I thought my lap was getting too warm...
To force the processor to minimum speed:
sudo killall -USR1 cpudynd. Source: cpudyn
FAQ.
Job hunting via founder blogs
Just got an interesting question in by email. The person has a friend who's job hunting, and interesting in working with all kinds of high-productivity web stuff: microformats, site APIs, free/open-source databases, REST, XHTML—you know, all of "Web 2.0" except for the curvy pastel box layout thing.
So how do you find the companies that are looking for people who work on this stuff? I tend to hear about a lot of those kinds of jobs, even though I'm not looking for one. Today's question made me think about how. First, if I use and like a new web service or technology, I usually subscribe to the founder's or architect's blog. Then, just watch those blogs for links to job postings, and links to the services that people who make good new web sites use. Tree, fruits, and so on.
Company founders are not just blogging for investors and customers. A good founder's blog is a recruiting tool, too. In the new software market, you can't just be a Code Monkey. Catchy song, bad career advice.
Code Monkey: "Maybe manager wanna write goddam login page himself."
Web 2.0 developer: "Maybe manager wanna not reinvent the wheel, login-wise, and just use LID or something—check out the discussion on this feature request page."
(IT Journalism trade secret: the most informative web pages about a company are usually in the "jobs" section. What they're looking for in an an employee reveals technical info there that would never get past Marketing.)
Fri, 12 May 2006Roblimo on selling
Robin "Roblimo" Miller has some advice on selling to businesses if you're not a "good salesman". "Do cold calls when you're on the way to someplace else and have a few moments to kill."
Sun, 09 Apr 2006Transaction mail or junk mail? Check the postage.
It says "Personal and Confidential" or "IMPORTANT CORRESPONDENCE REGARDING YOUR OVERPAYMENT" on the envelope—can you really discard it without opening it? You sure can. Some junk mailers disguise their mail pieces as important correspondence from companies you actually do business with, and the USPS helped them out a lot by renaming "Bulk Mail" to "Standard Mail". But you can look at the postage to discard "stealth" junk mail without opening it.
Postal regulations require that any bills or mail containing specific information about your business relationship with the company must be mailed First Class. And the lowest rate for First Class mail—for companies that pre-sort it down to the carrier route—is $0.29 (9 Apr 2006).
So, if the postage is less than $0.29, or if "STD" appears in the upper right corner, it's not a bill, it's not your new credit card, and it's not a check. It's just sneaky junk mail.
Wed, 22 Mar 2006Stolen Christmas? Try these handy tips.
So you're a PC vendor, and a proprietary OS vendor trashed your Christmas sales by rescheduling their big product release for right after Christmas. How can you start to prevent this kind of low blow next time, without throwing big money at a desktop Free Software market that isn't big enough to justify it this year?
The good news is that it's easier and less expensive to participate in the Linux market than not to participate in the Linux market. Here are a few tips.
1. Don't "Linux-proof" otherwise good designs with parts from suppliers that don't release needed documentation. Do a quick check of the Linux source code to make sure that support is in there. (If Cypress Semiconductor, run by notorious hard-ass TJ Rodgers, can release specs and drivers, your other vendors can too. It's good business.)
2. Make pre-release hardware available to the appropriate projects. (If a product is small and can be hooked up to a laptop, consider shipping some to Greg Kroah-Hartman for his next driver writing tutorial.)
3. Don't try to pick distribution winners in what's still a confusingly diverse market. You have better things to do than try to reckon up the market shares of Ubuntu vs. Fedora vs. Mandriva. Smart IT companies expose interfaces and let the market help them, Web 2.0 style.
4. Let's do a shadow "unconference" in Seattle, and get your questions answered about how easy Linux support can be.
ThinkPad backlight
I have an ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M6 in my IBM ThinkPad X31 running Debian etch.
I added
radeontool light off
and
radeontool light on
to /etc/acpi/sleepbtn.sh to get the backlight to power off at sleep time.
Wed, 30 Nov 2005Quick-and-dirty company reputation analyzer.
Commenter eddy joaquim writes, " before ever buying anything I always go to google and type 'company name+scam'".
Thu, 24 Nov 2005Photos for the future
Doc, it could be a good idea to shoot photos of all those wires in the walls before the Sheetrock® goes up. I wish I had some inside-the-walls photos of where everything is in this place.
I have the same problem of lack of ventilation in the server closet. If I were having a custom house built, all machinery would live in the server closet, and I'd just run VGA and USB to the office—no noisy computer in the office for me.
Bill Pollock showed me a handy Buffalo file server box that might be good for central media storage. Don't know if there's a way to manage it without the proprietary-OS-only management utility, but if you could solve that problem, I bet with a couple scripts you could podcast off of it.
Tue, 08 Nov 2005SSH Connection Sharing
Use ssh ControlMaster to share one TCP connection among multiple ssh instances and speed things up when you run many commands over ssh.
How much time does it really buy you? A quick test of
date; for i in `seq 1 40` ; do ssh xenu.example.org true; done; date
takes 4s with a "Master" process running; 24s without.
(via sneakums.)
Fri, 28 Oct 2005Planet cleanup
The excellent Planet feed aggregator keeps a cache of feeds you no longer subscribe to. Which is probably what you want if you just temporarily unsubscribe from something, but after a while, you can clean up with:
1 1 * * * /usr/bin/find YOUR_CACHE_DIRECTORY_HERE -mtime +7 | xargs rm -f &> /dev/null
Thu, 15 Sep 2005
Why User Education is not the Answer
(updated 15 Sep 2005: added link, example)
Jakob Nielsen has a good point that User Education Is Not the Answer to Security Problems.
And "Educating Users" made the Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security.
End-user instructions for legitimate web sites and IT products are more counterintuitive than the instructions for being victimized by a phishing scam or the instructions for decrypting and installing a social engineering worm.
As long as the industry is willing to make users do complicated and incomprehensible things, attacks that depend on confusing the user will succeed.
Sat, 16 Jul 2005Shop or hack?
A friend called me to ask a Linux question. He was trying to make an 802.11b card work using ndiswrapper, which I have tried too, and got working pretty quickly once I figured it out.
But there's no way you'd throw "set up ndiswrapper" as a to-do list item for someone who isn't just messing with his or computer for the sake of messing with the computer.
So I said, "Dude, do you want to mess around with your computer, or would you rather go shopping?" He said he'd rather shop, so I recommended a boring, stable, working Orinoco card.
Shop or hack is the fundamental decision you have to make with a lot of desktop Linux stuff.
If you want to plug it all in and have it work, you need to be a picky shopper. Instead of making an impulse purchase of a printer or camera, you have to check what works, maybe bounce some ideas off your favorite support forum, print out a list of possible hardware to buy, and then go shopping.
The people in an awful mess are the ones who already have a bunch of computer hardware from companies with different levels of Linux friendliness or hostility, and want to switch OSs. They often end up with one of least fun Linux projects, "trying to get some random hardware to work", as their first Linux project.
Wed, 29 Jun 2005Doc's FM antenna
FM transmitters for use with portable devices use the audio cable as the antenna. So add a headphone extension cord to get a bigger antenna.
If home stereo manufacturers won't sell you a good FM receiver, you could do what I did and browse yard sales and get a used Pioneer tuner for $5. I love Alameda. Or just do it in software. See Eric Blossom's Listening to FM Radio in Software, Step by Step. Bdale has also been building radios.
Fri, 29 Apr 2005Theo de Raadt and used drives
Tue, 19 Apr 2005Spam filtering at junkemailfilter.com
If you really, really don't like e-mail spam, junkemailfilter.com is using a thorough combination of SMTP-time and post-SMTP scoring.
And if you made it to linux.conf.au, there's Marc's talk too.
Sun, 17 Apr 2005Dude, use modules
Seth writes about an ancient CGI vulnerability.
It might have Hack Value to write your own query string parser or your own code to invoke standard utilities, but, really, better to just use a module.
use strict; use Mail::Sendmail;
...
sendmail ( 'From' => $FROM,
'To' => $to,
'smtp' => $SMTP_SERVER,
'Subject' => $what,
'Message' => $text
) or die $Mail::Sendmail::error;
Here's the Mail::Sendmail FAQ.
Worm attack -- so what?
There are two important security lessons from the Microsoft SQL server worm.
First, apply the principle of egress filtering. Don't let internal systems make connections to the outside that they don't have to.
There is no such thing as "internal network good, Internet bad." You have to assume that a system on your network could be compromised and be used to attack someone else, or that one of your users could go bad, or that someone could plug a compromised laptop into your "safe" internal network.
Database servers have no business talking to the outside world _at all_ but your web server probably doesn't need to make any outgoing TCP connections, and your mail server only needs to make outgoing SMTP connections.
Second, please don't turn this into an opportunity for mindless Microsoft-bashing. Worms aren't a vendor-specific problem. Instead, _prevent_ a future worm from becoming a reason for mindless free software-bashing. What if each of your systems were compromised? Pretend that an intruder or a worm has root on mail.example.com. How do you set things up to contain the damage if this happens, while still allowing mail.example.com to do its job?
Turkey sandwich
Spread two pieces of white bread with mayonaise. Add turkey breast meat. Salt to taste. Slice diagonally and serve with a glass of cold milk.
Escape URLs
Quick-and-dirty way to convert text to URL-escaped text:
perl -MCGI -e 'print CGI->escape($ARGV[0]), "\n"' 'Escape This!'
Is this page valid?
I saw this link on the fdg design studio page, and everybody should have it. validate. This page is Valid HTML 4.01 Strict. (the rest of this site is crap.)
--
Don Marti
<dmarti@zgp.org>
