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Disabling Firefox Resume From Crash
Though to many it’s handy, personally I find Firefox‘s “Resume from Crash” function, well, annoying. This function makes it so that if Firefox is killed prematurely that the next time you start it you get an (annoying) popup that asks you if you want to restore the previous state/page(s) that Firefox was viewing. I can…
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ICANN to end (finally) domain tasting/kiting
Domain “tasting” and “kiting“, which are where companies (often registrars) use a loophole in the domain purchase cancellation policy to hold domains without paying for them, are finally heading toward an end. Using “tasting” and “kiting” techniques a huge number of domains that otherwise would be available are held by corporations who essentially “squat” on…
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My LinkedIn profile
Of all the networking sites, LinkedIn appears to be about the most useful. Here’s the link to my personal profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mattfahrner Not that there is that much there to see about me.
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Forget the stores…
If you’re looking for a new laptop, clearly the place to go is the airport! Over 637,000 served!
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Custom Google RedHat Kickstart List search engine
Michael DeHaan at RedHat has created a custom Google “search engine” to search the RedHat Kickstart List archives (the RedHat mailing list “kickstart-list@redhat.com“). It looks pretty handy to not have to use other perhaps more painful tools (or get too much noise): http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=016811804524159694721%3A1h7btspnxtu This whole idea of custom Google Search Engines (which appears to be…
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Handy “Mozilla” backup page
If you want to back up your Mozilla settings, whether it be Firefox or Thunderbird, this is a very hand page: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Migrating_settings_to_a_new_profile I had actually figured out most of these, but it help me catch a few I might have otherwise missed.
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CrossLoop – secure remote access
A friend of mine showed me what looks like a nice (free) secure remote access solution for visually managing a remote PC: http://www.crossloop.com It’s based on TightVNC and therefor has the advantage of using encryption on the control session, helping reduce the risk of prying eyes. It also has a pretty cool way of letting…
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SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Americas Blog
Here’s a potentially interesting Novell SUSE blog where you might expect a little more “off the cuff” information from the SUSE development teams: http://opsamericas.com There seem to be some interesting articles about a range of things including licensing, desktop lockdown, how to add/update drives to AutoYast etc…
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Fedora 8, NIS (or LDAP), and “gdmgreeter”
One major issue with Fedora 8 in shops that use a network user repository like NIS or LDAP is “gdmgreeter” breaks (note “gdmgreeter” is the Fedora replacement for XDM). The symptom is X11will fail repeatedly and not come up. In that case you will also see errors like this in “/var/log/messages”: Jun 13 12:18:00 myhost…
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Fedora Core 6-isms
While in the organizations I have sway over we are working to rid ourselves of older out of maintenance OSes, I do occasionally run into some Fedora Core 6. When I do there are a couple of minor hacks you regularly have to do to make things work (note these are after applying the latest…
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Good RPM documention
Good documentation for maintaining/creating Linux RPMs is difficult to find. This Wraptastic site seems to have so good stuff: http://wraptastic.org It appears official, but it’s hard to say since the site seems to lack an “about” to key off of. In a related line, these two RedHat sites seem to have copies of the “Maximum…
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How to “fix” a Mozilla plugin for a new Firefox
Ok, lets you’re using a great Firefox plugin, like say “QuickProxy” and you go to upgrade Firefox and it doesn’t work because it says the plugin doesn’t support this version of the Firefox. Well, there’s an easy “hack” (kludge, whatever) around it: Download the “.XPI” plugin file, rename it to a “.ZIP” extension. Unzip it…
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And this is why security REALLY matters…
Imagine if you went to file your income tax return, only to find out that someone had already filed it and gotten your refund: http://csoonline.com/article/381513/UnitedHealthcare_Data_Breach_Leads_To_ID_Theft That is exactly what happened to 155 graduate and medical students of UC Irvine who were victims of identity after UnitedHealthcare’s (the provider of their medical insurance) records were breached.…
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How to create a mini-boot CD for SLES 10 SP1
If you have an older system that doesn’t have an internal DVD but you do have an external USB DVD, here’s how to build a CD to boot from. This will probably work with any version of SLES 10: Boot Linux and mount the SLES 10 DVD. mkdir /tmp/mini-boot cp <path-to-DVD-mount>/boot/i386/loader/* /tmp/mini-boot mkisofs -o /tmp/mini-boot.iso…
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Bill Gates retires?
A “kind of” funny video about Bill Gates “retirement”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr5w3X4R8b4 It’s perhaps a little too self aware and woody but still worth watching. Of course if you’re a bit of an Open Source person like myself, you might also enjoy this: http://strom.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/giving-thanks-to-bill-gates It has a little “bite” shall we say though.
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Pretty cool Google tool…
I’m not sure how useful this would actually be in practice, but this “Goosh” or “Google Shell” is a pretty neat trick: http://goosh.org which is an unofficial command line tool to access Google. For those of us Unix types, it’s fun to see it presented this way, though as noted I’m not sure how useful…
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IT Acronym Hell
Whenever I enter IT acronym hell (SOA, ITIL, IPAM, ETL, etc, etc…) I always think of this quote: “Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the VP is such a VIP, shouldn’t we keep the PC on the QT? ‘Cause if it leaks to the VC he could end up MIA, and then we’d all be…
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BIND DNS “replacement” released
NLnet Labs, Verisign, Nominet, and Kerei have announced the release of a new DNS server to potentially replace ISC’s BIND: http://www.unbound.net/ Built from the ground up, it’s supposed to be faster and more secure, in part supporting DNSSEC out of the box. Of course as with all new software, it remains to be seen if…
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Email obfuscation in HTML
One of the problems with posting your email is that there are programs that troll the web for email addresses for SPAM uses. This site: E-mail Obfuscator does a quick conversion of your email address into HTML that most of these programs can’t or won’t read, hopefully allowing you to post your email and avoid…