David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I saw some abuses of the red-light cameras on the news at noon. In one case, the car next to the one that ran the light got the ticket. In another, the owner wasn’t driving the car. The reporter asked the mayor of Florissant, Thomas Schneider, if that was fair.
“It’s safe,” he said. And he said the same thing to every other question the reporter asked.
That’s debatable. But guess what? Josef Stalin’s regime was very safe. Do what Stalin said, and you were safe. That doesn’t make Stalin fair, right, or ethical. It doesn’t make Schneider fair, right, or ethical either.
It’s not safe, either.
No OS is 100% secure if there’s enough desire to get in. There’s a web server exploit targeting Apache, Nginx, and Lighttpd running on Linux–a first of its kind, in at least one regard.
According to this page, if you execute this command:
strings /usr/bin/apache2 | egrep opentty
you’re clean if nothing comes up, and your infected if you see one or more matches. If your system stores its httpd elsewhere, change the first parameter to match.
This past week, Barnes and Noble put the Google Play store on its Nook HD and Nook HD+ tablets. So while they’re still running a forked Android, they’ll run most Android apps without you having to do anything special. That, plus the high-resolution screen, the low price, plus the ability to plug microSD cards into it, plus the ready availability at major retailers makes for a much more compelling tablet.
Sales have been abysmal lately, but I expect this to change that pretty quickly. Now the Nook tablets have three things the Kindle Fires lack: a better screen, greater openness, and expandability. Now they look like a very good general purpose tablet, to my eye.
Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) came out this weekend, and I want to mess with it. Here’s how I wrote the installation media to a USB thumb drive for it using a Windows box. Because sometimes that’s all you have available to work with. If you prefer another Linux distribution, like Ubuntu or CentOS or Fedora, the same trick will work for them too.
MSN asks if investors are ruining the housing market. I say no–around me, if it weren’t for the investors, there would be no housing market to speak of.
Let me tell you a story.
I saw a question on a vintage computing forum this week: How did the IBM PC become the de facto standard for PCs, and the only desktop computer architecture from the 1980s to survive until today?
It’s a very good question, and I think there were several reasons for it. I also think without all of the reasons, the IBM PC wouldn’t have necessarily won. In some regards, of course, it was a hollow victory. IBM has been out of the PC business for a decade now. Its partners Intel and Microsoft, however, reaped the benefits time and again.
PC Magazine is advocating a bring your own laptop, with your own software approach to business. It likens it to mechanics who bring their own tools.
The trouble is that while mechanical tools in a toolbox operate autonomously and don’t interfere with one another, software residing on a computer does. Read more
Unfortunately, energy saving products are political. Pitch energy efficiency as a cost savings, and liberals and conservatives alike are willing to buy. Pitch it as environmental-saving, and moderates get turned off while conservatives get even more so.
The lesson to marketers: Sell energy-efficient products as technology that promotes energy independence and cost savings. Everyone likes technology, everyone likes energy independence, and everyone likes cost savings.
And the savings is significant. Although I don’t have LED lights and an occupancy switch in every room yet, that’s my eventual goal. Even as electric rates go up, my electric bills tend to hold steady or barely go up, mostly because none of my rooms consume more than 60 watts of electricity to light them, and the highest-traffic rooms turn the lights off automatically after everyone leaves. My total usage goes down some years.
And for what it’s worth, I always preferred LED lights with occupancy switches. The LEDs don’t seem to care how often you switch them off and on; but CFL bulbs do. When using an occupancy switch with CFL bulbs, be sure to put them on their very longest time setting. Anymore, I always go with LED bulbs.
I have a fair number of documents I created myself–that probably shouldn’t surprise anyone–but I don’t think I’m the only one who does. And from time to time, I’d like to reference them, and I may not have my computer with me.
Carrying around a cheap Nook or Kindle isn’t much of a problem, though. If only I could get my Word documents to display on it… It turns out that’s not hard to do. Here’s how to load your own content onto a Nook, Kindle, or any other similar device. Read more