General

Passwords: a Primer August 30th 2013

You may have heard that you should use a random password to protect yourself. Or that you should use a different password on all your different online accounts. Or that you should use some r@nd0m characters in your password. This article serves as a short primer on passwords and why they are more and more of a problem. …

Using MAMP and Pow in harmony August 14th 2013

I wanted to use Pow to serve my rails apps during development. However, Pow takes over all port 80 requests. This means that if you are also using MAMP (or any web server) for local development, those sites are inaccessible. I don’t want to run MAMP on a different port, so what to do?

First, uninstall Pow, …

Cloning a larger linux OS hard drive to a smaller one July 6th 2013

I needed to upgrade my linux server’s hard drive from a traditional HDD to a SSD. Unfortunately the old hard drive was 80 GB and the new one is 64 GB. There are commercial programs for this purpose but I figured I could do it with freeware. To that end, you will need:

Linux live CD (anything with Gparted on it …

Netatalk fix for Ubuntu 12.04 June 14th 2013

Ubuntu 12.04 breaks netatalk and when you try to login in to the apple share you will get errors such as this in /var/log/syslog:

Jun 14 13:03:13 GlaDoS afpd[4395]:
===============================================================
Jun 14 13:03:13 GlaDoS afpd[4395]: INTERNAL ERROR: Signal 11 in pid 4395 (2.2.1)
Jun 14 …

Stopping mdadm assemble on ubuntu boot June 14th 2013

Soft raid setup with mdadm

I have a Raid-6 running and it currently has 6 drives. My Mobo has 6 sata ports, one of which is used up for the boot drive (not involved in the array). The sixth array drive is on a PCI sata/raid card. The server is headless, which is important because I do not want degraded array events to …

Microsoft Access Database to SQL file April 30th 2013

I had an existing Microsoft Access database that was quite large that I needed to migrate to a more manageable MySQL database. I wanted to export the database to a .sql file for portability sake. Strangely, this feature is absent from Access the program. Here is the easiest solution.

Download the program DBWScript. It …

Determine the source of a package January 26th 2013

In order to determine the source of a package:

apt-cache policy {package name}

e.g:

apt-cache policy xbmc
xbmc:
  Installed: 2:11.0~git20120321.14feb09-0ubuntu1~ppa1~lucid
  Candidate: 2:11.0~git20120321.14feb09-0ubuntu1~ppa1~lucid
  Version table:
 *** 2:11.0~git20120321.14feb09-0ubuntu1~ppa1~lucid 0
        500 …

My Setup January 9th 2013

Main Work Computer/Hackintosh

My day to day computer is a desktop hackintosh that I built in early 2010. For the most part I find it to be rock solid and a great alternative to pricey Apple hardware.

List of components

Setting up AFP for OSX 10.8.2 <---> Ubuntu 11.10 January 8th 2013

Purpose

Set up Netatalk to use afp between my Mountain Lion desktop and my Ubuntu file server.

Relevant Details

Hackintosh OSX desktop running 10.8.2 Ubuntu Server running Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric

Process

All of this is on the Ubuntu File server. Setting up the afp Mountain Lion client is trivial. Simply connect to server …