Comments »
From Liz Laffan’s “GPLv2 vs GPLv3: The two seminal open source licenses, their roots, consequences and repercussions” (VisionMobile: September 2007):
From a licensing perspective, the vast majority (typically 60-70%) of all open source projects are licensed under the GNU Public License version 2 (GPLv2).
…
GPLv3 was published in July 2007, some 16 years following the creation of [...]
Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Liz Laffan’s “GPLv2 vs GPLv3: The two seminal open source licenses, their roots, consequences and repercussions” (VisionMobile: September 2007):
Cumulatively patents have been doubling practically every year since 1990. Patents are now probably the most contentious issue in software-related intellectual property rights.
…
However we should also be aware that software written from scratch is as likely [...]
Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, politics, tech in changing society | No Comments »
I’m really proud to announce that my 5th book is now out & available for purchase: Google Apps Deciphered: Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop. My other books include:
Don’t Click on the Blue E!: Switching to Firefox
Hacking Knoppix
Linux Phrasebook
Podcasting with Audacity: Creating a Podcast With Free Audio Software
(I’ve also contributed to two [...]
Posted on February 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, education, history, personal, social software, tech help, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
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: business, history, science, security, tech in changing society, 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: 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
Filed under: tech help, technology | No Comments »
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
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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: 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: security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
