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dbus error

Strange dbus error from the KDE power monitoring tool

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top 10 girl geeks

We have a list of 10 (famous) girl geeks from CNET and one from someone else.

The CNET list has Ada Byron, Grace Hopper, Mary Shelly, and Marie Curie. Mary Shelly isn’t someone who I’d have listed, but it does seem appropriate now I think about it. Marie Curie is one of the top geeks […]

ps and security

A post by Scott James Remnant describes how to hide command-line options from PS output. It’s handy to know that but that post made one significant implication that I strongly disagree with. It said about command-line parameters “perhaps they contain sensitive information“. If the parameters contain sensitive information then merely hiding them after the fact […]

some random Linux tips

echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump The above command sets a sysctl to cause the kernel to log all disk writes. Below is a sample of the output from it. Beware that there is a lot of data. Jan 10 09:05:53 aeon kernel: kjournald(1048): WRITE block XXX152 on dm-6 Jan 10 09:05:53 aeon kernel: kjournald(1048): WRITE […]

cooling

Recently there has been some really hot weather in Melbourne that made me search for alternate methods of cooling.

The first and easiest method I discovered is to keep a 2L bottle of water in my car. After it’s been parked in the sun on a hot day I pour the water over the windows. […]

Xephyr

As part of my work on Xen I’ve been playing with Xephyr (a replacement for Xnest). My plan is to use Xen instances for running different versions of desktop environments. You can’t just ssh -X to a Xen image and run things. One problem is that some programs such as Firefox do strange things to […]

document storage

I have been asked for advice about long-term storage of documents. I decided to blog about it because my thoughts may be useful to others, and because if I get something wrong then surely people will correct me. ;)

Many organizations are looking at using computers for storing all documents. This gives savings on the […]

core files

The issue of core file management has come up for discussion again in the SE Linux list.

I believe that there are two essential security requirements for managing core files, one is that the complete security context of the crashing process is stored (to the greatest possible extent), and the other is that processes with […]

monitors for developers

Michael Davies recently blogged that all developers should have big screens. This news has been around for a while, the most publicity for the idea came from Microsoft Research where they did a study showing that for certain tasks a 50% performance increase could be gained from a larger monitor.

If you consider that a […]

Windows Vista

There’s a blog about Windows Vista as the Free Software Foundation site. Not much content yet apart from RSS links but it should have some potential in future.

I am not planning on tracking Vista in detail (not enough time), but if you want to track such things then the FSF site should be useful.

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