Day: February 3, 2010

1

At work we currently use version 3.3.3 of the Luminis III platform by SunGard Higher Education.  This product handles our mail and portal needs for the time being.  While it is definitely not the best web-based mail client in the world I have seen worse.
Recently I had received a notice from a friend that he […]

Computers, Mac OS X 10.5, Privacy

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1

So, PayPal has thrown down the gauntlet on the safe browser war.  According to an InfoWorld article, they have declined to add Apple’s Safari browser to their list of safe browsers due to the lack of native anti-phishing technology.
I find it interesting that one of the features they explicitly mention in the InfoWorld article as […]

Privacy, Research, Security

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0

My GPG key expired today, so I renewed it this morning  (updated the expiration date).  Download it!

Privacy, arfore.com

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0

I you have read my previous post, GPG Best Practices, you will know that I am a fan of setting expiration dates on my GPG keys.
This has not always been the case. As with many computer users I tend towards the lazy, and if I can keep from having to re-learn a password by […]

Computers, Cyberspeech, Privacy, Security

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1

Like many people who have some concerns over security on the Internet, I have started to use digital signatures for all of my mail sent from my regular e-mail client on my Mac.
While there are several avenues for this, I chose to use GPG. While I know that this means jumping through a couple […]

Computers, Cyberspeech, Privacy, Security

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0

When doing system administration it is often more convenient to connect to a server through some sort of remote connection setup rather than having to sit at a console in a datacenter.  The comfort of one’s office (or living-room) is often far superior in terms of noise and temperature than the environs of the datacenter […]

Linux, Mac OS X 10.5

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0

Over the weekend I setup a Ubuntu 8.04 installation in my apartment.  The main purpose was to have a box to use to connect to my Tivo, but I am also going to use it to play with Java servlet and jsp development.
Of course none of this is any fun without Internet access.  So I […]

Linux

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0

Those of you out there who are running an installation of SCT Luminis 3 may have noticed that the browser check always comes up warning you that the browser is unsupported when using Firefox 2, even though all the features seem to be completely supported.
This is due to the fact that the browsercheck javascript does […]

Linux, Mac OS X, SCT Luminis, Software, Windows

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0

Well, over the weekend some of the other sysadmins of the world provided the solution to the Office 2007 file download problems.

It’s all about the mime types. For those of you not in the know, a MIME type is an Internet Standard that is used to help webservers and e-mail servers know what kind of files are being served up and sent out. Check out the Wikipedia article for more.

Apache, Linux, Windows

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0

In the process of rebuilding my MythTV box with Gentoo, I found a bug in the 2.6.19 kernel when it comes to using wireless and ndiswrapper for my Linksys WMP54G v.4 PCI card.

When you configure the kernel you normally have to only select CONFIG_NET_RADIO=y and CONFIG_NET_WIRELESS=y.

But with the 2.6.19 kernel I discovered via post on a board that you also need to select one of the wireless chipsets as a module, even if you don’t plan on using it. If you don’t do this then CONFIG_NET_RADIO will still be marked as “n” when the kernel is built even though that isn’t what you selected at config time.

Linux

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0

While re-loading the OS and apps on my iMac at work, I ran into major issues whilst updating MS Office 2008.  When running the first update, Office 2008 SP1 (12.1.0) I had no problems, however none of the other updates would run.  I kept getting the error “You cannot install Office 2008 Updates on this […]

Apple, Mac OS X, Software

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0

I noticed something today in the new iTunes Store interface.  When you hover over a song in the store you are presented with a nifty play icon that replaces the track number in the album listing.  This is quite similar to the iTunes Store interface functionality on the iPhone/iPod Touch OS.  Clicking on the play […]

Apple, iTunes

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1

While setting up Apache for Windows to use SSPI so that I could implement Alain O’Dea’s method of combining Active Directory authentication with SVN I ran into an interesting path problem. After following Alain’s instructions I kept receiving the following error: SSLSessionCache: Invalid argument: size has to be >= 8192 bytes

After some investigation it runs out that […]

Apache

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6

So this morning I fired up my iMac at work to continue on with editing this PHP form I have been working on.  Now I usually use TextMate for my daily editor, since it is very lightweight.
Since I hadn’t actually created a TextMate project file, I just selected all the files and opened them using […]

Apple, Software

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1

UPDATE (2009-04-26 7:06PM EDT): Apparently I was mistaken.  When poking through the preferences of ClamXav in order to restructure my watch folders, I noticed a checkbox that I had overlooked.  Apparently you can add the login item from within the main application.  However, it still doesn’t start the Sentry app when adding the item.  You […]

Security, Software, arfore.com

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0

There is an AP story out about a Minnesota college student attempting to sell his vote on eBay. He is being charged with a felony under an 1893 law that makes it a crime to sell your vote in Minnesota.
Seems to me that if the teenager is going to be charged and prosecuted for selling […]

Politics

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0

So I was wondering on the web this morning and ran across a link the to an article about whether there should be a 4th Matrix movie.
While the obvious point was made aboutthe Oracle’s comment at the end of the third movie concerning whether Neo would be seen again, I found some of the other […]

Movies

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0

On December 18, 2007,  the latest release of the Blade Runner movie will be out.  The Ultimate Collection is going to come in a scaled down imitation of the briefcase that Deckard uses in the film.
It is going to have not only the new edition, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, but also includes the original […]

Movies, Science Fiction

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0

So it seems that L. Frank Baum’s Oz book series is going to at last come to the silverscreen as a whole. According to an article on sliceofscifi.com, Warner Bros. has purchased the film rights to all of the original 14 Oz novels, plus a fifteenth book by Ruth Plumly Thompson.

Apparently it is going to be […]

Culture, Movies

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0

So according to a study commissioned by Mayor Bloomberg, the greenhouse gas emissions of New York City in 2005 was on par with all of Ireland or Portugal.

You have to love it when a city produces as much environmentally destructive elements as an entire country.

The most interesting part was the fact that it’s mostly from the buildings and not the average citizen. The claim that the mass transit system is what make the citizens less polluting.

I wonder how much less the entire U.S. would produce if we took mass transit more seriously?

Environmental

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0

So I ran across a story on Slashdot about how ABC/Disney had a blog shutdown over the posting of some audio clips from a radio-station affiliate in conjunction with the blogger’s letters to the radio station advertisers over their tacit support of the comments and views of the talk radio hosts on the station.

The Slashdot post linked to a blog posting on the Daily Kos: State of the Nation that had more details.

Blogging, Cyberspeech, Free Speech

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0

In my process of tranferring my DVD collection to a digital media server I discovered that the Apple TV software is smarter than I thought.
I have been ripping my DVD collection using Handbrake on my Mac and transferring them to a Windows box which is shared out via my internal only network to the Apple […]

Apple, Apple TV, Technology

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8

Over Thanksgiving break I bought an Apple TV.  Like any good geek I wanted to expand the capability of the unit beyond the default setup.
After installing Firefox and getting USB keyboard and mouse support going, I realized that it would be tremendously cool if I could control it from my iPhone instead of using a […]

Apple TV

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5

In the old days of the Internet search engine business you had a vast multitude of places to visit. There was Excite, Yahoo!, WebCrawler, Lycos, and many others. You had the search engine aggregators, such as Dogpile and HotBot.

What you didn’t have was a single source to use to search the whole of the web. When Google came along they created a way to analyze the relationships between pages to produce more useful results. The search results were no longer just a mishmash based on how many times a word existed in a page, now the results had a certain relevancy.

Then Google added advertising into the mix, providing users with a way to find products or vendors that had some correlation with the keywords entered. This was a great tool for the layperson and researcher alike. Along the way Google has added shopping results, images, news, videos, and maps. However they seem to have forgotten their core product: a clean, easy-to-use, clutter-free search engine.

Technology

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0

For those of you who are in the iPhone developer community or just are just geeky enough to pay for the developer program in order to get a sneak peek on your friends, I thought I would let you in on some information I received from Pandora concerning problems with the Pandora Radio application and […]

Technology, iPhone

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0

One of the current hot topics in many technology circles concerns the cloud-computing model.  Wikipedia has the following definition for cloud computing: a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.

One of the biggest criticisms and concerns with this approach is the ownership, integrity, and […]

Security, Technology, arfore.com

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15

So I just finished Prince of Persia on my PS3.  I decided that I would go and purchase the $9.99 Prince of Persia: Epilogue DLC from the PSN (PlayStation Network) store so that I could have some more PoP game time.
Turns out that I can’t purchase anything using my Bank of America debit card, because […]

Gaming, PS3, Technology

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0

In my process of tranferring my DVD collection to a digital media server I discovered that the Apple TV software is smarter than I thought.
I have been ripping my DVD collection using Handbrake on my Mac and transferring them to a Windows box which is shared out via my internal only network to the Apple […]

Apple, Apple TV, Technology

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0

My last two posts, Starting NRPE via launchd and Nagios NRPE on OS X Server 10.5, concerned getting NRPE to run on OS X Server 10.5 and having it startup at system boot.
However, this is only part of the battle.  Once you have Nagios monitoring setup on your server you also need to have some […]

Mac OS X Server, Nagios, Software

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18

Last week I posted on how to setup NRPE on Mac OS X Server.  Here is what you need to do to make it start up at system boot.
On a Linux or Solaris machine you can just include the call to the daemon in an init script like rc.local and it will be started when […]

Mac OS X Server, Nagios

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4

Recently I was tasked to install the Nagios add-on NRPE on two OS X 10.5 servers. I read a little on the ‘net about it, but no one actually had much in the way of a walkthrough, so I thought I would fill the void.

The basic steps involve compiling the NRPE source, but doing so involves […]

Mac OS X Server, Nagios

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