Author: Dave Farquhar

And we’re live.

Dave Farquhar General

Steve and I have been working for a couple of hours, and the old Greymatter site is no more (well, it still exists but it’s offline), replaced by this. The old static files are still out there for posterity’s sake. Well, for your bookmarks’ sake, anyway.
While I was moving archives around and changing templates, Steve was fixing karma. I think we’re 100% functional again. I’ll be back later with new stuff. Meanwhile, enjoy the new site.

Disguising a Linux box for the big, bad world

Dave Farquhar Linux ,

I had to put a Linux server out all alone in the big, bad world today. Before I turned it loose, I did a few things to give it a fighting chance out there.
The biggest thing I did was make the machine volunteer as little information as possible. Here’s how.
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Coming soon: My best line ever

Dave Farquhar Society

I just came up with the most sensational lead-in of my entire adult life. But I can’t use it yet because it has someone else’s name in it and I really ought to clear it with him first.
There’s no shortage of other things to talk about. I’d really love to use that line because it’s so politically incorrect… But I need something to make you come back tomorrow anyway. Meanwhile I’ll talk about something else. Politically incorrect, of course.
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A dream realized: Mozilla 1.0

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

Mozilla 1.0 went gold Wednesday, and it’s a keeper.
After years of suffering through Netscape 4.x, Netscape loyalists finally have a browser that’s worth upgrading to. Mozilla 1.0 offers speed that’s comparable to the latest versions of Internet Explorer (when it’s not downright faster), along with better standards compliance, fewer security holes (did you catch the security hole in IE’s gopher implementation Wednesday?) and compelling features that IE lacks.
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Getting out of a sticky BIND

Dave Farquhar Linux , , ,

Setting up DNS on Linux isn’t supposed to be the easiest thing in the world. But it wasn’t supposed to be this hard either.
I installed Debian (since it’s nice and lean and mean) and BIND 9.2.1 and dutifully entered the named.conf file and the zones files. I checked out their syntax with the included tools (named-checkconf and named-checkzone). It checked out fine. But my Windows PCs wouldn’t resolve against it.
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What am I?

Dave Farquhar Christianity

OK, I’ll share my scores from Belief-O-Matic, the online test that asks you a bunch of questions and tries to guess your religion.
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Let’s be rational when we talk about the War on Terror

Dave Farquhar Society

I guess the War on Terror isn’t progressing fast enough for some people.
I guess you can count me among them, but I’m not going to throw a fit about it. When we act impatient and irrational, we’re giving the enemy exactly what they want. Plus, it’s a very short step from talking tough and dumb to disaster.
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A useful Linux app for your CD-R

Dave Farquhar Linux ,

Quit wasting space on your CD rack with CDs that are only 3/4 full!
C’mon. You know you’ve done it. You’ve got 1.9 gigs worth of stuff to burn to CD. You know it should fit on three CDs. Half an hour later, you’re tired of trying to figure out how to make it fit and you just burn 500 megs’ worth on four CDs.
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Trolling ’round the ‘net

Dave Farquhar Society

I’m not feeling nauseous enough so I’ll go troll some news sites and see what I find.
Foxnews: “I think the value of life has been really reduced when a person who strangles their child gets less time than you would for killing a pet.” This person is surprised that there are people who value the lives of our pets more than the lives of our children? The spoils of our past 30 years are coming home to roost. I hope everyone enjoys them, because it’s only going to get worse.

Remember that homo sapien plot to take over the world? No need to worry about it. Even if they do manage to take over the world, they’ll squander it because all they want to do is kill each other.

London Telegraph: Israel arrests and holds 100 Palestinians. Be glad that’s all they’re doing. History will look back at today’s Palestinians as the 21st century’s answer to the Nazis. (Just another case of the homo sapiens killing each other for fun and profit.)

Bah. That’s enough for people to talk about. I’m going to bed.

Wiping a disk securely

Dave Farquhar Linux , ,

Sometimes in the course of work, it’s necessary to securely wipe a disk. A drive containing confidential information may require replacement. Assuming you caught the problem before the drive died for good, you can wipe it before sending it back to the manufacturer.
Programs to securely wipe a drive cost money. Sometimes big money. Fortunately, it’s easy to do it with Linux.
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