©1995 United Artists Pictures
This article originally appeared in Issue #13 of The Dot Connector Magazine.
Whether it’s the “Iranian Cyber Army”, those darn “Chinese Hackers”, or just your average script kiddie, everyone is aware that there bad people out there who want to mess with your glorious internet surfing experience.
You probably have heard of things like DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, and you’ve most certainly heard about viruses, trojans, and worms. But there is one thing I’m betting you haven’t heard much about: DNS cache poisoning.
You’ll see why this is a very important type of attack to be aware of a bit later. First, I should probably cover a few basics in case you aren’t a techie nerd. Just for the record, nerds don’t wear coke bottle glasses anymore; they wear contacts. Junk food is out, and healthy eating is in. Flannel shirts? Yes. Pocket protectors? No. And contrary to popular belief, we are generally good-looking. It’s all part of Nerd 2.0.
But, I digress.
Read more…
Scottie Networking denial of service, dns, dos, hacking
Let’s say you were using Rails 2.3.x, and you made the (wise) decision to implement heavy fragment caching. Then let’s say that you updated to Rails 3.x. At that point, you probably noticed that Rails 3 does something seriously annoying with the paths where it caches fragments.
In Rails 2, doing this:
<% cache('posts/123/123456/main') do %>
Gave you a cache file that looks like this:
RAILS_ROOT/tmp/cache/views/posts/123/123456/main.cache
However, in Rails 3, the same cache code results in a cache file that looks like this:
RAILS_ROOT/tmp/cache/925/AB2/posts%2F123%2F123456%2Fmain
WTH? That’s not documented in the Rails 3 API. So what’s going on, and how do you make Rails 3′s fragment caching work like it used to instead of using those crazy hash subdirectories? Read on!
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Scottie Programming caching, rails, ruby
Until recently, I got a lot of use out of Google Translate. It worked great, it was fast, and its web page translations were good enough.
But then, something changed.
Now when I use Google Translate in Firefox to translate a certain URI, it seems to get stuck in some kind of loop and then craps out.
So I found a lovely alternative: Bing Translate!
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Scottie Computers bing, google, microsoft, translate
With the advent of Thunderbird 3, searching messages became a bit more sassy in the old bird.
There is one little problem: it is not readily apparent how one actually searches for text inside an open e-mail.
It used to be that you could just type Ctrl-F and the little “Find” bar opened at the bottom of your message pane/window. Type in some text, and all instances of that text would be highlighted in the open message.
In the latest Tbird, that doesn’t work in certain cases. In fact, searching in an open message has become downright annoying, and nobody seems to know how to make it work. Several people even filed bug reports about it.
This situation was obviously intolerable, so I finally managed to solve it!
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Scottie Computers e-mail, search, thunderbird
If you’re using Ubuntu Server 10.10 and you get the upgrade notice for 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”, you might want to hold off a bit before taking the plunge and typing “do-release-upgrade”.
It seems there is a rather severe problem with GRUB 2. If you have a RAID setup – and even if you don’t – GRUB may not load at all upon reboot, leaving you with a bricked server.
There doesn’t seem to be a fix for it. In fact, I do believe the name of the release should be changed to “Nasty Narwhal”.
Here’s the scoop.
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Scottie Computers natty, server, ubuntu, upgrade
These days, the fad is GREEN. Everything is “eco-this” or “green that”. Of course, we’re supposed to be terribly concerned about saving Mother Earth. Well, I’ve got news for you: Mother Earth is plenty capable of taking care of herself… Whether or not humankind survives her care is another question entirely. Frankly, if I were Big Mama, I’d be pretty pissed off that my occupants were continually dumping toxic crap on me and irradiating me. I don’t think I would care if they were using a certain type of hard drive or not.
But, I digress…
If you’re in the market for a new hard drive, you may have noticed that there are now tons of “green” hard drives out there. There are several reasons why you do NOT want one of these things. Perhaps the most important reason is that when you get right down to it, they do almost nothing to truly save energy – which kind of defeats the purpose of having a green drive, now doesn’t it?
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Scottie Computers, Spare Me! green, harddrive, hdd
Most likely, you have at least the Java runtime environment installed on your puter. And, if you’re using Firefox, you may have some strange add-ons installed that just won’t go away.
With every Java update you install, yet another “Java Console” add-on may be installed. The problem is, all you can do is disable them. There is no way to actually uninstall older versions of this add-on. Worse yet, you don’t even really need the add-on in the first place!
So, if you have multiple Java Console add-ons sitting in your Firefox, how do you get rid of the darn things?
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Scottie Computers add-ons, extensions, firefox, java
In the olden days, video games relied heavily upon sprites given the rather severe limitations of computing hardware at the time.
You can use this “old” technique to reduce the bandwidth load on your server.
Most major web sites use them, but you may never have even heard of a sprite.
But what exactly is an image sprite, and why does it save bandwidth?
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Scottie Programming CSS, images, sprites, web
Click here to read Part 1!
I’m going to assume that you know how to do some basic stuff in Linux. In other words, if you don’t know what a command line is, or how to traverse directories, this might not help you much.
I should also note that my preferred flavor of Linux is Ubuntu. These commands will work on Ubuntu, but I can’t make any guarantees for other distributions. Best to just try them out and see what happens!
Without further ado, here are some more of the top linux tips and tricks that I have gathered over the years…
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Scottie Computers linux, ubuntu
This original article was first published in The Dot Connector Magazine, Issue #11.
On August 3, 2010, a C3-class solar flare caused a coronal mass ejection that headed towards the Earth. The impact of the flare resulted in a G2-class geomagnetic storm that lasted almost 12 hours. The official story is that the storm caused beautiful northern lights to appear from Europe to North America. Well, that doesn’t seem so bad, does it?
Nevertheless, there has been a lot of talk lately about solar flares and how a big enough solar flare directed towards Earth could knock out electrical grids. As we all know, sometimes the mainstream media talks up certain scenarios to scare everyone. Sometimes they just make things up entirely. In this case, I sat up and took notice because the power in southern Europe was flickering that night. Lights would dim in a pulsating fashion. That is a fairly rare occurrence. It is doubly strange because according to conventional wisdom, geomagnetic storms cause aurorae and electrical problems mostly in latitudes closer to the poles.
Obviously, some investigation was in order. First, we need to understand a little something about sunspots, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections.
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Scottie How Does it Work?, Space cme, earth ground, gic, ground current, solar flare
