Author: Dave Farquhar

The safest way yet to clean your train track

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , ,

The subject of the best way to clean train track sure does ruffle some feathers. Everyone, it seems, has their favorite elixir to swab down their tracks and some favorite material to wipe it back up with.

When it comes to Lionel, Marx, and American Flyer track, all of which is tin plated, it’s best to avoid anything abrasive if at all possible. Steel wool is absolutely out, sandpaper is bad news, and even a Scotch Brite-type pad is best to avoid. Scratches attract more dirt, which causes the track to get dirty faster, and eventually the abrasiveness rubs through the tin plating, taking your rust prevention with it.

If the track has already rusted a little, a Scotch Brite pad is about the best bet. But if not, the January 2014 Classic Toy Trains has the best answer I’ve seen yet: microfiber cloth. Read more

Hacker chasing, circa 1987

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing, security , , , , , , , , ,
Hacker chasing, circa 1987

I’m catching up on reading. Next on my reading list is The Cuckoo’s Egg, (Amazon link), Clifford Stoll’s memoir of chasing down a computer hacker in the late 1980s. In it, he describes a very different world, ruled by mainframes and minicomputers, where Unix was something special, IBM still made PCs, but desktop PCs and Macintoshes only received occasional mention, and academia and the military owned the Internet, almost literally. And, oh, by the way, the Cold War was still raging.

The remarkable thing about this book is that it’s an approachable spy thriller, written in 1989, that explains computer security to an audience that had never seen or heard of the Internet. You don’t have to be a security professional to appreciate it, though it’s a classic in the computer security world–many people read it in the late 1980s and early 1990s and decided to get into the field. Read more

Why the government (and others) still deal in floppy disks

Dave Farquhar security
Why the government (and others) still deal in floppy disks

The revelation that the Federal Government still relies on floppy disks for some of its business is making it the butt of some jokes this week. And although that will serve as confirmation for some people that the government is completely backward, there are actually multiple good explanations for it.

From a security standpoint, using floppy disks isn’t a bad idea at all. Read more

A meeting secret weapon: the potato

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , ,

One of the security podcasts I listen to–I’m not sure which one, but this sure sounds like Liquid Matrix–gave some advice the other week about meetings: Bring a raw potato.

With any luck, you won’t need it. But if the meeting gets out of hand, whip out the raw potato and–hopefully you washed it first–eat it. Yes, just like an apple. Supposedly the meeting ends very quickly when you do this.

I was at a meeting about backups last week where I really needed this. We’re at a stalemate. I need some disk space and the ability to connect to it via NFS or SCP. My protagonist wants to come in through MySQL. He’s not coming in through MySQL, and we’re not reverse-engineering a product that costs more than my house. My stance is that we’ll use the product precisely the way it’s designed, so that next week when we need the vendor’s support, they don’t blame whatever problem we’re having on the backups. The product has the facility to back up and restore its data through one of those two protocols, and setting it up takes less time than a single meeting.

Too bad it was a conference call, where I’m not sure it would have the same effect. But the next time I get a meeting request about this when what I need is a destination IP address, account credentials, and a protocol, I’m bringing a potato.

The Phoenix Project: A must-read book for anyone who aspires to IT leadership

Dave Farquhar security , , , , ,

After a bad day at work last week, I went home and ordered The Phoenix Project (or here it is on Amazon), started reading it, and felt better. Like Office Space, but there’s more to learn from it.

Phoenix is more realistic. Every problem every shop I’ve ever worked in is in that shop, plus some I’ve (luckily) only heard about. But unlike Office Space, it has solutions beyond burning the building down. Read more

The three things that make a difference

Dave Farquhar Parenting ,

So I was talking with my boss’ boss’ boss one day last week about parenting. He was talking about sending his kids to Montessori school and what an advantage it was, but how much it cost, and, well, I agree. Two years of Montessori school had me reading at a third grade level before I started first grade, and my math skills were pretty advanced too, even though I already didn’t like math. Then he paused and said, somewhat whimsically, that it doesn’t make much of a difference.

There are only three things a parent can or can’t do that make a big difference in how their kids turn out, he said. Read more

Things to do for your relatives’ computers this Christmas

Dave Farquhar security , , , , , , , , , , ,

I wish I’d posted this last week, since many of us see one set of relatives at Thanksgiving and a different set at Christmas (and perhaps New Year’s). Here are things you can do as preventative maintenance for relatives whose computers could use a little help. Read more

Hostsman makes it easy to block malware with a hosts file

Dave Farquhar security , , , ,

I’ve written before about using the hosts file to block domains that are hosting malware. The idea is pretty simple. There’s a known list of domains that are either hosting or controlling malware, so by blocking your computer from accessing those domains, you make it much harder to get infected in the first place, and in the event that you do get infected, at least you block access to the command and control servers.

The problem is that Windows doesn’t make this easy. Well, I found an easy way: Hostsman. You can have it up and running in minutes.

Update: Don’t mess around with hosts files. It’s more efficient and more effective to change DNS servers instead.

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Getting a proper Start button back even when Microsoft doesn’t want to give one

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , , , ,

Are you putting off switching to Windows 8.1 because you don’t want to relearn everything from scratch that you’ve known since 1995? I saw Windows 8.1 on Thanksgiving, and you have to do some asinine downward swipe with the mouse to bring up Control Panel. Yeah, that’s easier.

But even though Microsoft insists on shooting itself in the foot with a nuclear missile, Classic Shell fixes what Microsoft refuses to fix. Want Windows 8 to act like Windows 7? No problem. Want it to look like XP? Yeah, you can even do that.

So I highly recommend it. Yes, Windows 8.1 with Classic Start. Here’s why. Read more

Upgrading a D-Link DIR-615 to DD-WRT

Dave Farquhar DD-WRT, Hardware, security, Servers and Networking , , , , , , , ,

Last year I bought my mother in law a D-Link router, an oddball DIR-615 revision E1 that was only sold at a few stores. It was supposed to be a Fry’s exclusive, but I bought hers at Micro Center. It worked for a while, then gave her trouble, so this year I was working with it again, and when I was setting it up, I noticed it had some security vulnerabilities–remote code execution, UPnP vulnerabilities, and who knows what else.  So that got me some practice upgrading a D-Link DIR-615 to DD-WRT.

DD-WRT’s track record and attitude towards security research could be better, but I’d rather trust my mother in law to DD-WRT’s B+ security than D-Link’s F.

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