Topics pertaining to science and technology, current or future.
Unity — the VMware Fusion feature for Macs — allows Macs to run Windows and Linux programs on the Macintosh desktop, instead of in a virtual machine window. And as of 5:40am today (US Eastern time), I hear that that feature is coming to the next VMware Workstation version too!
As mentioned earlier, I’ve been using the ZFS file system on my network backup drive for the last couple weeks. Last night, I decided to run a “scrub” operation on it (a file-check, similar to fsck or chkdsk): $ sudo zpool status pool: zfs state: ONLINE status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable …
He-LLO, Steve! Security through obscurity doesn’t work! How many times do we have to be burned by your software before you learn that?
Interesting interview with one of my favorite computer security writers, especially (to me) the part about how he handles passwords: Q: How do you remember all of your passwords? A: I can’t. No one can; there are simply too many. But I have a few strategies. One, I choose the same password for all low-security …
Continue reading ‘“Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions”’ »
At the end of the previous entry in this series, I mentioned that there were still some things that made the backup system I’d developed less than optimal: The backup files aren’t compressed; Backups should always be read-only, even when the media is mounted, so it’s a lot harder for a virus or user-error to …
As mentioned a couple weeks ago, I recently picked up a new piece of hardware, a 1TB MyBook World Edition II. It’s a network-attached external hard drive that turned out to be a full-fledged headless Linux box. I’ve been wanting to change my backup setup to go to it instead of the CygWin ssh server …
This “Virgin Mary USB Flash drive” is just ridiculous. “Plug her in and ‘she comes to life, her red LED heart starts to beat — in passive state slowly, quicker whilst connecting or saving data’ […]” Thanks, but I’ll take a USB Rocket Launcher instead. (Oh darn, it looks like it’s Windows-only.)
My first computer was a used TI-99/4a, given to me as a gift on my twelfth birthday, just after Texas Instruments abandoned it. It was a wonderful little device, despite the quickly-outgrown 16K of memory. One of the best things about it (besides the hardware speech synthesizer module that I got with it) was that …
Continue reading ‘“Phoenix hijacks Windows boot with instant-on”’ »
“The Kentucky legislature holds hearings on global warming, and forgets to invite any actual scientists.” Un-freakin’-believable.
After trying for a couple days to get the Squid http proxy software installed on my office CygWin system (to bypass the hotel’s blocking system, so that I can get a secure connection over their open wireless system), I’ve given up on it. I don’t know of any way to have the office machine download …