In my career so far I’ve managed to meet lots of companies who have absolutely horrible business practices when it comes to security. Usually the problem is either a lack of technical staff skilled enough to secure things properly, a lack of support from management, or both. Either way the result is more open doors than are best for business. The other thing I’ve noticed is that companies who don’t take security seriously also tend to have crappy products.
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I’ve been slacking lately, as there’s been a lot to do around the house and things. I’ve only managed to update a few things:
Added stats tracking to this blog (forgot I had turned on this one flag in Feb) Added stats tracking to the howto documents, curious how that will look Initial import of a Git howto (since I’m starting to love it) Added drop down style navigation to the howto index Cleaned up the keychain howto just a bit I also ordered a good regex book as I’m still not near good enough at them.
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I finished the setup of my new laptop. It’s a shiny new Dell D620 with all the features you could ever want. I’m running 64 bit Gentoo Linux along with Xfce 4.4 as my desktop. This is my first time running a 64bit clean OS and I must say that Gentoo continues to be the coolest OS I’ve ever used. When comparing the compile time of this laptop with my other laptop, the difference is quite the impressive.
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I’ve been doing computer related work professionally for some time now. I’ve had a few “servers” in my basement for as long as I can remember. So yes I do have a lot of computers, but I’m not your typical computer nerd. I’ve never really played computer games. My newest computer is 5 years old, and just a few months ago I retired my very first computer (AMD K6II 350). It actually seems like everyone I know has a computer that’s newer and nicer than what I have.
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Today I was prompted via the notification area that 16 updates were available. I took them (via Synaptic) after which I rebooted the system. Upon bootup grub complained about an “Inconsistent filesystem” regardless of the kernel I chose. Evidently Ubuntu ate my ramdisk again sigh
I’m honestly afraid to let apt update my ramdisk/kernel again. Before I was 50/50 on using Ubuntu for the desktop. That number has definitely slipped to around 20% now.
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Today I needed to upgrade to Python 2.5 so I could work on work stuff. Earlier in the day I had upgraded my Gentoo box at work to use Python 2.5 - piece of cake. It seems that in Ubuntu land you currently don’t get Python 2.5 unless you’re tracking the “Feisty” sources. So I went on to update my sources and use Synaptic to update everything. It finished up by throwing some errors about being unable to finish due to “unresolvable errors “.
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It seems lately I’m all about trying new things. First I tried Ubuntu even though I’m a devout Gentoo user. Yesterday I gave Paludis a test drive. First off let me go ahead and express my admiration love for Portage. Quite simply Portage allows me to do things that I simply couldn’t do on my own. Sure I could compile things myself. Sure I could use very specialized compiles to get the precise binaries that I need… but I could never do it across multiple machines (I’m responsible for ~9) consistently.
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Today I set out to get my own software running. This included dependencies like:
Apache Mod_python Postgresql Tsearch2 Psycopg2 elementtree Simplejson Matplotlib Apple I wasn’t difficult to install and configure things, though it obviously felt different than it does on Gentoo. Honestly things seemed less organized, though that’s likely because I know Gentoo so much better.
I have not been successful in getting mail-notification to work. Poking around it seems the imap ssl support is disabled, and people recommend installing from source.
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Install was flawless
Wifi worked perfectly without doing anything (curious what it’s using.
IBM Thinkpad buttons work, and even have graphical candy (volume)
I wanted to enable flash for Firefox:
Update /etc/apt/sources.list adding support for multiverse
apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
Accept license
“automatic installation failed due to network problems or upstream changes”
apt-get install flashplayer-mozilla
Restart Firefox, no love
Ubuntu forums mainly talk about using Adobe’s installer, or copying the .
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