David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I saw in this morning’s Post-Dispatch that 25% of student borrowers can’t repay their debts.
I understand why, but it’s preventable. Jim Gallagher’s column has some good advice. I’ll add some more, having recently spent a little time on my old stomping grounds at Mizzou. Read more
It seems like I’ve been finding a lot of financial questions online lately. I guess that’s good–it means people are thinking. The best question I’ve found this week is whether you should use your emergency fund to pay off credit card debt.
Mathematically, it makes sense to do so. But one thing I remember hearing time and time again as we were paying off massive quantities of debt was not to empty bank accounts in order to do it. The reason for it was simple: Life is unpredictable. Read more
If there’s a theme I’ve heard over and over again this year, it’s that it’s time to pay attention to security in embedded devices like routers, other network equipment, televisions, and the other devices around us. This is the soft underbelly, and frankly, it’s probably a time bomb.
The astonishing thing is that we’re now protecting our computers with devices that have bigger security holes than our computers do. Read more
The Bradley Manning verdict came out this week, and the less I say about Manning himself the better, but one thing in the press coverage definitely bothered me, and I want to set that straight.
The prosecution attempted to tie him to Julian Assange, saying he coached Manning on the use of “hacking tool wget.”
Wget isn’t a hacking tool. Read more
I picked up a Celeron G1610 CPU last week and I’m using it to build a Linux box. Yeah, it’s a Celeron. But it performs like a 2011-vintage Core i3 or a 2010-vintage Core i5, consumes less power than either, and costs less than $50. It’s hard to go wrong with that. Read more
I’m working right now for a Fortune 25 company. This story is going to sound like bragging, so I’ll ask forgiveness in advance. Maybe if I mention I’m a contractor, then it’s not bragging quite so bad. Read more
An article on Lifehacker this week explained a lot about how I initially became a computer professional. Its advice was to fly by the seat of your pants, try things without guidance or manuals, not be afraid to fail occasionally, and learn before you go to sleep.
So when I spent many nights in my late teens disassembling and reassembling obsolete IBM PC/XT clones to learn how they worked, I was unwittingly doing all of it right.
The first version of Windows NT, version 3.1 (to coincide with the then-current 16-bit version of Windows) was released 20 years ago today. It was an insanely ambitious effort for Microsoft that took a while to pay off, though it eventually did in spades. Windows NT was what killed off Novell and OS/2 and turned the proprietary operating system market into a duopoly. Although a user running it wouldn’t see much difference between Windows NT and regular Windows except that it didn’t crash nearly as much, it was the first version of Windows that qualifies as a modern operating system, with pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory.
Both Libre Office and Open Office released new versions this week, and the changelog indicates a good amount of shared code between the two, at least in this go-round. The animosity between the two—Libre Office is a fork of Open Office, dating to before the time Oracle spun the project off to Apache—may thus be overstated. Read more
Every once in a great while, I have to answer a question like what version of Windows a range of servers is running. If the number of servers is very small, you can just connect to them with a Terminal Services client and note what comes up. But sometimes that’s impractical. Right now I’m working someplace that has 8,000 servers, more or less. I’m not going to check 8,000 servers manually. I’m just not.
Here’s a more elegant, much faster way to go about getting that information.