Adventures With A Broken Screen

A older friend of mine stopped me in church a few weeks ago.  He said their granddaughter’s laptop was broken.    It starts up and it just beeps. The laptop isn’t a big deal, but the files on there are — it’s all of her files for her graduate degree. I know these people well, and I know they don’t know much about technology.  I don’t know their granddaughter at all, but since she has no backup I assume that she’s not real savvy. ... Read More

How To Get Your Data To Disappear Completely

I occasionally ask how to completely wipe a hard drive.  Usually someone is selling their PC, giving their old one away, etc., and know all the risks of leaving bits of their identity on their hard disk.    I have been telling people where to get a basic security CD that runs Linux and run scrub, but that can take a long time (someone told me it took the better part of a weekend on their old laptop!).  I ran into Darik’s Boot And Nuke (DBAN) recently and that may... Read More

Weave: The Best FireFox Plugin You Aren’t Using

(This is shamelessly cross-posted from my personal blog. But I think it’s worth spreading the news even more.) I’m not sure how I stumbled onto it — I think I was reading something at Ars Technica and saw a link for this article about Mozilla Weave.  I never heard of it before — it sounded interesting.  After a month of heavy use, let me just say that it’s not just interesting — it’s downright, wicked cool. Let me tell you my pattern... Read More

Download Insurance? Seriously?

My mother-in-law alerted to me  something Symantec was offering in the latest version of the Norton Security Suite — Download Insurance. What?  Huh?  Yes,  Download Insurance.  For $9.95 Symantec will give you the opportunity to download the software that you originally bought from them for up to one year.  Without the insurance, they will only let you download the software that you paid for only 60 days. Note that you don’t pay $9.95 when you need to download... Read More

My own “Oh My ZSH”

I’ve been thinking about cleaning up my own ZShell config and putting it out in the wild, but that just didn’t seem to happen. I was looking for something in ZShell — I think it was getting version control information at the prompt and I stumbled upon a mention of Oh My ZSH which is a bunch of powerful ZShell configs arranged in a nice way. I tried it and I liked it. But it didn’t have everything that I used. But, heck it’s on github —... Read More

Have Your Cake and Your PHP too.

I’ve never had a great love for PHP the Language. It seems like if someone wanted functionality into the core language, they just vomited it up inside the code base, submitted it, and it was accepted. They are trying to make this better in the core, but alas it’s still too easy to do dumb things. And let’s not get started on the security problems. But PHP the Platform is much more interesting to me. You can deploy PHP applications in just about any cheap web... Read More

How to Dance with Django

I’ve been helping 5Q Communications with some Django work in the past few weeks and will be continuing to work with them for a while.  I was excited when we started talking together  not just because of Django but because they have a lot of good ideas on how the web should work and how to properly treat clients. I wasn’t new to Django but it had been a while since I have dug deep into it. More and better tools had been developed and I had to add things to my development/troubleshooting... Read More

Setting Proxy Environment in UNIX

The easiest and best way to set proxy information on your Linux/Unix machine is with the http_proxy environment variable in your ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or whatever your favorite shell’s configuration file is.  Set it like this: http://user:password@proxy-server:portnum In my brief bit of experimentation, the follow important (to me, at least) command-line tools use http_proxy: wget Python easy_install curl I’ve been a Unix user for 14 years — why did I take... Read More

When Vista Forgets

Last Friday evening, I got the type of call that no one wants  to get — or make, for that matter.  It was a customer I hadn’t heard from in a while. Last time I was there I setup Windows Networking in their office. In other words, I made a Workgroup, folders to share their documents, and a shared printer.  I also recommended Linux and Samba in the medium future too, instead of Vista.  Yes, they have Vista everywhere! Well, this call was that they got a new wireless... Read More

An Easy Way To Speed Up Your WordPress Blog

I’ve been struggling with the speed of my WordPress blogs, both on my personal blog and here.  My web host for these two domains is notorious for bad MySQL implementations, but I knew that wasn’t my whole problem.  I tried to get WP Super Cache to solve some of these problems, but that didn’t quite do what I thought it should have. I’ve been looking for ideas and found a little tweak here and a little tweak there but nothing really helped.   Tonight... Read More