Planet Sysadmin

Font Manager - A font management application for the GNOME desktop

2010-03-11T00:36:12+00:00

Font Manager is a font management application for the GNOME desktop. It is not intended to be a professional-grade font management solution, but rather a simple application suitable for the needs of most desktop users and even some graphics designers who may need to manage just a few thousand font files. Although designed with the GNOME desktop environment in mind, it should work well with most major desktop environments such as XFCE, Enlightenment, and KDE.
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Post tags: desktop, Font Manager, Font Manager ubuntu, install Font Manager ubuntu

Automated install comes to open source .NET projects

2010-03-10T16:49:07+00:00

One of the nice things about Linux is the ability to install apps (and dependencies) very easily using apt-get or similar. Windows users have been missing a similar tool for a long time. Never fear, the Scottish Alt.Net group have written Hornget, a tool for installing open source .NET projects.

Quite a few projects are supported, though most are of interest only to programmers. It would be nice to see a lot more user oriented tools like games and the like.

Add Defragment to the Shell menu in Windows 7 / Vista

2010-03-10T16:19:38+00:00

I find adding common tasks to the shell menu a great timesaver when I am running between stations. It is also easier to direct users to simply “right-click” on something rather than walk them through a maze of menus…or even have them find the “run” box.

Click Start -> type “regedit” in the Search command box.
Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell.
Right-click on “shell” and select New -> Key. Name it “runas” and set the default value to “Defragment”.
Right-click on “runas” and select New -> Key. Name it “command” and set the default value to “defrag %1 -v“.
If you ever wish to remove this functionality, just delete the “runas” key.

You can also paste the following into Notepad and save it as: RightClickDefragment.reg or you can download the zipped RightClickDefragment.reg here. Double-click on the .reg file and click “yes” when asked to enter it into the registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\runas]
@=”Defragment”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\runas\command]
@=”defrag %1 -v”

Install openshot video editor 1.1 in ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) /9.10 (Karmic)

2010-03-10T15:47:47+00:00

OpenShot Video Editor is a non-linear video editor. It is meant to be an easy-to-use, powerful, non-linear video editor, with a focus on user interface, work flow, and stability.
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Post tags: desktop, Install openshot video editor 1.1 in ubuntu 10.04, Install openshot video editor 1.1 in ubuntu 9.10, Install openshot video editor 1.1 in ubuntu karmic, Install openshot video editor 1.1 in ubuntu lucid

The woes of a small infrastructure admin…

2010-03-10T14:53:55+00:00

Before I start, I just want you to know that I’m not whining, I just thought I’d give this as an example of some of the things that people who run small infrastructures are left out of…

Today I’m sitting in the office in NJ, doing work as normal. What I’d prefer to be doing is going to the IT Roadmap Conference & Expo in NYC. According to the website, it’s “designed for IT professionals who want to cover multiple industry topics in one day”. That sounds like something I’d be interested in!

Essentially, it’s a sales pitch, or a series of sales pitches. I don’t know if I’m in the market for what they’re selling, but I’d like to go find out what is being offered. All the same, I like to keep my eyes on the horizon, because things have a habit of coming up quick on us in IT, and if we don’t familiarize ourselves with the likely technology of the next few years, then we’ll be caught with our pants down. So I wanted to see what people were selling.

The conference is free. All you have to do is fill out the application for registration. Unfortunately, I don’t qualify:

Dear Matt,

Thank you for your interest in Network World Live’s IT Roadmap Conference & Expo in New York.

Unfortunately, after reviewing the information that you submitted, we determined that at this time, we are not able to confirm your seat on a complimentary basis.

As we noted on the registration form, this event is geared towards network and IT professionals in end-user type companies who actively purchase products and services – or – who will be doing so in the near future. We have a limited number of complimentary seats reserved for attendees who meet this criteria.
…
snip
…
Walk-ins or ineligible applicants arriving at the conference facility will NOT be admitted on the day of the event.
Thank you,

IT Roadmap Team
Network World Events & Executive Forums

(emphasis theirs)

Well, I do actively purchase technologies and products, but not at the scale that they’re looking for, I suppose. I don’t have 50 data centers, or “20,000 or more” servers, so I don’t get to go to their party and look at the toys.

It’s unfortunate for them and me, but somehow I think I’ll live. I just wanted to give you a tangible example of…well…I won’t go so far as to say discrimination, but maybe exclusion, that we small admins deal with from vendors.

Now playing: Apps Script for Google Docs

2010-03-10T14:22:08+00:00

The Google Apps team here in New York City is a hotbed of movie fanatics. But while planning a recent movie night, we realized we spend too much time organizing our events and not enough time discussing, debating and watching movies.

To take the hard work out of planning, we turned to Google Apps Script, which lets you write short programs that automatically perform simple actions within a spreadsheet. For example, our Movie Night script figures out which movies are playing close by and invites everyone to vote on what they’d most like to see.

Google Apps Script has been available to Google Apps customers since January, and today we’re excited to bring it to everyone who uses Google spreadsheets. Apps Script can be helpful for all kinds of things, from customized party invites to sending out holiday letters — in fact Apps Script can be especially helpful for those repetitive, time consuming tasks.

To help you find useful scripts, we’ve also launched a public gallery where you can check out our Movie Night script and browse other available scripts. If you’re feeling adventurous, try your hand at writing your own script and submit it to the gallery for others to use. To see the gallery or install a script in your spreadsheet, click on “Insert” and select “Script.”

Check out the Google Docs blog for more information about Apps Script, and to learn about writing your own scripts, visit the Google Apps Developer Blog.

Posted by Evin Levey, Product Manager, Google Apps

Finding awesome stuff online with Google Reader Play

2010-03-10T13:24:05+00:00

I use Google Reader a lot — not only to stay on top of the news, but also to find interesting blog posts and articles. I’m always telling my friends about Google Reader, and while some of them love it, others don’t want to take the time to set it up. For those of you who fall into this second category, we’re announcing Google Reader Play, a new product that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone. Reader Play is a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web, customized to the topics you’re interested in, with no setup required.

Items in Reader Play are presented one at a time, and images and videos are automatically enlarged to maximize the viewing experience. We use the technology behind Recommended Items in Reader to populate Reader Play with the most interesting content on the web. While you don’t need a Google account to use Reader Play, your experience will be personalized if you sign in. As you browse, you can let us know which items you enjoy by clicking the "like" button, and we'll use that info to show you other content we think you’ll enjoy.

We think Reader Play is a fun way to browse interesting items online that you wouldn’t find otherwise. We designed it especially for people who don’t want to spend time curating their own set of feeds — but folks who already use Reader can easily use it to read their feeds as well. Just click the feed settings menu on any feed in Reader and select “View in Reader Play.” We’re launching Reader Play as an experiment in Google Labs so that we can test it out, get feedback from you and then improve it as quickly as possible. Visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Posted by Garrett Wu, Software Engineer

Mowgli's Song

2010-03-10T12:57:25+00:00

I've finally finished recording part three of The Jungle Book, in which Mowgli hunts Shere Khan. Perhaps I'll get it edited some other morning this week.

Here's a preview - Mowgli's Song, That He Sang At The Council Rock When He Danced On Shere Khan's Hide

Listen HERE or subscribe to my podcast.

Now I'll have to find something else to record to keep the boy happy.

Drucumber: Drupal testing made easy

2010-03-10T11:11:05+00:00

http://www.pronovix.com/blog/drucumber-testing-made-easy-how-delegate-drupal-testing-your-project-manager

Drucumber is a new module that converts native-language like text into a Drupal Simpletests. The goal of this module is to allow end-users and project teams to implement behavior driven development: specify behaviors or features of a Drupal site in a test and never again worry about checking it.

Quick and Easy Title Bar Button Side Switching in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid)/9.10 (Karmic)

2010-03-10T10:25:26+00:00

A ton of users are dissatisfied with the decision to change the buttons on the title bar, however, it’s incredibly easy to change back and forth between the old (Karmic) look, and the new (Lucid Alpha) look. You do not have to be on Lucid to test out the new look. These commands work fine on Karmic and (probably) older.
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Giggle - A graphical frontend for the git content tracker

2010-03-10T10:04:12+00:00

Giggle is a graphical frontend for the git content tracker (think of gitk on GTK+).

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Post tags: desktop, Giggle, Giggle ubuntu, git frontend ubuntu, install Giggle ubuntu

Bejtlich OWASP Podcast Posted

2010-03-10T10:01:29+00:00

My appearance on OWASP Podcast 61 is available.

The .mp3 is 36 MB. Thanks to Jim Manico for inviting me to participate.

We recorded the podcast in late January. Jim asked me the following questions:

Would you care to tell us how did you get into IT and what lead you into a career in information security? What keeps you busy these days?
What's the difference between focusing on threats vs focusing on vulnerabilities?
What is your problem with the "protect the data" mindset?
What do you mean by "building visibility in"?
What is your take on the Aurora/Google hack?
You just tweeted that "Network Security Monitoring ideology is the proper mechanism to combat APT/APA". Do you think network IPS/IDS/WAF can help defend insecure web applications? What are the limits of Network Security Monitoring?
How important a role do you think secure coding and secure software development life-cycle play in defending the enterprise?
Have HIPAA, PCI, SOX and other regulations helped reduce risk in the average enterprise?
Is seems pretty clear that attackers have a clear advantage. Why is that? How can we turn the tide?
Any thoughts on OWASP? Are we helping the cause?
Where are we going to be as an industry in 10 years?
You blogged that "The trustworthiness of a digital asset is limited by the owner's capability to detect incidents compromising the integrity of that asset." Given that we don't have any high integrity database, identities or application servers - how do you detect a breach of integrity when there is no verifiable integrity in the system in the first place?

The Internet in America: A YouTube Interview with the FCC

2010-03-10T08:16:37+00:00

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

If you're reading this, then you're probably on the Internet — via your laptop, your mobile phone or other handheld device, or maybe even through your television. But in 2010, millions of Americans still do not have access to the wealth of information made available on the Web. Even though the Internet was invented in the U.S. over 20 years ago, many Americans lag behind in both access to the Internet and speed of connections, which is why the Federal Communications Commission (or the FCC, the federal agency that oversees the U.S. communications industry) is launching its much-anticipated National Broadband Plan next Tuesday, to lay out its strategy for connecting all Americans to fast, affordable high-speed Internet.

After this plan is announced, you have the opportunity to interview FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in the second of a series of in-person YouTube interviews with government leaders. (Our first, with U.S. President Barack Obama, took place last month.) Go to CitizenTube today to submit your video or text question via Google Moderator, and vote on your favorites; we'll bring a selection of the top-voted questions to Chairman Genachowski in our interview next Tuesday, March 16. The deadline for submission is Sunday night, March 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT.

To help structure our conversation with the Chairman, we've broken the interview down into seven topics. To learn more about what the FCC is doing in each area, click on the links for each topic below. Then submit your question on CitizenTube under one of the topic headings.

Access to the Internet has transformed almost every aspect of our economy and society. This is your chance to press the FCC on how the National Broadband Plan will work, and ask your questions about improving the Internet in America. We're looking forward to seeing your questions and hearing what the Chairman has to say.

Posted by Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, YouTube

Mythology about Unix workstations

2010-03-10T07:57:25+00:00

Mythology about Unix workstations

Talking of Unix workstations, there's some mythology about them that seems to go around, or at least that may be going around and I feel like preemptively shooting down.

First, people who think that 1990s era Unix workstations were marvels of performance and features that have yet to be surpassed either have a very selective memory, were using very high end hardware from SGI, or never really used those workstations. I have used everything from Sun 3/50s onwards, and I can assure you that a modern PC that costs $500 smokes each and every one in terms of speed and features.

In fact, as I alluded to in passing in my original entry, old workstation hardware was actually rather terrible. It was not bad for the time (sometimes it was quite good), but it was not very good on an absolute scale and it was tolerable only because the software was equally limited so as not to exceed the hardware's capabilities. Let us not idolize the old days lest we be forced to live in them again, thanks.

The other piece of mythology is the idea that Unix workstation hardware was at least a marvel of niceness and good design compared to the hodgepodge and hacks of the current PC architecture. I am pretty sure that this was historically false; I certainly remember a whole stream of Usenix papers about what could basically be called 'the secret life of your hardware', where a number of kernel hackers wrote up bitter descriptions of exactly how bad various pieces of hardware were, such as Ethernet driver chipsets. Graphics were not exempt from this; for example, at the start of the 1990s, some DEC people wrote an entire paen about the advantages of an extremely simple framebuffer because its 2D performance beat the heck out of most of the then-current more complex graphics chipsets.

(Before you snort in disbelief at this, note that it was an 8-bit framebuffer. That was considered mainline or even advanced at the start of the 1990s, since at least you got 256 colours.)

I don't think that this should surprise anyone. People make design mistakes at the start of anything, because it takes time for them to figure what really works and what just looks good on paper, and the Unix workstation era happened in the early times of people making (commodity) chipsets for most of the hardware capabilities that we now take for granted.

(The less said about various workstation vendor predecessors to SCSI the better, especially in the server space. I still remember our early 1990s decision to pass over this new, low-performing 'SCSI' stuff in favour of an advanced, fast IPI disk interface on our new Sun 4 server. This being a university, that server stayed in production long enough for our laughter to become rather hollow.)

YouTube calling: Now serving ads on the YouTube mobile site

2010-03-10T07:02:37+00:00

(Cross-posted with the YouTube Biz Blog)

Mobile phones are rapidly becoming essential tools for surfing the web, connecting with friends, and sharing and watching video online, and we're seeing these effects at YouTube. The YouTube mobile site is more popular than ever: site traffic grew by over 160% in 2009, and now millions of people all over the world are streaming tens of millions of videos every day on their mobile phones. The mobile space moves fast, so we've been working hard to roll out new features and functionality quickly, especially as more and more people adopt YouTube-capable phones.

The increased usage of high-end devices like the iPhone and Android is also making mobile advertising easier and more effective for advertisers. So today, we're launching ads on the home, search and browse pages of the American and Japanese YouTube mobile websites (m.youtube.com from your mobile browser). This is a great way for advertisers to reach YouTube viewers across multiple platforms. In fact, at launch YouTube will immediately provide one of the largest audiences for a mobile ad campaign anywhere on the mobile web. And because YouTube mobile attracts early adopters, the site can deliver to advertisers a coveted demographic of tech savvy trendsetters. We've already seen some early campaigns run on YouTube's mobile site by advertisers like Sony (for the DVD release of "District 9") and Kia, both of whom were able to easily reach their target audience, no matter where they were looking for video.

Our first tests of YouTube mobile ads — with brands ranging from L'Oreal to Land Rover — showed strong results related to click-throughs, user experience and brand awareness, and we've learned a lot in the months since then. As a result, ads on the YouTube mobile website will be banner ads sold on a full-day basis (like with the YouTube homepage on the web), making a mobile buy an easy and valuable addition to any YouTube campaign. For example, today Mazda is running a homepage ad on YouTube.com, and extended their campaign to run ads on our mobile site as well.

If you're interested in learning more, reach out to your YouTube or Google sales rep, or visit youtube.com/advertise.

Posted by Taylor Cascino, Strategic Partner Development Manager

Biking directions added to Google Maps

2010-03-10T05:00:05+00:00

Whenever I meet someone who finds out that I work on the directions team for Google Maps, the first question I'm asked is often "So when's Google Maps going to add biking directions?" We're big biking fans too, so we've been itching to give you a concrete answer. I don't want to keep the good news a secret any longer, so the answer is: right now!

Today we've added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S. My team has been keeping close tabs on all the public support for biking directions that’s been steadily coming in, but we knew that when we added the feature, we wanted to do it right: we wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that's exactly what we've done.

Let's say you want to bike to work, or maybe you want to drive less and spend more time outdoors. Biking directions can help you find a convenient and efficient route that makes use of dedicated bike trails or lanes and avoids hills whenever possible. To find biking directions, select "Bicycling" from the drop-down menu when you do a directions search:

So, how does it work? Well, I'm based in Seattle, along with the rest of the biking directions team. The city is notoriously hilly, but also has some great trails and a strong cycling community. Let's say I'm trying to get from Golden Gardens to a friend's house in Montlake:

This route avoids hills (phew!) and puts me on the Burke-Gilman trail for most of the journey. When I need to get off the trail to cross town, biking directions makes sure to keep me on bike-friendly roads and avoid some of the city's busiest intersections. The time estimate for the route is based on a complex set of variables accounting for the type of road, terrain and turns over the course of my ride. If I decide that I want to stop at Woodland Park Zoo along the way, I can click on the blue path and drag it to my desired route — just like with driving directions — and we'll still customize the journey for cycling suitability. Over on the Lat Long Blog, you can read more about all the unique tweaks and calculations factored into our routing algorithm.

We've also added information about bike trails, lanes and recommended roads directly onto the map. This can help you get a better sense of your route, or let you find trails nearby for a recreational ride. When you're zoomed into a city, click on the "More" button at the top of the map to turn on the "Bicycling” layer. You'll see three types of lines appear on the map:

Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
Dashed green indicates roads that are designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes

Thanks primarily to our partnership with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, we now have more than 12,000 miles of trails included in biking directions and outlined directly on the map. We also have data on bike lanes and recommended streets for 150 cities across the country. We'll continue to add new trail information and encourage riders to send feedback (biking directions is in beta, after all) and route information for inclusion via the “Report a Problem” tool. When Map Maker is available in the U.S., all riders will be able to directly contribute their local knowledge about trails, bike lanes and suggested routes.

We know that many of you have been anxiously awaiting this feature, so head over to http://maps.google.com/biking to try it for yourself and then hop on your bike!

Posted by Shannon Guymon, Product Manager

A digital renaissance: partnering with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage

2010-03-10T04:00:10+00:00

The Renaissance, Europe's period of cultural, political and scientific rebirth, began in Florence around 600 years ago. At Google we're interested in a (small “r”) renaissance of a different kind — a digital one. Since the launch of Google Books, we’ve been working with libraries and publishers around the globe to bring more of the world's books to more readers around the globe. Any school child should be able to access the works of Petrarch, Dante or Vico (or, if they're so inclined, Machiavelli). In the case of these more famous authors, this is already largely possible, but what about the work of Guglielmo il Giuggiola or Coluccio Salutati? We want all of the great literature and writings of Italy to be accessible to the general public.

Today we’re announcing an agreement with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage that will push this vision forward. Working with the National Libraries of Florence and Rome, we’ll digitize up to a million out-of-copyright works. The libraries will select the works to be digitized from their collections, which include a wealth of rare historical books, including scientific works, literature from the period of the founding of Italy and the works of Italy's most famous poets and writers. It marks the first time we’ve ever joined forces with Italian libraries, and the first time we've worked with a ministry of culture.

Around Europe and the rest of the world, we are effectively witnessing a digital renaissance, with an increasing number of organizations running ambitious and promising book digitization projects. We're not the only ones who have seen the need to bring the world's books into digital form. Digitization of books is a tremendous undertaking, requiring the joint effort of a great number of public and private stakeholders. For this reason, we’re supportive of many other efforts at digitization, such as the European Commission's Europeana. We want to see these books have the broadest reach possible — the books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana, of which the Florence Library is a contributing member, and other digital libraries. The more of the world's historical, cultural treasures we can bring online, the more we can unlock our shared heritage.

We believe today’s announcement is an important step, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners. We envision a future in which people will be able to search and access the world's books anywhere, anytime. After all, Antonio Beccadelli and Anastasius Germonius — like Shakespeare and Cervantes — are part of our human cultural history.

Posted by Gino Mattiuzzo, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Italy

Caching-Tutorial für Webautoren und Webmaster

2010-03-10T03:48:13+00:00

Thomas Hühn has graciously translated the caching tutorial into German. Thanks!

See also the Chinese, Czech and French translations. To help the translators keep up with changes, I've started hosting the raw document on Github, which can also be used to log issues.

Tragic password policies

2010-03-10T02:27:51+00:00

I just completed an order with Newegg for some personal computing equipment. That part was OK. What wasn't OK was the "Verified by Visa" thingy that popped up during the ordering process. My primary credit cards aren't Visa so I haven't seen that yet, despite shopping on sites with the verified by Visa logo on 'em. Since I hadn't used it before I had to set the durned thing up. Which meant picking a password.

My jaw dropped.

6-8 characters is stated in the 'password policy' that was posted. And no matter what I threw at it, if I used my shift key it wouldn't take the password. I don't know about you, but complex password policies have been around long enough that my fingers automatically go for the shift key when entering passwords. NOT using it took mental effort. In fact, the password I ended up with is markedly less secure than the one I use for throw-away accounts on web-sites I don't care about.

That is not a way to run a bank.

I don't know what "Verified by Visa" really provides, but whatever it is, password security isn't it.

Task Coach - Your friendly task manager

2010-03-10T00:53:39+00:00

Task Coach is a simple open source todo manager to keep track of personal tasks and todo lists. It grew out of a frustration that most task managers do not provide facilities for composite tasks. Often, tasks and other things todo consist of several activities. Task Coach is designed to deal with composite tasks. In addition, it offers effort tracking, categories, and notes. Task Coach is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and iPhone and iPod Touch.
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Lovely Review of Manage Your Project Portfolio

2010-03-09T22:14:04+00:00

Steve Berczuk has a lovely discussion of Manage Your Project Portfolio. You can see his review here.

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OpenSSH 5.4: Great Scott!

2010-03-09T21:23:30+00:00

One point twenty one jiggawatts! Yesterday (March 8, 2010) the OpenSSH project released version 5.4 and naturally will start hitting the various distributions and platforms soon, and again there are some great things to be interested in:

Although many distributions of OpenSSH have SSH1 disabled, the project is now shipping with SSH1 disabled by default.
There is the ability to revoke keys (host and user) in both sshd and ssh.
Netcat mode connects stdio on the client to a single port forward on the server. For example the following would connect to smtp.server.example.org on port 25, and redirect the output to stdio on my client side. Useful if you need to test connectivity to a mail server, but can't from your direct location, but can from your SSH server (my.ssh.server.example.org). ssh -W smtp.server.example.org:25 my.ssh.server.example.org That has pretty much bags of possibilities, ranging from simple connection tests to piping a file to a remote server that you can't get to directly.
sftp-server has gained a read only mode!
Passphrase-protected SSH2 private keys are now protected with AES-128 instead of 3DES. This counts if you reencrypt your key or create a new one.

One more ZFS video

2010-03-09T20:32:00+00:00

Dynamic LUN expansion

http://blogs.sun.com/video/entry/zfs_dynamic_lun_expansion

Cool ZFS Dedup video

2010-03-09T20:30:00+00:00

Check out this vide by George Wilson of the ZFS team.

http://blogs.sun.com/video/entry/zfs_dedup

Debugging syslog-ng problems

2010-03-09T20:10:04+00:00

While debugging the syslog-ng issue I mentioned previously, I needed to be able to observe the syslog-ng pattern matches as they occurred. The syslog-ng daemon has a couple of useful options to assist with this. The first is the “-e” option, which causes the daemon to log to stdout. The second is the “-F” option, [...]

Open for business: the Google Apps Marketplace

2010-03-09T19:09:06+00:00

Every day, thousands of businesses choose the cloud. More than 2 million businesses have adopted Google Apps over the last three years, eliminating the hassles associated with purchasing, installing and maintaining hardware and software themselves.

We've found that when businesses begin to experience the benefits of cloud computing, they want more. We're often asked when we'll offer a wider variety of business applications — from accounting and project management to travel planning and human resources management. But we certainly can't and won't do it all, and there are hundreds of business applications for which we have no particular expertise.

In recent years, many talented software providers have embraced the cloud and delivered a diverse set of features capable of powering almost any business. But too often, customers who adopt applications from multiple vendors end up with a fractured experience, where each particular application exists in its own silo. Users are often forced to create and remember multiple passwords, cut and paste data between applications, and jump between multiple interfaces just to complete a simple task.

Today, we're making it easier for these users and software providers to do business in the cloud with a new online store for integrated business applications. The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps. More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses, including:

Intuit Online Payroll: A small business application that offers business owners a new way to efficiently run payroll, pay taxes and let employees check paystubs all within one integrated online office environment.
Manymoon: The company's free work and project management application for Google Apps makes it simple for businesses and teams to organize and share information including tasks, projects, documents, status updates and links with co-workers, customers and partners.
Professional Services Connect (PS Connect): This new cloud-based offering coming soon from Appirio, pulls contextually relevant information on people, projects, customers and transactions from a user's domain and surfaces it directly inside a Gmail message so services professionals can make more informed, real-time decisions.
JIRA Studio: A hosted software development suite from Atlassian enables software developers to flow naturally between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other design and development tools in order to better track and manage project issues and workflow.

Once installed to a company's domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each. The Google Apps Marketplace eliminates the worry about software updates, keeping track of different passwords and manual syncing and sharing of data, thereby increasing business productivity and lessening frustrations for users and IT administrators alike. That's the power of the cloud.

For more information on the benefits of the Google Apps Marketplace to businesses, check out our Enterprise Blog post. Developers interested in learning how to integrate with Google Apps can check out our post on the Google Code Blog. Or, you can explore the Google Apps Marketplace directly at http://google.com/appsmarketplace.

Finally, we'll be diving deeper into application development for the enterprise at Google I/O on May 19-20. We hope to see you there!

Posted by Chris Vander Mey, Product Manager, Google Apps Marketplace

Changing Shoes For A Redesign

2010-03-09T11:45:49+00:00

The best way to rethink things is to be in the shoes of your users. Use your app how they use your app. Try to take a fresh look at your application like you’ve never seen it before. Would you change the location of the menu/navigation? Would you change the actual menus/navigation? Would you add a shortcut search box where there wasn’t one before? Maybe you remove the advertising or move the place that the ads are located so that they are less intrusive…

The idea is that every so often you need to take a step back. Looking at your application from your users perspective may well change how your entire application works. I’m not saying this from a statistical analysis of the way people click and heatmaps and all that good stuff (though they do have their applications), I’m saying just a pure usability test from another perspective. Where do the new users look? Where do they click? What’s the first thing they want to go to? Are you putting them through information overload?

So take a step back, change shoes and take a fresh look at your app. No statistics, no heatmaps, no preconceived notions about the problem you are trying to solve (I know this is easier said than done). Just remember why you wrote your app in the first place. Try the passion on for size again and see if that doesn’t stir things up a bit.

No related posts.

Ode to AdWords

2010-03-09T09:57:03+00:00

[From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Allison Schwam, Senior Search Analyst at Backcountry, join us here. -Ed.]

When you don’t have to sacrifice your love of the outdoors for your career or vice versa, it’s something special. In fact, my love of both skiing and marketing has grown dramatically since I took my job at Backcountry. Getting to work with Google, specifically managing our AdWords account, is an online marketing geek’s dream come true. Combine that with every skier’s dream of Utah powder, and life is good.

Day traders wake up every morning to check their portfolio — I get up and check my AdWords accounts. Backcountry sells gear and equipment for the outdoor enthusiast from ski boots to tents, and we sell all of it online. My job is to drive valuable, qualified traffic 365 days a year to Backcountry using AdWords. The AdWords platform lets me manage hundreds of campaigns and hundreds of thousands of keywords with relative ease. I have access to huge amounts of data that are revealed as daily ebbs and flows in impressions, clicks and bids. If you do a Google search for [telemark ski gear], you’ll see our ad:

Backcountry was founded in 1996 by two self-proclaimed ski bums, John Bresee and Jim Holland. Since then, the company has grown to hundreds of employees. I’ve been working here for over two years. Ultimately, our goal is to “crush it,” as some ski town folk say: work hard, play hard.

A typical powder day for me is like this one last Friday when Park City got 12 inches of new snow overnight. Here’s how AdWords helps me manage both work and fun.

7 – 7:45am
Roll out of bed.
Get the coffee going.
Fry eggs and bacon.
Check snow totals.

If it looks like a good ski morning, I first check my email and glance over our AdWords campaigns. All I need to do is my daily reporting to see that I’m on target for my revenue and cost goals. As long as things are okay, I email my boss to say I’ll be out slaying the white dragon.

Just as I have the ideal tools to maximize our online campaign performance, I have the tools avid skiers covet for deep days: fat, rockered skis, stiff ski boots, Gore-Tex jacket and pants, helmet, goggles, merino wool layers, etc. After I grab my gear, I’m off.

7:45am – 12noon

My commute to The Canyons Ski Resort takes 10 minutes. My friends and I know how to get the most out of our time on the mountain, balancing chair lift time, snow quality and vertical. Does that sound a bit like cost-per-click, conversion rate and top-line revenue? Take this lift to that lift, ski the trees while we wait for that chair to open, get after our favorite steep lines. Next thing you know:

Photo by Jim Harris

Face shots are invigorating. Hard to explain, best to experience! After a few glances at the time and collecting my thoughts, I make my way off the mountain.

12pm – 5pm

I head a few miles down the road to the office. As the afternoon goes by, co-workers will emerge from their cubicles; sometimes because legs are cramping up but also to share stories about how the morning was. Where did you ski? How was the snow? Smiles all around.

I settle into work knowing what I need to succeed at my job is at my fingertips. AdWords gives me visibility into my programs to prioritize and understand trends. It also makes it easy to add and edit my account without getting bogged down in manual work. I regularly use Keyword Performance Reports to monitor both head terms and tail terms to stay on top of revenue opportunities. I’ll take into account the average order value and also the percentage of clicks that turn into sales (rate of conversion) in order to manage our keyword bids. As I do bid updates, I also check the AdWords Preview Tool to see how our ads are ranked and what is going on with our competition. We don’t really focus on “cost-per-click” but instead on “cost as percentage of revenue,” which means the more people purchase, the more ads we can run. So the higher the return on advertising spend, the more room we have to grow our paid search presence.

5 pm – 8 pm

I like this afternoon time in particular because it’s quiet and I can really focus on data-crunching. Uninterrupted time and a strong cup of coffee are essential for doing long-term analysis.

Campaign Performance Reports are great for identifying long- and short-term trends as seasons shift or for changes in demand by brand. We just wrapped up our winter sale, so this is a great time for me to run an Ad Performance Report to analyze which versions of ad copy had the strongest clickthrough rates for future reference. Finally, Google Insights for Search is a fun tool. It’s a great way to connect with our buyers by discussing big-picture trends with the brands we carry. We can look at AdWords Campaign performance and try to tie it back to general search volume in the marketplace and identify product searches on the rise. In short, given our metrics focus, AdWords gives me the information I need to make decisions about specific keywords, bids, and our overall spend.

There are typically the same few folks hanging out at the office this late. We’ll exchange some pleasantries, and as the lights get turned off I’ll shut down my computer.

When I earned an undergraduate degree in marketing and cultural anthropology, I had only a vague idea how I was going to create a career with behavioral and analytical activities. It turns out online marketing is an exciting mix of real-time data and customer service. AdWords lets me manage campaigns very efficiently, so I have time to dig deeper and do the strategic analysis that makes this job about much more than just meeting revenue goals.

Finally, I picked Park City because it’s more than a ski town. Here fanatical skiers, trail runners, bikers, snowboarders and climbers can live year round and still have a meaningful career. I’ll always be grateful to companies like Backcountry and Google for making this possible: Backcountry for fostering the passions of the outdoor enthusiast, and Google for innovation in creating the forums and tools that really work for us.

Posted by Allison Schwam, Senior Search Analyst at Backcountry

Lyricue - The GNU Lyric disply system

2010-03-09T09:45:35+00:00

Lyricue is free and open-source application that is used to edit/display song lyrics and passages of text along with images and videos on a second screen/projector. It was designed for use at live events such as church services, concerts and seminars.
(...)
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Post tags: desktop, install Lyricue ubuntu, Lyricue

UDAV - Application for data visualization based on MathGL

2010-03-09T09:32:02+00:00

UDAV is a cross-platform program for data array visualization based on the MathGL library. It supports a wide spectrum of graphics, simple script language, and visual data handling and editing. It has a windowed interface for data viewing, changing, and plotting. It can execute MGL scripts, set up and rotate graphics, export to bitmap or vector (EPS or SVG) files, draw TeX-like formulas, and so on.
(...)
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Post tags: desktop, install Application for data visualization based on MathGL ubuntu, install UDAV ubuntu, UDAV, UDAV ubuntu

Links: 3-8-2010

2010-03-09T09:28:25+00:00

IE7 : This page contains both secure and nonsecure items - Rob Chartier ~ Contemplation…
Oh IE how I love thee.
(categories: ie7 security https ssl html ifame )
chartbeat - real-time website analytics and uptime monitoring
These guys get bought in < 3 months IMHO.
(categories: analytics statistics monitoring tracking realtime stats metrics )

They've got a point

2010-03-09T07:31:37+00:00

Yesterday on El Reg was a nice article about the sorry state of the stand-alone mail client. WebMail has captured what little email people do while not at work, and the in-application messaging features of certain large social networking sites is supplying most of the rest of the private asynchronous chat messaging people are doing. And yes, I'm seeing a lot less non mail-list traffic in my private mailboxes than I was 10 years ago (of course, 10 years ago I was also still on Usenet. For the articles. Really!). Of the messages that aren't list-traffic, the rest are the usual assortment of semi-legit come-ons and a very large percentage of status update type messages from various social networking sites.

Anyway, stand-alone email is not getting the developer attention it once was. The Register article pointed out on page 2 that Opera has a surprisingly good mail client hiding in it. And they're right, it's pretty darned good. I'm using it at home in preference to Thunderbird even. I keep Thunderbird around for those exceedingly rare cases when I need either GPG or S/MIME for something, a feature Opera hasn't gotten around to dealing with yet and probably never will. But for simple email management, the mail client in Opera really is quite good.

How not to design an API (in C): the `enum` ordering mistake

2010-03-09T05:32:17+00:00

How not to design an API (in C): the `enum` ordering mistake

Suppose that you are creating an API in C and that you have a return value that is just right for an enum; for example, it communicates either 'all is okay' or some range of errors and exceptional conditions. Here's how not to write this API:

typedef enum { ERROR_1, ERROR_2, ERROR_3, ALL_OK } error_t;

You don't want to do this, because sooner or later you're going to want to add another error condition, ERROR_4, and the end result of putting it after ALL_OK is going to look somewhere between ugly and stupid.

The rule of thumb with enums and similar objects is that the fixed point goes at the start of the range. You are unlikely to have more than one 'all is fine' return code, so it is the fixed point and goes at the start.

The extra special way not to design this API is to do this and then just put ERROR_4 where it belongs, ie before ALL_OK. If you do this, any number of people will throttle you because you have just destroyed binary compatibility by renumbering ALL_OK's actual value. Worse, the broken binary compatibility may be subtle, depending on where and how people use the enum, since only one value has shifted.

(Admittedly this is only an issue in C and similar compiled languages that turn enums into actual integers behind the scenes. In other languages, this confusion can't happen; either ALL_OK is silently renumbered in all code that's using it or ALL_OK is purely a symbol with no numeric value attached to it as such.)

You would think that people wouldn't do this. Sadly, I have just seen this mistake made in software from a major vendor, assuming that it was a mistake instead of a deliberate decision to subtly punish people who counted on binary compatibility when it wasn't documented.

(PS: if you want to punish these people, it is much more productive and direct to spectacularly break your ABI so that people can't help but notice. People are kind of slow to notice subtle problems and they may not even realize what's going on for some time.)

How to Monitor Process on Linux using pidstat

2010-03-09T05:27:09+00:00

The pidstat command is used for monitoring individual tasks currently being managed by the Linux kernel. It writes to standard output activities for every task selected with option -p or for every task managed by the Linux kernel if option -p ALL has been used. Not selecting any tasks is equivalent to specifying -p ALL but only active tasks (tasks with non-zero statistics values) will appear in

Breaking down system time usage in the Solaris kernel

2010-03-08T23:58:46+00:00

I am frequently asked (or paged) to review system performance issues on our Solaris 10 hosts. I use the typical set of Solaris performance tools to observe what my systems are doing, and start drilling down once I know if the problem is with userland applications or in the kernel itself. When I observe issues [...]

LOPSA Conference schedule published!

2010-03-08T18:42:14+00:00

If you were waiting to register until the complete schedule was revealed, get that credit card out!

LOPSA PICC last night published the final slate of papers and speakers (if you didn't get your accept/sorry email, please let us know). http://picconf.org now contains the complete schedule.

You can attend for as little as $249, or $99 for students. The training program is extra.

If you aren't sure how to ask your boss for permission, we have some advice.

Tom

CHM / HTML Help feature cannot be displayed in some programs

2010-03-08T15:48:45+00:00

Although this particular problem has been around for some time, I am surprised at how many times I am asked about the solution. Many programs use an HTML help system that requires Internet Explorer and ActiveX to run (CHM – Compiled HTML Help). After security updates 896358 and 890175, some HTML content outside of the “local machine” zone was disabled. This would affect many network based programs or programs that connect to an outside server for HELP files. When accessing the Help system, an error saying “Page Cannot Be Displayed” would show up. Luckily the fix is easy.

In Notepad, copy and paste the code you need and name it “htmlhelpfix.reg” Then double-click on the file and click “YES” when it asks if you want to enter it into the registry.

Enable Local Machine, Local Intranet and Trusted Site Zones to display ActiveX HTML Help. This is the most commonly referred to fix – this is probably the one you want. You can also download the zipped htmlhelpfix.reg file here.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000002

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000002

Enable Local Machine Zones to display ActiveX HTML Help. This is the default entry, you can use it to reset.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000000

Enable Local Machine and Local Intranet Zones to display ActiveX HTML Help.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000001

Enable Local Machine, Local Intranet, Trusted Site and Internet Zones to display ActiveX HTML Help.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000003

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000003

Enable Local Machine, Local Intranet, Trusted Site, Internet and Restricted Zones to display ActiveX HTML Help. NOT RECOMMENDED!

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000004

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000004

Quick Poll: What would you like to see from the book?

2010-03-08T14:13:52+00:00

I have permission to include a few pages from the Definitive Guide to PC-BSD in the next issue of BSD Mag and could use some help determining what to submit.

Traffic Talk 10 Posted

2010-03-08T14:09:31+00:00

I just noticed that my tenth edition of Traffic Talk, titled Pcapr.net -- where Web 2.0 meets network packet analysis, has been posted. From the article:

Solution provider takeaway: Pcapr.net is a free packet collaboration site hosted by Mu Dynamics. Solution providers can participate in the community to exchange, analyze and gather traces for testing products or processes for their customers, including network packet analysis.

Not many networking solution providers are happy with the apparently limited number of network traces available for testing their products or processes. Hardly a day goes by on a network-focused mailing list without a participant asking, "Where can I download network traffic to test X?" Fortunately for anyone who wants to take network traffic exchange to a new level, Mu Dynamics has answered the call. Its Pcapr.net site is the self-proclaimed "Web 2.0 for packets." In this edition of Traffic Talk, we'll take a tour of Pcapr.net to see what features it offers networking solution providers, including network packet analysis.

And the searches go to...

2010-03-08T13:41:46+00:00

The Oscars®: glitz, glamor, gossip, gold statuettes, much fanfare — and for many fans, Google search is increasingly a part of watching this live TV experience. Before and during the Academy Awards® broadcast in the U.S., we saw related queries on Google dominating the hot searches list on Google Trends. People searched for the TV schedule, printable ballots for voting on favorites, streaming video sites, nominee and film information, celebrity chatter and whatever else caught your attention. Here's a snapshot:

Fashion
Everyone knows the red carpet is all about the gowns. So which actresses made the best (or worst!) dressed list in search? Zoe Saldana's purple Givenchy haute couture gown won the day in searches, with just a few more queries than runner up Miley Cyrus, who walked down the carpet in one of Jenny Packham's finest. Both beat searches for Sandra Bullock's dress (Marchesa) by large margins. Sarah Jessica Parker, always the fashionista, ranked a distant fourth in Chanel. Certain designers were also popular in search, thanks to the stars who wore (and name-dropped) them. Elie Saab (worn by Anna Kendrick), Armani Prive (Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer Lopez) and Marchesa (Sandra Bullock, Vera Farmiga) were all rising trends.

Winners
Throughout the night Oscar®-related searches rose and fell as nominations were introduced and winners announced. Avatar had the most searches before the ceremony, but as The Hurt Locker received more awards, searches for that film exceeded all others and peaked when it won Best Picture. Precious also had a good run throughout the night. Its peak matched that of "Avatar" during the ceremony:

The awards for best actor, best actress and best director are some of the most-anticipated in the program. There was a considerable amount of buzz about Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock and Kathryn Bigelow before last night, and considerable spikes in search volume when they each won. Here's a look at a few of the star searches last night:

Finally, the evening wasn't all about big wins. The awards help expose more obscure films — shorts, documentaries and foreign-language — to a much larger audience. Searches for these titles typically went up tenfold during the evening, and if they took home a gold statue, search volume spiked as much as 100 times higher. Music by Prudence, Logorama, Food, Inc., The Cove and The Secrets in their Eyes all experienced an exponential explosion of queries.

Gossip and memorable moments
People are always eager for more information about the Hollywood stars — personal stats like age, height, family and dating status. During this year’s Oscar® ceremonies, Kathryn Bigelow's height and Miley Cyrus's mother's tattoos were hot topics. Whose girlfriend was most searched for? Easy. George Clooney's (Elisabetta Canalis).

So what were the most memorable moments of the broadcast? When George Clooney wandered off the red carpet to greet the crowd, queries on [clooney] shot through the roof. Ben Stiller’s appearance as a Na'vi was another draw, and queries on him were high during his spoof. Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick’s John Hughes tribute triggered a flood of nostalgia; Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Home Alone all saw huge query spikes as well. During the memorial portion of the show, queries surged for those in the industry who passed away in the last year, including Ron Silver, Natasha Richardson, Patrick Swayze and Brittany Murphy. On a lighter note, Sandra Bullock set off a frenetic amount of searches when she mentioned a Meryl Streep kiss in her acceptance speech.

As we've seen in presidential debates, unusual words also generate great interest. The Oscars led to spikes in searches for [catharsis] (from Robert Downey Jr.'s presentation with Tina Fey) and [spooning] (Colin Farrell talking about Jeremy Renner).

We hope you enjoyed the evening, and want to thank everyone for turning to Google search to see the latest. And our parents deserve huge thanks, and our agent... oh, they're telling me to wrap it up...!

Posted by Qing Wu, Senior Economics Analyst

I finally broke down and got a smart phone

2010-03-08T13:02:07+00:00

My wife and I picked up a couple of Droids yesterday. Her phone was broken and mine was up for the new in two. Since they are currently 2 for 1, we took the jump.

This is my first real smart phone. I like it so far. There are a ton of options. I can see why this platform as presented(the normal android interface), wouldn’t be ideal for every day users, and really pointed towards people who aren’t afraid to mess around with their phone.

I like the Gmail integration. The touch screen works better than I thought it would and I have no problems with the on screen keyboard. If I’m doing a bit more typing, I’ll slide the physical keyboard out. Wireless on a phone is great as I’m normally around a wireless AP when at work or at home. The 3G will work fine in between.

There are a couple of things that bug me a bit. Novell is still working on their sync tool for modern phone to replace the GroupWise Mobile server. Outside of the SMTP and IMAP combo, there’s no good way to get your GroupWise mail on the phone. The default GW8 webaccess interface doesn’t work with the default browser or the dolphin browser. You have to switch it to basic mode to open mail. Not that aesthetics are everything, but the basic mode in webaccess is just that, BASIC. For now, I’ll just be forwarding my Zenoss and other SMTP alerts to my gmail account.

I downloaded a task killer tool which I find myself using often. I’m not sure how much I really need to be using it, but to keep the battery from getting sucked down, I’m using it. That’s a bit annoying and takes me back to the old Mac operating system where you had to manage your RAM manually for each application. It’s not the end of the world, but I guess it’s the price you pay for multitasking.

Fetch as Googlebot Mobile and Claim your Sidewiki comment - added to Webmaster Tools Labs!

2010-03-08T12:23:34+00:00

Webmaster Level: All

Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler.

Today, we're happy to announce two additional Labs features:

Fetch as Googlebot-Mobile
Create your Sidewiki page owner entry

Fetch as Gooblebot Mobile (developed by Ryoichi Imaizumi)

After we launched Fetch as Googlebot, many users with mobile-specific sites asked if we could provide the ability to fetch their pages as Googlebot-Mobile. We thought it was a great idea, and added it as an option to our Fetch as Googlebot feature. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites), and XHTML/WML.

Create your Sidewiki page owner entry (developed by Derek Prothro)

Sidewiki allows users to contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension. Webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry, that appears above all entries written by users.

After Sidewiki launched webmasters kept asking, "How can I put a Sidewiki page owner entry on all pages of my site quickly?" With the feature that we're introducing today, you can now create these page owner entries directly within Webmaster Tools for any site you own.

We're really happy about these new features, and hope you enjoy them as much as we do. Let us know what you think!

Written by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools

Back to our normally scheduled blog posts

2010-03-08T12:17:16+00:00

Or as (ir)regular as they normally are. I really hope that you enjoyed the flashback week, and got something useful from it. I’m going to try to do it again next year on the first full week of March.

Now it’s just back to the daily grind for me. I’ve been rehashing some Nagios configuration and I’ve unearthed an ancient relic! How fun! Configuration archaeology is a hobby of mine, and to find a gem that hasn’t (as far as I can tell) been mentioned on the official site since 2002? That’s GREAT! I’ve still got to go through the source code to make sure that it doesn’t do anything interesting, but it’s out of my config now.

As it turns out, my recent attention to Nagios is multifaceted. I’m cleaning up the config and tightening up the alert rules, but also, I’m going to be giving a 45 minute talk at the Professional IT Community Conference in May. If you’re in the northeast US, you should definitely make it! And you should hurry and register while the early bird special is going!

An update on Google.org and philanthropy @ Google

2010-03-08T10:58:26+00:00

(Cross-posted from the Google.org Blog)

What do tracking flu, helping consumers monitor their home electricity use, slowing deforestation and perhaps most importantly in 2010, helping the people of Haiti have in common?

While they are all part of the wide-ranging work of Google.org over the last year, they also show what our technical teams can accomplish in critical areas that don't always get the attention they need and deserve.

A year ago we outlined our goals for the next chapter for Google.org. We talked about our vision to use strengths of Google in information and technology to build products and advocate for critical policies that address global challenges. Ideas for projects continue to pour in from Googlers and partners around the globe, and we're incubating several new projects in the areas of economic development, clean energy and access to technology.

This past year, we:

Ramped up Google PowerMeter to help consumers reduce their electricity use and save money, secured utility and device partners, and launched the API on code.google.com to help expand partner access globally.
Introduced Earth Engine, a new computational platform we have begun building for global-scale analysis of satellite imagery to monitor changes in key environmental indicators like forest coverage, at COP15 in December.
Quickly expanded Google Flu Trends to 20 countries and 38 languages as the H1N1 flu virus spread around the world. We also added city-level flu estimates to 121 U.S. cities and developed the Flu Shot Finder to help people find vaccine locations.
Responded to earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, with maps, updated earth imagery, and networking projects, and built Person Finder to help people find information about their loved ones after a disaster.
Advocated for policies to spur innovation of renewable energy technologies that are cheaper than coal (RE<C), and our engineers worked on ways to reduce the cost of solar thermal and other RE<C technologies.

We will continue to greenlight large scale engineering projects that build on Google's strengths in technology, our computing infrastructure and global teams.

Overall, our philanthropic mission at Google includes our Google.org projects and a range of other initiatives — from grants, scholarships and other charitable giving programs to in-kind product support for non-profits. Our founders have set a goal of devoting approximately 1% of Google's equity and yearly profits to philanthropy. In 2009, we devoted around $100 million plus in-kind giving to a broad range of philanthropic efforts. Here are some highlights:

Academic scholarships and awards: We provide scholarships to encourage students of various backgrounds, ethnicities and gender to excel in their studies in hopes that these and other programs will help dismantle barriers that keep women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields.
Academic grants: We support the next generation of engineers and maintain strong ties with academic institutions worldwide that are pursuing research in core areas relevant to our mission. We fund projects across a variety of subjects, host visiting faculty members at Google, and have launched the Google Fellowship Program to fund graduate students doing innovative research in several fields.
Holiday charitable gift: We made $22 million in donations in 2009 to a couple of dozen deserving charities around the world to help organizations that have been stretched thin by more requests for help in a year of fewer donations.
Employee gift matching: Google matches up to $6,000 for each employee's annual charitable contributions and contributes $50 for every five hours an employee volunteers through our "Dollars for Doers" program to encourage employee participation in charitable causes.
Charitable Giving Council: We support grants for Googler-led partnerships on causes such as K-12 educational initiatives in science, math and technology.
Community affairs: We invest in communities where Google has a presence around the world, creating opportunities for Googlers to invest time and expertise, engage in local grant making and build partnerships with local stakeholders.

In addition, our Google for Non-Profits site provides information and links to free tools to help charitable groups promote their cause, raise money, collaborate with others and operate more efficiently. Google Grants, for example, offers in-kind AdWords advertising to non-profit organizations. Since the program began, we've donated over $625 million worth of AdWords advertising to all kinds of charitable organizations.

To keep up with our activities, check out the Google.org blog.

Posted by Megan Smith, VP and General Manager, Google.org

KDE For Windows - An Overview

2010-03-08T10:02:00+00:00

KDE is turning out to be a fabulous Desktop. The latest version - KDE 4.4.0 aka Caikaku is choke full of features which gives the term "Desktop usability" a new meaning all together. What makes KDE all the more appealing is the plethora of well designed applications that come bundled with it.

Then again, considering that Windows enjoys a virtual monopoly of the computer desktop market, (with Linux garnering just over 1%), it might take some time for the ordinary lay person to savour the goodies that KDE provides.

But hope is at sight. KDE 4.x which is based on Qt4 library is truly portable and works remarkably well across operating systems.

KDE 4 on Windows

"KDE for Windows" is a very active project that aims to port KDE 4 and all the applications that are built on KDE to run natively in Windows.

This article accompanied by pictures explain the steps involved in installing a native build of KDE 4 on Windows.

Why should I run KDE 4 on Windows ?

Fair question. Look at it this way - How would you like to replace your dour Windows Explorer with a cute albeit very powerful file manager such as Dolphin ? How about ditching Adobe Acrobat Reader which is known for its sluggishness for a far more versatile PDF reader like Okular ? Perhaps you are interested in spending some quality time playing those fabulous games bundled with KDE..., Or how about replacing proprietary Microsoft Office, or even OpenOffice.org, with KOffice ?

Which ever way you look at it, KDE 4 brings with it a huge set of useful applications that will raise your productivity to a whole new level. This makes it really enticing to install and use KDE 4.x natively in Windows. The latest version KDE 4.4.0 has already been ported to Windows. Do give it a try.

Links: 3-7-2010

2010-03-08T09:30:32+00:00

The Power of the Audience - Anil Dash
Great essay. Quote: "…And the best use for realtime communications on the web is not to simply bring in the most recent information on a topic, but rather to make clear that others are experiencing or interacting with the same content at the same time."
(categories: realtime communication writing ux design )
user research friday (tecznotes)
Awesome article on product design, innovation, community management, crisis management and user research…. and a quote: "…There’s an alternative to the Buzz model of foisting novelty on people, and I think that Flickr is a classic example of a better way to operate on the web. Flickr is famous inside of Yahoo and out for having a basically cavalier attitude to commonly-accepted wisdom about testing, assurance, predicability, and all-around maturity. What that means is that sometimes, Flickr screws up. This is the Flickr coloring contest, hastily assembled during a multiple hour, unexpected engineering emergency from 2006. Flickr had and has a world-class community management approach that can respond to crisis with humor. The coloring contest kept anxious community members busy while terrifying technological feats were performed to unclog the tubes."
(categories: stamen innovation userfocus research flickr product-design prototyping crisis community-management design ux )
HTML5 video markup, compatibility and playback
Nice rundown on HTML5 and video and a quote: "…Playback is only one component of the total video experience. You will need to develop analytics and advertising capabilities to match or exceed your current Flash experience. Advertisers don’t publish interactive advertisements in <canvas>. The high-CPM pre-roll and post-roll video advertisements we see today are based on a Flash ecosystem built up over the years. HTML5 video and your money maker of choice will need to find a way to co-exist (banner and text advertisements still work well) and drive your development budget. I expect to see better JavaScript libraries from the open-source community as well as advertising networks solve some of the problem in the near future, just like a suite of XHR handlers popped up once Ajax started to take off."
(categories: video html5 flash browser )
Paul Buchheit: If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good.
Quote: Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product — the rest is noise. For example, the original iPod was: 1) small enough to fit in your pocket, 2) had enough storage to hold many hours of music and 3) easy to sync with your Mac (most hardware companies can’t make software, so I bet the others got this wrong). That’s it — no wireless, no ability to edit playlists on the device, no support for Ogg — nothing but the essentials, well executed.
(categories: product-design productmanagement innovation design usability startup )
PubSubHubBub — Matt Mullenweg
Quote: … WP.com’s goal of all its useful code being available to everyone
(categories: plugins innovation iteration wordpress pubsubhubbub )
Thunderbird in 2010 @ david ascher
Quote: If we have an idea for a change to an existing Thunderbird feature, we’d like to roll it out first as an add-on, so that we can get feedback on early versions of the idea without having to incur all of the up-front costs of landing that change into the “trunk” builds. This should allow us to validate (or reject) ideas much faster. A great example of how this can work is the Personas feature, which matured as an add-on, and is now a standard (and awesome) feature of Firefox 3.6.
(categories: innovation mozilla software plugins iteration )

BSD for Linux Users Audio now Available

2010-03-08T09:13:37+00:00

The audio for my SCALE 2010 talk on BSD for Linux Users is now available in mp3 format. The accompanying slides are in PDF format.

Statistics for a changing world: Google Public Data Explorer in Labs

2010-03-08T08:25:30+00:00

Last year, we released a public data search feature that enables people to quickly find useful statistics in search. More recently, we expanded this service to include information from the World Bank, such as population data for every region in the world. More and more public agencies, non-profits and other organizations are looking for ways to open up their data and expand global access to this kind of information. We want to help keep that momentum going, so today we're sharing a snapshot of some of the most popular public data search topics on Google. We're also launching the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool in Google Labs.

Popular public data topics on Google
We know people want to be able to find reliable data and statistics on a variety of subjects. But what kind of statistics are they looking for most? To help us better prioritize which data sets to include in our public data search feature, we've analyzed anonymous search logs to find patterns in the kinds of searches people are doing, similar to the patterns you can find on Google Trends and Insights for Search. Some public data providers have asked us to share what we've learned, so we decided to put together an approximate list of the 80 most popular data and statistics search topics.

You can read the complete list at this link (PDF), but here's the top 20 to get you started:

1. School comparisons
2. Unemployment
3. Population
4. Sales tax
5. Salaries
6. Exchange rates
7. Crime statistics
8. Health statistics (health conditions)
9. Disaster statistics
10. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

11. Last names
12. Poverty
13. Oil price
14. Minimum wage
15. Consumer price index, inflation
16. Mortality
17. Cost of living
18. Election results
19. First names
20. Accidents, traffic violations

You'll notice some interesting entries in the list. For example, we were surprised by how many people search for data about popular first and last names. Perhaps people are trying to decide what to name a new baby boy or girl? As it turns out, people are interested in a wide range of statistical information.

To build the list, we looked at the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search, using data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools — similar to what we do for our annual Zeitgeist. We combined search terms into groups, filtering out spam and repeats, to prepare a list reflecting the most popular public data topics. As a statistician, it's important for me to note that the data only covers one week's worth of searches in the U.S., so there could be seasonal and other confounding factors (perhaps there was an election that week). In addition, preparing a study like this requires a fair amount of manual grouping of similar queries into topics, which is fairly subjective and prone to human error. While imperfect, we still think the list is helpful to consider.

The Public Data Explorer
As you can see, people are interested in a wide variety of data and statistics, but this information is only useful if it's easy to access, understand and communicate. That's why today we're also releasing the Google Public Data Explorer in Labs, a new experimental product designed to help people comprehend data and statistics through rich visualizations. With the Data Explorer, you can mash up data using line graphs, bar graphs, maps and bubble charts. The visualizations are dynamic, so you can watch them move over time, change topics, highlight different entries and change the scale. Once you have a chart ready, you can easily share it with friends or even embed it on your own website or blog. We've embedded the following chart using the new feature as an example:

This chart compares life expectancy and the number of births per woman over the last 47 years for most economies of the world. The bubble sizes show population, and colors represent different geographic regions. Press the play button to see the dramatic changes over time. Click "explore data" to dig deeper.

Animated charts can bring data to life. Click the play button in the chart to watch life expectancy increase while fertility rates fall around the world. The bubble colors make it quick and easy to see clusters of countries along these variables (e.g., in 1960 the European and Central Asian countries were in the lower right and Sub-Saharan Africa in the upper left). The bubble sizes help you follow the most populous countries, such as India and China. These charts are based on the Trendalyzer technology we acquired from the Gapminder Foundation, which we've previously made available in the Motion Chart in Google Spreadsheets and the Visualization API.

With a handful of data providers, there are already billions of possible charts to explore. We currently provide data from the same three providers currently available in our search feature: the World Bank, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, we've added five new data providers: the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), the California Department of Education, Eurostat, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. We're excited that all around the world new data providers are deciding to make their information freely available on the Internet, enabling innovators to create interesting applications, mash up the data in new ways and discover profound meaning behind the numbers.

We hope our list and new tool help demonstrate both the public demand for more data and the potential for new applications to enlighten it. We want to hear from you, so please share your feedback in our discussion forum. If you're a data provider interested in becoming a part of the Public Data Explorer, contact us.

Posted by Jürgen Schwärzler, Statistician, Public Data team

Exceptions versus error return values

2010-03-08T06:41:05+00:00

Exceptions versus error return values

Python has two ways of signalling that a function has failed; you can raise an exception or return a special error value of some sort. I use both techniques in different circumstances; since I've recently been writing some Python code, I've been thinking about exactly what those circumstances are, as far as I can tell.

(Self-analysis is tricky given that I don't particularly think through the choice when I'm making it; I handle errors however seems right for the function I'm writing at the time.)

Generally, I tend to use error return values if I expect failure to be routine, especially if there is a natural return value that is easy for callers to use. For example, getting a list of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for a host; it's routine to look up nonexistent names (or at least names with no IP addresses), and returning an empty list is an easy return value for callers to use (since in many cases they will just iterate through the list of IPs anyways).

I use exceptions if I expect failure to be rare, especially if there is nothing that the direct caller of a function is going to do to handle the problem. If the only thing that I'll do on failure is abort the program with a pretty error message, there's no need to complicate all of the code between the program's main routine and the failing function with code to check for and immediately return the error. (The obvious exception is if there is cleanup work to be done on the way out, but I've come up with ways to handle that, similar to phase tracking.)

I'm pretty sure that I'd use exceptions even for common failures if they had to be handled by someone other than the function's direct caller; I don't like cluttering functions up with a bunch of 'if error: return error' code.

This view is not the common Python one. As we can see from the standard library, the Pythonic way uses exceptions a lot more often than I do.

(I'd argue that this is a sensible tradeoff for a library, too. The advantage of exceptions is that they are unambiguous signals of failures that you can't possibly confuse with valid return values, and they force people using your library to explicitly deal with errors.)

(2 comments.)

Links/Online Guides/Forums for top Linux Distro's

2010-03-08T05:28:16+00:00

Here is a huge list of Links/Online Guides/Forums for Linux, These are mainly Official Links which you can find on the respective site========================================== General Linux Guides/LinksThe Linux Documentation Project : – The Linux Documentation Project How-To : – Index of /pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html Easy Linux : – Main Page - HowtoForge : – HowtoForge – Linux

sshsplit - A utility to multiplex ssh dynamic tunnels

2010-03-08T00:21:45+00:00

A utility to multiplex ssh dynamic tunnels. Frequently, for instance when proxying a torrent client through a tunnel established with ssh -D, the tunnel will be swamped by traffic. sshsplit spawns multiple instances and distributes the load among them.
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Tom @ Usenix LISA 2010, San Jose, CA, Nov 7-12, 2010

2010-03-07T21:43:20+00:00

Tom's presentation is TBD. (Including this with the "appearances" tag so it shows up on the navigation)

Tom @ LOPSA PICC in NJ, May 7-8, 2010

2010-03-07T21:38:36+00:00

Tom will be the Saturday opening keynote, plus he will be teaching his two most popular half-day classes: Time Management for System Administrators, and "Help! Everyone hates our IT department!". LOPSA NJ PICC is in New Brunswick, NJ, May 7-8, 2010. It is a regional conference, everyone is invited. For more information: http://picconf.org

Countdown to LOPSA PICC!

2010-03-07T21:33:56+00:00

Click the cartoon for more information!

This week in search 3/7/10

2010-03-07T19:32:36+00:00

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week's enhancements include:

Stars in search
Every day, we work to improve the four key components of search: comprehensiveness, latency, user experience and relevance. Of these, relevance is dramatically enhanced by more personalized results. This week, we announced a new feature that makes it much easier to mark and rediscover your favorite content. Stars in search are just like the stars you see in Google Toolbar or in Maps — they act like bookmarks. When you star a search result, and it happens to appear again in future results, you'll see that you already found that particular result. Starred items will appear at the top of your results. Stars in search has been rolling out this week, and will be available globally for all users who are signed in to their Google account.

Auto-spell for images
This week, we unveiled automatic spell correction for images. In cases where we're highly confident you had intended to type something else, we'll replace results from the typo query with those from the spell-corrected version — just like when you misspell a query in Google search. Ultimately, this change will reduce the time it takes to get you the result you're looking for (and that's a good thing).

Example searches: [butterflys], [roman architecture] and [apollo ohno]

Sidewiki page owner entry
In September, we launched Sidewiki, which lets you contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension. Afterward, webmasters asked, "How can I quickly put Sidewiki on all pages of my site?" Now webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry, that appears above all entries written by users. Webmaster tool improvements ultimately create a better web experience for us all, so we're pleased about this. Let us know what you think about our webmaster enhancements.

Stay tuned for next week's news on more search launches.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

Great write-up on AMD’s RVI (Rapid Virtualization Indexing) hardware assisted virtualization feature

2010-03-07T15:59:25+00:00

I came across an awesome Q&Q where Tim Mueting from AMD described the hardware virtualization features in AMD Opteron CPUs. The following excerpt from the interview was especially interesting: “Prior to the introduction of RVI, software solutions used something called shadow paging to translate a virtual machine “guest” physical address to the system’s physical address. Because [...]

Viewing the scripts that run when you install a Linux RPM

2010-03-07T14:27:26+00:00

RPM packages contain the ability to run scripts after a package is added or removed. These scripts can perform actions like adding or removing users, cleaning up temporary files, or checking to make sure a software component that is contained within a package isn’t running. To view the contents of the scripts that will be [...]

Creating a bootable OpenSolaris USB thumb drive

2010-03-07T14:15:36+00:00

This past week, I had the need to install opensolaris on a host using a USB thumb drive. To create a bootable USB drive, I first needed to snag the distribution constructor tools via mercurial (I ran these commands from an OpenSolaris host): $ pkg install SUNWmercurial $ hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/caiman/slim_source The caiman slim source Mercurial repository contains [...]

Why I don't expect third-party support for OpenSolaris

2010-03-07T05:27:19+00:00

Why I don't expect third-party support for OpenSolaris

One of the common reactions to Oracle's potentially ambivalent attitude towards providing OpenSolaris support is that since OpenSolaris is open source, third parties can spring up to provide support for it even if Oracle doesn't. However, I'm fairly pessimistic about the chances of this; even if OpenSolaris itself becomes reasonably popular, I don't think that we'll ever see an OpenSolaris equivalent of Red Hat or Canonical.

There's two reasons for this. One of them is the difference between forking code and merely supporting it, which comes down to your ability to get your bugfixes accepted upstream. My impression to date is that in practice there are relatively few outside contributors to OpenSolaris and that it is hard to get changes accepted upstream. This pushes anyone attempting to do OpenSolaris support towards de facto forking OpenSolaris, which is expensive and thus makes you unprofitable.

(Some casual searching didn't turn up any information about the rate of outside contributions to OpenSolaris that's more recent than 2008, when the news wasn't good. Certainly the OpenSolaris repository shows very little signs of contributions from outside developers, and there is no sign that the practices described in 2008 have changed much. Note that pushing changes upstream is hard at the best of time; you can imagine how much worse this gets if the upstream is not really interested in the whole business of outside contributions, especially if something is going to require significant amounts of effort and time from upstream developers.)

The other reason is more subtle. In order to really support code, you must have good programmers who understand it. With Sun not really being very enthusiastic about outside contributions, there are not many people like that outside of Sun (or, well, outside of Sun before Oracle took over and people started leaving). In addition, your good OpenSolaris programmers are probably going to face the constant temptation of taking a job with Oracle where they can actually work directly on OpenSolaris; the better they are and the more passionate about OpenSolaris they are, the higher the temptation. The less expert your programmers are the less attractive your support is, since you can't diagnose and fix people's problems as fast or as well.

(And if you can find good expert OpenSolaris programmers right now it's pretty likely that they're quite passionate, given the obstacles to acquiring that expertise.)

Rename Them All - A simple and easy to use batch renaming utility

2010-03-07T00:13:43+00:00

A simple and easy to use batch renaming utility
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Einstein 3 Coming to a Private Network Near You?

2010-03-06T22:28:42+00:00

In my Predictions for 2008 I wrote:

Expect greater military involvement in defending private sector networks... The plan calls for the NSA to work with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies to monitor such networks to prevent unauthorized intrusion, according to those with knowledge of what is known internally as the "Cyber Initiative."

Now in Feds weigh expansion of Internet monitoring we read:

Homeland Security and the National Security Agency may be taking a closer look at Internet communications in the future.

The Department of Homeland Security's top cybersecurity official told CNET on Wednesday that the department may eventually extend its Einstein technology, which is designed to detect and prevent electronic attacks, to networks operated by the private sector. The technology was created for federal networks.

Greg Schaffer, assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications, said in an interview that the department is evaluating whether Einstein "makes sense for expansion to critical infrastructure spaces" over time.

Not much is known about how Einstein works, and the House Intelligence Committee once charged that descriptions were overly "vague" because of "excessive classification." The White House did confirm this week that the latest version, called Einstein 3, involves attempting to thwart in-progress cyberattacks by sharing information with the National Security Agency.

The first step towards creating Cyber NORAD is instrumentation. Stay tuned.

FAST 2010 Proceedings Available

2010-03-06T22:28:00+00:00

I've missed FAST 2010 yet again.... but, good news! The complete FAST 2010 Proceedings (PDF) are available for free. USENIX members can also view the presentation videos online.

Uninstaller for Adobe® AIR® 1.0.0

2010-03-06T17:33:46+00:00

Uninstaller for Adobe AIR is an easy solution for uninstalling Adobe AIR applications. When installing an AIR application it is possible to first save the installation program file (. air). This file will then allow to install but also to uninstall the application, provided that the AIR engine is installed and functional. If you install an AIR application from its source without saving its installation program file, or if the AIR engine is not available, uninstalling an AIR application can be difficult on a GNU/Linux system because it requires the use of system commands via a shell. Thanks to Uninstaller for Adobe AIR it becomes very easy to uninstall an AIR application since it suffices to choose it from a list of installed applications and click on an Uninstall button. Uninstaller for Adobe AIR is a free software under GPL version 3 license, designed to compatible with the GNU/Linux Ubuntu distribution and with the GNOME and KDE window managers.
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Making a Point with Pressure Points

2010-03-06T17:06:15+00:00

Imagine you're a martial arts student. One day you have a guest instructor, accompanied by some of his black belts. They're experts in so-called "pressure point fighting." You've heard a little of this system, whereby practitioners can knock out adversaries with a series of precise strikes that lack the power of a brute-force approach. Until today you've had no direct experience. You may be skeptical, or maybe you believe such techniques are possible.

The seminar starts. You watch the guest instructor explain his techniques. He starts knocking out his black belts. Maybe you believe what you see, or maybe you don't. Then the instructor asks for volunteers, and several of your fellow students agree. The instructor knocks them all out, including a student you really trust to not "take a fall" to make the guest "look good." You ask the student "what happened?" and he replies "that dude knocked me out!"

Next the black belts fan out through the class to help teach pressure point techniques. They ask you if you want to get knocked out with a three-strike technique, or if you just want to feel disoriented with a two-strike technique. You decide you're a believer at this point, but you want to see what it feels like to receive a two-strike technique. Sure enough, two rapid strikes later, you're wondering what happened but are still conscious. That's all you need to believe; you're glad you're not lying on the floor, out cold!

The class ends. Several bystanders were watching through the studio's windows. Some of them are laughing. They think the whole class was fake, a joke, or stupid. Some witnesses are curious. They believe what they saw and want to know more. A few ask questions. Others mumble to themselves incoherently, probably intoxicated or mentally ill.

One of the students decides to talk to a famous yet local news reporter about his experience. This widely-read newspaper reports the story the next day, attracting a lot of attention.

With a wider audience, an extended discussion takes place about this pressure-point fighting activity.

One company conducts a Webcast and a spokesperson says "my mom used to knock me out with a frying pan when I was a kid!" He also says there's no difference between pressure-point fighting and getting punched in the face.

Another company decides to register a domain name called "pressurepointfighting.biz" and starts talking about how it works, applying what they know from Western boxing. This misses the mark but uninformed observers can't really tell the difference.

A third company jumps on the pressure point fighting bandwagon, issuing supposedly original research, inventing its own analysis, and integrating the technique into its marketing material. It turns out someone at the company had a confidential agreement with the original pressure point fighting instructor, but unilaterally decided to take a few pages out of his notebook and run to the market to make a fast buck.

A fourth company knows a lot about pressure point fighting. It writes original reporting based on its experience. Critics claim this company is just offering marketing based on the new craze.

Reaction to the news among those without direct experience is mixed, as might be expected.

Some readers are martial artists themselves. They fear being irrelevant. They are afraid their skills are not sufficient. They decide to ridicule anyone who participated in the seminar, or who has knowledge.

Some readers distrust authority. They think these techniques are just a government conspiracy to justify additional police powers. The only reason anyone is talking about such affairs is their need to get greater budgets for their oppressive police powers, man!

Some readers think the whole affair is "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" (FUD). Who could knock out a person by hitting a few pressure points? It's all a lie, or just the latest craze. It must be fake.

Some readers have been learning and practicing pressure point fighting for the last several years. They know it isn't a joke, and it is real. Also, some readers without experience realize they should learn more about pressure point fighting. That knowledge could save their lives, or the lives of those close to them. These like-minded people communicate privately, since the public arenas are now clogged with too many false discussions.

Aside from the fact that advanced persistent threat is an adversary, and not a fighting technique, this story explains the last 6 weeks of APT activity in the security industry. Not all factors are included, but enough to make my point.

Incidentally, the pressure point class is true, at least as far as the class content is described.

Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) Alpha 3 Screenshots Gallery (Updated with new wallpaper,theme)

2010-03-06T15:20:36+00:00

The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Lucid Lynx Alpha 3 is the third alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04, bringing with it the earliest new features for the next version of Ubuntu.
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Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) Alpha 3 Screenshots Gallery (Updated with new wallpaper,theme)

2010-03-06T15:16:20+00:00

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Can you master Puppet?

2010-03-06T13:15:36+00:00

Pay attention at the back. Reductive Labs just announced Puppet training dates for London:

Puppet Training London: March 29 - April 2

There are two courses available: Becoming a Puppet Master (3 days) covers Puppet and Puppetmaster configuration, classes, modules, definitions, resource types, the resource abstraction layer, virtual resources, exported resources, stored configs, metaparameters, dependencies, events, tags, environments, Puppet language patterns and best practices. There'll be a mix of teaching and interactive class exercises using your own laptop and virtual machines. It costs £1595 for the 3 day course.

If you're a seasoned old Puppet hand and you know all that stuff by heart, then the Puppet Developer course (2 days) is probably for you. You'll get an introduction to Ruby for Puppet, as well as learning how to craft your own custom resource types and providers, develop custom functions and Facter facts. In addition there's a segment on testing practices and RSpec for Puppet. The cost is £995 for two days.

Register for the training (get £100 off each course if you register before March 15th) or contact Scott Campbell to find out more. And don't forget to bring an apple for the teacher.

Solar Cycle

2010-03-06T13:07:25+00:00

Unlike previous years, this year we have a week long set of events planned: Angus, Fluffy, Clapton, Foxworthy. Key difference: we are (nearly) empty-nesters.

HardwareMap - Lists computers,services on the local network and hardware connected to your computer

2010-03-06T09:33:32+00:00

It lists computers and services on the local network (Avahi) and hardware connected to your computer (HAL). When you click a device, it tells you properties of the device and lets you perform common actions for that device. For example, an ftp share has a button to open in Nautilus, a webcam has a button to open in Cheese and an inline preview of the webcam.
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Keeping FreeBSD Applications Up-to-Date in BSD Magazine

2010-03-06T09:22:02+00:00

The March 2010 BSD Magazine includes an article I wrote titled Keeping FreeBSD Applications Up-to-Date.

It's a sequel to my article in the January 2010 BSD Magazine titled Keeping FreeBSD Up-to-Date: OS Essentials.

With these two articles published, they replace the versions I wrote in 2005.

I wrote these articles to demonstrate the variety of ways a system administrator can keep the FreeBSD operating system and applications up-to-date, with examples showing commands and effects.

How to Restart a Unresponsive Linux System with Reisub

2010-03-06T06:27:36+00:00

It may sometime happen that our Linux system hangs completely and the only option available is to shut down the system via the power button. The power button to reboot could cause a problem if your hard drive is still being written to, and usually causes more problems than it solves. The Linux kernel includes a secret method of restarting your PC * Hold down the Alt and SysRq (Print Screen)

Pushing code changes upstream is hard work

2010-03-06T05:50:12+00:00

Pushing code changes upstream is hard work

This is a followup to SupportingVsForking, where I talked about the difference between supporting some open source code and forking it being whether you could get your changes accepted upstream. One thing that is not widely understood is that getting bugfix changes accepted upstream is hard work at the best of times, with a cooperative upstream.

(We can see this from how many private changes to the Linux kernel each Linux distribution maintains.)

The problems are many. Often there is a conflict between the expedient way for you to fix a problem now and the 'right' way to fix the problem, which the upstream is going to argue for and which may require quite a lot of development (and arguing with developers); sometimes the upstream won't even know what the right way is, but they'll know that your way is the wrong way. In some cases, you and the upstream may disagree about whether there is a bug and (if there is a bug) where it exists and what exactly it is. Some times the upstream may accept that there is a bug but feel that fixing it is too disruptive at the current time.

(And all of this assumes that your proposed change is good code. Sometimes it isn't; the most common case in Linux is new hardware drivers, which often contain code that varies from the merely bad to the outright wretched. A distribution often needs to support the new stuff soon and didn't write the drivers; the upstream needs to have code that can be maintained over the long term by people other than its original authors.)

All of these translate to 'thanks but no thanks' for your bug fix or change, which means that you get to maintain more code for a while.

It's worth noting that accepting downstream changes is work for the upstream too. Many of these problems require an investment of time from upstream developers to read code, debate approaches, investigate problems, and so on, and the time of upstream developers is in limited supply. Plus, things like code reviews and arguing with people about whether something is the right approach or is actually a bug are not very rewarding or fun activities, which makes it harder to persuade developers to do them.

(All of this goes even more so if you are adding features or removing limitations instead of fixing bugs, because those raise much larger questions of whether they should be done at all and if your approach is the right approach.)

New MacHeist Bundle

2010-03-05T23:25:36+00:00

Well the latest MacHeist bundle has been released, and for $19.95 you get 5 (and up to 7 if enough people buy the package) useful apps.

The apps included in this bundle are: MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout and Flow. Assuming the bundle reaches it’s “goal” (usually does) – you’ll also get a copy of Tales of Monkey Island and RapidWeaver. To sweeten the deal, you can also get 3 additional apps – Airburst Extreme, Tracks and Burning Monkey Solitaire if you ‘tweet’ about the bundle.

---
Related Articles at Simple Help:

Get a free copy of Squeeze from MacHeist

How to blurminal your OS X Terminal

How to run Greasemonkey scripts in Safari

How to create a "Quake-style" console in OS X

How to play .flac files in iTunes

JKstat 0.34

2010-03-05T22:24:12+00:00

I've just pushed out a minor update to JKstat.

The change here (apart from a couple of minor bugfixes and a jnetloadfx example to remind me what JavaFX looked like) is the addition of a class to update multiple accessories together. Previously, in demos such as iostat and cpustate, each item had its own timer loop and was responsible for handling its own updates. This was especially apparent in the kmemalloc example in SolView - it was obvious that separate widgets weren't being updated simultaneously.

Now I can just have a single update loop that updates multiple accessories. Not only does it look neater, but there are noticeable improvements in memory and cpu usage from only having one timer instead of many.

Coming up next is more related work. The ability to read historical kstat -p output works fine, but requires some changes so that you step through the data rather than continuously updating in time. (If you think about it for a moment, the class I mentioned above is one example of updating the time and then telling the world to update, so it's - albeit only tangentially - related.) These changes are likely to be a bit complex, so I also decided to cut a version before starting to make more significant changes to the code.

Bash script for configuring specific things on users’ Macs

2010-03-05T15:19:09+00:00

Although I’ve got our Mac mini server nicely set up now, there are occasionally things I want to do on users’ Macs which can’t be done or don’t work properly via Server Admin and Workgroup Manager. However, one of the wonderful things about having an office environment consisting entirely of Macs (rather than Windows PCs) [...]

Planet Network Management Highlights 2010 Week 9

2010-03-05T15:18:07+00:00

Highlights from Planet Network Management for Week 9.

Wireshark Quick Tip: Using the Expert Info (by Chris Greer) – why comb through hundreds of thousands of packets, looking for a problem, when Wireshark can point out issues for you?
Community works! – A simpler way to manage Orion email alerts – instead of configuring static email addresses in the To: field of your Solarwinds Orion Advanced Alert notifications, use a variable (a.k.a macro)
Avoid Traffic Headaches on the Road and in your Network – dopplerVUE 2.0 is now available for download with exciting new features including discovering and mapping HSRP primary and secondary links, a new interface with graphics for better visibility, improved SNMP table polling
Released: Icinga Core 1.0.1 & Web 0.9.1 beta *NOW* – Icinga marches on with the release version 1.0.1 and a heap of improvements to boot
Common Failing of Current IT Event and Fault Management Systems: Static and Non-Transportable Business Logic – A common feature of current generation IT Event and Fault management systems is that you have to encode into the configuration of the system, a knowledge or representation of the logic that you use to manage the network, or device, or application
Musings upon the open core functionality ceiling – does a functionality ceiling exist in open core [one of mine again]
Answers to Common Active Directory Management Challenges – a few words of wisdom when it comes to dealing with some of the most pressing Active Directory Management challenges – security and efficiency

Tulip - Graph visualization software

2010-03-05T15:13:47+00:00

The research by the information visualization community show clearly that using a visual representation of data-sets enables faster analysis by the end users. Tulip, created by David AUBER, is a contribution of the area of information visualization, “InfoViz”. Even if the Tulip framework enables the visualization, the drawing and the edition of small graphs, all the parts of the framework have been built in order to be able to visualize graphs having to 1.000.000 elements. A visualization system must draw and display huge graphs, enables to navigate through geometric operations as well as extracts subgraphs of the data and allows to change the representation of the results obtained by filtering.
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The turkeys in Congress

2010-03-05T12:45:55+00:00

The resolution in Congress branding the 1915 killing of Armenians as "genocide" has me very irritated with those turkeys in Congress. Our national attitude that we are the arbitrators of Good and Evil in the world would be comic if it wasn't so horribly hypocritical.

If Japan were to pass a resolution condemning Hiroshima as genocide, or Germany to condemn Dresden as genocide, or India to condemn the Jallianwala Bagh massacre as genocide (look that one up, kiddies!) there would be an immediate response, a breaking of political relations, and we'd probably do something absurd like call frankfurters "freedom sausages"

Presumably, to the folks in Congress, this is about Speaking The Truth, and that's the extent of it. For the folks at Boeing who will lose Turkey's contract, and for our young men and women in Iraq who will no longer have the support of Turkish soldiers, it's not about Making A Statement, and Sending A Message.

Something that I appreciate about President Obama is the way that he respects the sovereignty of other nations and treats them (well, mostly) as though they were equals. This resolution undermines that, and calls Turkey a small child that needs to be scolded. Our posture as the Great White Father is no longer convincing (if it ever was) and merely shows us up as ignorant, self-focused, and arrogant.

Furthermore, it was 95 years ago, and done under the authority of the Ottoman Empire, which was overthrown in 1923. That is, the Turkish people have *already* determined, as a nation, that the Ottomans were the Bad Guys, and tossed them out. What do we hope to accomplish that they haven't already done?

Flashback: Burnout and the toll it takes

2010-03-05T10:52:25+00:00

You are probably a human. At least, the statistical odds are in your favor. As a human, you experience stress, and how you react to it plays a large part in determining how happy you are. System administrators deal with stress particularly poorly, in general. We assume the role of hero and that’s that. Do what it takes, bask in whatever glory accompanies the successful completion of our task.

There is no downtime in that equation. Immediately following those emergencies, most of us drink depressants to bring ourselves down. On normal days, we require morning stimulants to bring ourselves up. I highly suspect that some of us are so called “adrenaline junkies” from the relative high that we get when there’s an immediate problem that no one can solve but ourselves.

This is unhealthy.

What we really need is to be able to step back and look at the pattern in our lives and say I don’t want to live with this stress.

When it first hit me that stress is probably the biggest single microproblem for admins, I wrote the following. I hope you find it relevant.

Jack Hughes, over at the Tech Teapot, mentions a very appropriate subject for too many systems administrators: burnout.

As sysadmins, we’re nearly always the go-to person for whatever happens. After a while, we start to get used to it, and lots of times, we can develop a hero complex, carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders, at least in our minds. This isn’t healthy for a lot of reasons, the most important of which is your health.

Here’s an example of what taking your job too seriously can do to you:

Part One

Part Two

Not to ruin the ending, but the most disgusting part is that, while the guy was taking medical leave, his company fired him. To be completely honest, he’s much better off without a company like that, and if your company would do the same thing, then so are you.

To quote Peter Gibbons, “We don’t have a lot of time on this earth. We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day…”

Even one of the most preeminent Systems Administrators around, Tom Limoncelli advocates leaving the pressure at work when you head home. For those of us on call 24/7/365, that can be a little hard, but it’s important to try.

New ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) proposed themes

2010-03-05T10:29:13+00:00

Finestly

Yin and Yang - Dark and Bright … My idea is that many peoples loves dark- or bright-themes … or they like to switch sometimes, depending the wallpaper they use. The Theme is adjusted to the Humanity-Icons and pointed to be a simple EyeCandy-theme. The used engine is murrine.

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FBReader - e-book reader for Linux desktops

2010-03-05T09:30:12+00:00

FBReader is an e-book reader for various platforms. Currently FBReader works on
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Best of FreeBSD Basics on Kindle

2010-03-05T09:26:48+00:00

The Best of FreeBSD Basics is now available for the Kindle.

Nautilus+Zeitgeist video

2010-03-05T08:52:24+00:00

Some time back we have posted about Deconstructing Nautilus and rebuilding it better and now you can see small video on this

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PCs are (or can be) Unix workstations

2010-03-05T06:09:28+00:00

PCs are (or can be) Unix workstations

My entry about the end of Sun was posted on Hacker News and garnered a comment thread. In two comments that I'm condensing and excerpting here, HN user rbanffy wrote (in context):

There is a huge difference between a glorified PC and a Unix workstation.

[...]

Unix workstations were built to run Unix. A Mac pro is essentially a PC. [...]

The difference looks subtle now, when every desktop computer is essentially the same. For those who lived through this, like the writer of the original article, it was blatantly obvious.

Since my name is being invoked, I am going to speak up: I reject this view. A Unix workstation is no more and no less than a machine, dedicated to a single user, that runs Unix with a graphical environment. The idea that PCs cannot be Unix workstations is the same kind of elitism and mythology that people deride in Lisp fanatics, and it is clearly wrong. To argue otherwise is to use a very selective reading of the history of Unix workstations, one that ends the moment that Unix workstation companies started making products using PC components and PC companies started making 'Unix workstation' grade components usable on PCs.

It is also to use a selective reading of the history of the marketing of Unix workstations. Very few Unix workstations were sold as ultra high performance machines; most were sold as 'fast enough and cheap enough', and quite often this was not very fast and as cheap as possible to run Unix. In fact, at the height of the Unix workstation era you could routinely find workstations without floating point hardware.

Yes, the Unix workstations generally worked with less sweat and effort. This was for the same reason that Apple Macs just work, namely that the workstation vendor controlled both hardware and software and so could closely integrate them.

Yes, Unix workstations originally had better performance than PCs. This was because PC performance was terrible, in fact all performance was terrible, and people had to pay extra for the ability to run Unix at (marginally) acceptable speeds. Both parts changed over time; by the end of the era of dedicated Unix workstations, they were worse than PCs for the same (or more) cost (cf). One major reason that the march of the cheap slaughtered the dedicated Unix workstation vendors was that PCs got good enough to be good Unix workstations.

(Unix vendors could still build $10,000 machines that performed better, but it turned out that people by and large didn't need and weren't interested in that much performance; once they could get what they wanted and needed for less than $10,000, they stopped paying $10,000 for machines. Late-period Unix workstation vendor marketing tried desperately to persuade people that they really did need that performance, for obvious reasons.)

How To Setup Squid Proxy Server to use outgoing IP address

2010-03-05T05:27:16+00:00

SQUID is a powerful and fast object cache server. It proxies FTP and WWW sessions making it relatively safe. Squid would be very hard to use to actually compromise the system and runs as a non root user (typically 'nobody'), so generally it's not much to worry about. Your main worry with Squid should be improper configuration. For example, if Squid is hooked up to your internal network (as is

The OSI Categorically Rejects IIPA's special pleadings against Open Source

2010-03-05T02:47:26+00:00

Introduction

Moore's Law, Disk Law, and Fiber Law have created an economic engine for growth, promising exponentially improving computing, storage, and networking performance for the foreseeable future. And yet according to a 2003 UNCTAD report, "there has been no Moore's Law for software," and indeed it is because of software that computer systems have become more expensive, more complex, and less reliable.

PubSubHubBub Publisher

2010-03-04T19:58:49+00:00

Previously, I had been pushing pings to blo.gs, blogrolling, technorati, and weblogs. I removed all of these, and added pubsubhubbub.appspot.com. This involved two steps.

Adding the following to my feed:

<link rel="hub" href="http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/"/>

And, adding the following to my publishing flow (based on pubsubhubbub_publish.py):

#!/usr/bin/python
import urllib, urllib2
         
hub = 'http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/'
feed = 'http://intertwingly.net/blog/index.atom'
        
try:
  data = urllib.urlencode((('hub.mode','publish'), ('hub.url',feed)))
  response = urllib2.urlopen(hub, data)
except urllib2.HTTPError, e:
  if not hasattr(e, 'code') or e.code != 204: raise

Light: the new look of Ubuntu

2010-03-04T19:26:13+00:00

Jono Bacon, Alan Pope, and many others have written, yesterday we published a new visual story and style for Ubuntu. The core design work was lead by Marcus Haslam, Otto Greenslade and Dominic Edmunds, who are the three visual artists leading our efforts in the Canonical Design team. Once we had the base ideas in place we invited some anchor members of the Ubuntu Art community to a design sprint, to test that the concept had the legs to work with the full range of forums, websites, derivatives and other pieces of this huge and wonderful project. And apparently, it does!

Here are some additional thoughts.

Embracing both Ubuntu and Canonical

One of the real challenges for us has been to find a branding and design strategy which spans the spectrum of audiences, forums and dialogues that we cover. With Ubuntu, it’s my specific dream to find a constructive blend of commercial and community interests, not only for Canonical but for other companies. That has made our design and branding work difficult – the distinctive look of Ubuntu lent itself well to pure community messaging, but it was hard to do a brochure for Canonical data center services for Ubuntu on servers. We have not only Ubuntu, but also Kubuntu and an important range of derivatives that all have a role in our ecosystem.

So we spent a lot of time trying to distill the requirements down into a set of three dimensions:

We found a set of ideas which each represent those spectrums, and which work together.

For example, we identified a palette which includes both a fresh, lively Orange, and a rich, mature Aubergine, which work together. The use of Aubergine indicates Commercial involvement of one form or another, while Orange is a signal of community engagement. The Forums will use the Orange elements more strongly, and a formal product brochure, with descriptions of supporting services, would use more of the Aubergine.

On the consumer/enterprise spectrum, we took inspiration from the aerospace industry, and identified a texture of closely spaced dots. When you see more of that, it means we’re signalling that the story is more about the enterprise, less of that, and it’s more about the consumer. Of course, there are cross-overs, for example when we are talking about the corporate desktop, where we’ll use that closely space dot texture as a boundary area, or separator. We also identified shades of Aubergine that are more consumer, or more enterprise – the darker shades mapping to a stronger emphasis on enterprise work.

And on the end-user / engineer spectrum, we took inspiration from graph paper and engineering blue prints. When you see widely spaced patterns of dots, or outline images and figures, that’s signalling that the content is more engineering-oriented than end-user oriented.

And finally, we found a number of themes which enhanced and echoed those ideas. We use a warm gray supporting colour to give shape to pages and documents, and we built on the dots and circles to create a whole style for figures, illustrations and pictograms.

The beauty of this is that we can now publish content that spans the full range, and we generally know when we start the design process what sorts of visual cues we want to be signalling. Instead of having these different mental domains fight with one another, we can now convey quite subtle collaboration between community and corporate, or work which is aimed at engineers and developers from enterprises as opposed to developers working with consumers. Time will tell how it shapes up, but for now I’m celebrating the milestone and the efforts of the team that pulled it together. There’s something there for everyone who wants to participate in the great hubbub of Ubuntuness that is our shared experience of free software.

So, for example, here’s a conference banner. The strong use of Aubergine suggests that it’s more corporate messaging (Canonical is heavily involved). Orange is used here more as a highlight. The Aubergine is darker, and there’s quite a lot of the fine dot pattern. Below the image is a set of scales showing where on those spectra this work is pitched.

As another example, here’s a brochure with an emphasis on end-users who are thinking about adopting Ubuntu’s cloud infrastructure. Again, the fine dot patterns suggests a more enterprise focus, as does the use of the dark aubergine. You can see the circle metaphor used in the quote callout.

And here’s a similar brochure, but with a more developer or engineering oriented focus: note the use of the graph-paper theme with wide spaced dots, and outline shapes.

Finally, here’s an example of a brochure and CD cover for Ubuntu:

As you can see the idea is to signal a mix of both community and Canonical involvement in the message, addressing consumer audiences with a mix of developers and end-users.

A new Ubuntu font

We have commissioned a new font to be developed both for the logo’s of Ubuntu and Canonical, and for use in the interface. The font will be called Ubuntu, and will be a modern humanist font that is optimised for screen legibility. It will be published under an open font license, and considered part of the trade dress of Ubuntu, which will limit its relevance for software interfaces outside of Ubuntu but leave it free for use across the web and in printed documents.

It will take a few months for the font to be finalised, initial elements will be final in the next week which will be sufficient for the logo and other bits and pieces, but I expect to see that font widely used in 10.10. The work has been commissioned from world-renowned fontographers Dalton Maag, who have expressed excitement at the opportunity to publish an open font and also a font that they know will be used daily by millions of people.

Initial coverage will be Western, Arabic, Hebrew and Cyrillic character sets, but over time we may be able to extend that to being a full Unicode font, with great kerning and hinting for print and screen usage globally. We are considering an internship program, to support aspiring fontographers from all corners of the world to visit London and work with Dalton Maag to extend the font to their own regional glyph set.

The critical test of the font is screen efficiency and legibility, and its character and personality are secondary to its fitness for that purpose. Nevertheless, our hope is that the font has a look that is elegant and expresses the full set of values for both Canonical and Ubuntu: adroitness, accountability, precision, reliability, freedom and collaboration. We’ll publish more as soon as we have it.

A good start

It’s been an exciting process, but I have the sense that we are just getting started. The language will get richer, we will find new things that we want to communicate, and new treatments and visual themes that resonate well with these starting points. We’ll find new ways to integrate this on the web, and on the desktop (look out for the two new themes, Radiance and Ambiance). I hope we’ll see the language being used to good effect across everything we do, both commercial and community oriented. There’s a range of expression here that should be useful to artists across the spectrum. Let me know how it works for you.

New wallpaper for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and Download link included

2010-03-04T18:27:21+00:00

New wallpaper for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) was revealed

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Bejtlich Teaching at Black Hat EU and USA 2010

2010-03-04T17:49:00+00:00

Black Hat was kind enough to invite me back to teach multiple sessions of my 2-day course this year.

Next is Black Hat EU 2010 Training on 12-13 April 2010 at Hotel Rey Juan Carlos I in Barcelona, Spain. I will be teaching TCP/IP Weapons School 2.0.

Registration is now open. Black Hat has three price points and deadlines for registration remaining.

Regular ends 1 Apr

Late ends 11 Apr

Onsite starts at the conference

Finally we have Black Hat USA 2010 Training 0n 25-28 July 2010 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, NV. I will be teaching two sessions of TCP/IP Weapons School 2.0, one on the weekend and one during the week.

Registration is now open. Black Hat has set five price points and deadlines for registration.

Super Early ends 15 Mar

Early ends 1 May

Regular ends 1 Jul

Late ends 22 Jul

Onsite starts at the conference

Seats are filling -- it pays to register early!

If you review the Sample Lab I posted earlier this year, this class is all about developing an investigative mindset by hands-on analysis, using tools you can take back to your work. Furthermore, you can take the class materials back to work -- an 84 page investigation guide, a 25 page student workbook, and a 120 page teacher's guide, plus the DVD. I have been speaking with other trainers who are adopting this format after deciding they are also tired of the PowerPoint slide parade.

Feedback from my 2009 sessions was great. Two examples:

"Truly awesome -- Richard's class was packed full of content and presented in an understandable manner." (Comment from student, 28 Jul 09)

"In six years of attending Black Hat (seven courses taken) Richard was the best instructor." (Comment from student, 28 Jul 09)

If you've attended a TCP/IP Weapons School class before 2009, you are most welcome in the new one. Unless you attended my Black Hat training in 2009, you will not see any repeat material whatsoever in TWS2. Older TWS classes covered network traffic and attacks at various levels of the OSI model. TWS2 is more like a forensics class, with network, log, and related evidence.

I plan to retire TWS2 after Vegas this year and teach TWS3 in 2011, if Black Hat invites me back.

I recently described differences between my class and SANS if that is a concern.

I look forward to seeing you. Thank you.

Bejtlich to Speak at FIRST 2010

2010-03-04T17:16:00+00:00

I'm happy to report that I will present Building a Fortune 5 CIRT Under Fire at FIRST 2010 on 16 Jun 10 in Miami, FL. I plan to attend the majority of the conference, since it is one of the few focused on incident detection and response. I hope to see you there!

3rd party application headaches

2010-03-04T17:14:51+00:00

A while back we managed to push through some new purchasing rules that required IT review of any IT technology purchases. This is needed, since end-user departments haven't the first clue what'll work with our existing infrastructure, and it helps us advise them of complications. For instance, if a product requires PHP on IIS for some reason, we really want to be able to let them know before they purchase that doing so will require a server purchase as well since we don't support that environment currently.

Unfortunately, a small number of things still slip through. Perhaps we didn't read the manuals enough. Perhaps a high enough manager expended sufficient political capital to Make It So. But complications can arise when we go to make the new thingy work.

A case in point:

For the last two weeks I've been attempting to get a certain package up and running that has email capabilities. This has to fit within our Exchange system, which is a rather common environment. What isn't so common, it seems, is our insistence on secure protocols for authentication. While Exchange 2007 is perfectly willing to support naked POP3 and even naked SMTP-Auth, we, on the other hand, are not so forgiving. We wisely have a security standard in place that says that all authentication traffic must be encrypted, and this prevents us from running POP3 and SMTP in a way that allows passwords in the clear.

This package has support for one SSLed service: POP3-SSL. We don't support POP3 since our users were forever screwing themselves thanks to the default of "Delete on retrieval" in most mailer clients, which kind of pissed them off when they got to the office the next morning and their mailbox was empty.

Thanks to the use of stunnel I was able to tunnel unencrypted IMAP to Exchange's IMAP-SSL port at least, so that channel got working.

Right now I'm trying to convince stunnel and the application to work together to get SMTP-TLS working. Sadly for me, I have to wait a couple of hours before the app attempts an SMTP check for me to see if it works.

On the 'up' side, we're charging this department by the hour to get this set up. So the labor bill on this will be fairly high.

Download wineasio .deb packages

2010-03-04T15:42:34+00:00

wineasio provides an ASIO to JACK driver for WINE. ASIO is the most common Windows low-latency driver, so is commonly used in audio workstation programs. (Wine’s built-in JACK transport isn’t a Windows ASIO driver.)
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Tonight's LOPSA-NJ Chapter meeting

2010-03-04T14:27:49+00:00

Tonight's topic is "What's the biggest problem in system administration?"

his month's meeting will be less technical, more philosophical.

What's the biggest problem facing system administrators? Is it the vendors? The managers? The tools? Is it us? (nah, it couldn't be us! Must be the tools). Scaling? The inconsistant syntax of Perl? It probably isn't any one thing.

I will be facilitating group discussion. Hopefully we'll learn something about our technology and ourselves.

Spring 2010 jQuery Talks

2010-03-04T14:27:46+00:00

I gave a number of talks this spring on jQuery and especially on some of the recent additions made in jQuery 1.4. Below are all the slides and demos that I've given.

The conferences / meetups that I spoke at (or will speak at, in the case of MIX), and the talks that I gave, are as follows:

Webstock (Wellington, NZ) (Introduction to jQuery Workshop, Things You Might Not Know About jQuery)
Future of Web Apps (Miami, FL) (Introduction to jQuery Workshop, Improve Your Web App with jQuery)
jQuery Boston Meetup (Boston, MA) (Things You Might Not Know About jQuery)
MIX (Las Vegas, NV) (Improve Your Web App with jQuery)

Introduction to jQuery Workshop

This workshop starts with an introduction to the fundamentals of jQuery (1 hour) and continues on with two pieces of hands-on coding (Todo list, 30 min, Social Networking Site, 1.5 hours).

Source Code

In the workshop I also had two pieces of hands-on coding. The first was an ajax-y todo list the second was converting a functional social networking site into a one page application (making significant use of jQuery UI).

Source Code Reset Demo Edit Demo

Things You Might Not Know About jQuery

A variety of things that people don't know about in jQuery - including new things added in jQuery 1.4 (and newer), data bindings, custom events, and special events.

Source Code

For the first jQuery Boston Meetup I built a game using the avatars of everyone in attendance. Sort of a space shooter style game you need to kick and kill the advancing hordes of users. I used this game as a way of demonstrating constructing an application that makes use of custom events, data binding, and building applications in an event-centric manner.

Source Code

Improve Your Web App with jQuery

A different restructuring of the previous talk that emphasizes a more holistic approach to improving your web applications with jQuery

Source Code

I've been messing around with a new piece of presentation software that I wrote for these talks. It's still terribly crude and buggy (pretty much just got it working enough in order to run my talks in Firefox 3.6 and Chrome) - you've been warned. I hope to refine it at some point and release it for general consumption.

Speeding Up Your Selects and Sorts

2010-03-04T13:30:07+00:00

When you are using a framework, they typically set your VARCHAR size automatically to 255. This is normally fine since you are letting the framework abstract you away from most of the SQL. But if you interact with your SQL, there is a way to get a decent speed increase on your SELECTs and ORDER BYs when you are working with VARCHARs.

The VARCHAR data type is only variable character size for storage, not for sorting and buffering. In fact, since the MySQL optimizer doesn’t know how big the data in that column can be, it has to allocate the maximum size possible for that column. So for sorting and buffering of the name and email columns below would take up 310 bytes per row.

To fix that you should alter the size of your columns. Imagine having the optimizer have to go through an additional 310 bytes for every row. If there are 500k rows in the table time 310 bytes for each row, that can add up in the amount of memory that the optimizer has to use to perform the sorting/buffering.

Consider the following table of businesses:

You can change the name to column sizes to 75 (name), 50 (email), and 100 (url). But realistically you don’t want to chance things getting cut off, so it may be better off to settle on each column here being a VARCHAR(100). Even that would save drastically on the space required to perform a sort and buffer the results.

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Over 4,000 developers at Google I/O 2010

2010-03-04T11:30:14+00:00

As of today, this year's Google I/O conference has sold out and registration is closed. That means more than 4,000 developers will be joining us on May 19-20 at Moscone West in San Francisco.

Like years past, I/O will feature over 90 in-depth sessions and the opportunity to meet and learn from other developers, including those from the more than 160 companies that will demo in the Developer Sandbox. For those unable to attend, video recordings of technical sessions will be available on YouTube following the conference.

From now until May, we'll continue to list new speakers, new sessions, and new Sandbox participants on the Google I/O website. To keep up with the latest event info and details, follow us on Twitter.

Posted by Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering

Klavaro - A very flexible touch typing tutor

2010-03-04T10:18:09+00:00

Klavaro is a simple tutor to teach correct typing, almost independently of language and very flexible regarding to new or unknown keyboard layouts.
(...)
Read the rest of Klavaro - A very flexible touch typing tutor (534 words)

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Post tags: desktop, install Klavaro ubuntu, Klavaro, Klavaro ubuntu, touch typing tutor ubuntu

How to view the contents of an initrd image

2010-03-04T07:27:19+00:00

Linux uses the initrd or initial ram-disk during the boot process. Linux kernel is very modular as you know. While the kernel main file contains only the most needed stuff, rest of the kernel, drivers included, reside in separate files – the kernel modules. It would be impossible to create a single kernel binary image that would suit all the hardware configurations out there. Instead, kernel

You want to do spam forwarding on a separate machine

2010-03-04T05:16:16+00:00

You want to do spam forwarding on a separate machine

I've previously written about how we use a different source IP address when forwarding spam-tagged email than when forwarding other email, so that users who forward all their email can still get some of it. If you do this, it turns out that you really want to use an entire separate machine for this, not just an IP alias on your main mail machine.

(We used a relatively small virtual machine for the purpose, rather than dedicating physical hardware to the job. If you really wanted to, I suppose you could run two instances of the MTA on the same physical machine.)

The problem that pushed us into doing this was queueing and retries. As you might expect, it turns out that spam email gets delayed in very different ways than regular email. Thus, if you send both regular email and spam-tagged email from the same machine you effectively have two mostly separate retry queues, with quite different characteristics, except that your mailer doesn't know this and you probably can't teach it about the real situation. Things get confused from there, in a couple of ways.

First, it makes monitoring and management harder unless you write fairly intricate custom tools; if your mail server has an unusual backlog, is that a real problem or is it just another site that's decided to stop accepting forwarded spam? If it is, can you easily tell which new site has decided to choke on your spam email?

Second, retries for the two different sorts of email get tangled together, both for actual retry times and for writing rules. Most MTAs try to notice when hosts or addresses aren't working and not pointlessly try delivering every piece of email to them only to have it stall. This works when all of the messages for one domain or user run into the same sort of delays, but spam email and regular email can be very different; it's routine for spam to stall when regular email gets through. Since your MTA can't tell the two apart, it's likely to get very confused about what it should do, whether it should back off on delivery attempts, and so on. Equally, you may want to have different retry timings and timeout periods and so on for spam email than for regular mail, but your MTA's retry rules probably can't tell them apart.

(Even when everything was on one machine we were able to make spam email get deleted from our MTA queue faster than the normal timeouts, which is very important for Exim-specific reasons.)

All of these issues went away when we moved spam email to a separate machine and thus a separate queue and mailer configuration. Monitoring became much easier and simpler, the MTA's retry handling was once again sensible, and we could apply different (and slower) retry timings to spam email.

Your separate spam forwarding machine does not need to be very big and fast, since spam forwarding is not a very important job (at least in my opinion) and delivery of such email is not likely to be very rapid in the first place.

In some ways, life would be simpler if you could tell your MTA to put spam email into a separate queue from regular mail (and then keep separate retry information for it, apply separate retry rules, and so on), but I don't know of any current MTA that allows things like that. I may be out of touch with the features of non-Exim mailers here.

(2 comments.)

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