Kaotic, Kreation, Design

Everyone has to use them; they protect our privacy so when it comes to something that grants access to things like bank accounts and private files why risk it?

Working in the IT field I can’t tell you how often I see passwords such as “123456” or “Password1” when a good password should never be a sequence of numbers or something based on a word found in the dictionary.

In fact when the application developer RockYou’s login credentials were left exposed because of a SQL injection bug  in RockYou’s website the top 10 passwords  used were listed as the following:

1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123

A good password should be something along the lines of “7ufebuHU” hard to remember? Yes it is but its also hard to guess and not going to be cracked in a dictionary based attack. If you really hate remembering passwords grab some kind of password database application, never settle for storing your passwords in a text or word document. I personally use 1Password (Mac Only) at home because it offers the ability to sync with the 1Password companion app on the iPhone. It also stores my passwords using AES the same encryption algorithm used as the national standard in the United States, 1Password uses 128-bit keys to encrypt your passwords. Which basically means it would take years to decrypt your data using a brute force attack, negate this altogether by changing your master password every few months.

If you don’t want to fork out any cash for a good password database, then check out KeePass which is a free alternative, which also offers encryption. A nice future the KeePass team came up with, if you don’t want to even remember the one password to decrypt your password database is the use of keyfiles, you can toss the keyfile on a flash drive and keep it with you while leaving the password database one your computer, to decrypt the database to retrieve your passwords simply plug in the flash drive and point the KeePass application at the keyfile.

With both of the above applications you can copy the passwords directly to your clipboard to paste in whatever application you need, and both also have the ability to clear your clipboard after a set number of seconds. KeePass even has the ability to automatically clear the clipboard as soon as you paste it.

So now if you’re going to store everything in the password there is no need to keep them simple, both programs offer you the ability to generate random passwords. If you don’t have ether application handy and need to generate a password, you can use a nifty tool up at the PC tools page to generate up to 50 passwords all at once.

The moral of the posts is that by making a little effort at using a secure password makes a big difference at keeping prying eyes out of your private information.

Also as a final note, looks like 1Password has already made plans and released Mockups for the iPad Interface =) I’m looking foward to that release.

written by Brandon Leon \\ tags: Open Source, Passwords, Privacy, security

Linux Mint

So I’ve always been a fan of Ubuntu, yea yea I know what your saying already, but Ubuntu is for people that don’t know anything about Linux. We’ll your right and thats party why I like it because its designed in that manner, It installs super fast, I can have a Ubuntu server up and running AND hosting a web page in under 10 min, and its stable.

I have a few Ubuntu servers I manage that have upwards of 150+ days of uptime and they are still running great. Ok now I hear all the Linux guys out there complaining that Ubuntu systems are so hard to Troubleshoot and Diagnose. Right again, but who cares, remember I can have a Ubuntu system up and running in under 10 min if its a simple Web or Database server, so if I determine I’m going to have more then 10 minutes of troubleshooting time to fix my issue, I reinstall the system and restore backups. My linux boxes do daily backups, if your running a more mission critical Database server you may want to run Hourly backups, in my case its only a simple internal Wiki.

Okay, enough server talk, lets talk desktops, I’m usually a Mac guy but I have an extra box at work thats my own personal Linux box, I talked my Manager into letting me bring it in because the Linux network diagnostic tools are wonderful, It used to be a Ubuntu system but when the Primary hard disk failed I opted to give Linux Mint a shot.

Initial impressions were wonderful the Installation process was very straight forward and I’m confident any computer user would be able to figure it out, with the exception being the partition management, but then again partition management on any Unix system is fairly hard to wrap your head around for anyone coming from a windows environment. This is largely due to the fact that Unix does away with each disk getting its own filesystem (kinda). On a unix system there is the root filesystem which is mounted on a disk but you can then mount others disks into directories on that filesystem, so while each disk still gets its own filesystem its all transparent to the end user.

A common way to set up your system is to install the os to a small but quick disk then mount a big beefy disk to the /home folder of the partition this allows the system files to load very fast and at the same time allows you to separate tee users home folders. another advantage to this setup is if you ever have a problem with the system you can wipe the main disk reinstall the system then simply remount the disk with the home files back to the new /home folder, instant restore of users files.

This is actually the setup I was running under ubuntu until the primary hard disk failed, then I ditched it and installed the new system to a single disk, eventually I’ll go get a second disk for it an copy the home files over to the new disk and mount it over the systems /home folder.

Package management is super easy in mint, when you see the little green check mark on the lock in the task bar go away you know your system needs an update, click it enter your password and the system automatically downloads and installs all relevant updates. And since Mint is based off Ubuntu any applications designed for Ubuntu should also run on Mint with little or no extra configuration.

if you have an extra machine laying around give Linux Mint a shot Im glad I did you just may decide you like linux =)

written by Brandon Leon \\ tags: *nix, Computer, Linux, Linux Mint, Mint, Open Source, OS, Software

Perhaps you noticed in the top right of the page I’ve added my flickr photos. This is auto-updating, as soon as I upload new images to flickr they appear here on my site as well. And its super easy.

First head over to http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne, We are going to use the HTML Badge for this. On the next step we have a few options about the type of content you’d like to display. You can choose to display all of your public photos and video or perhaps just your content with a specific tag associated with it. You can even limit it to only display content within a specific flickr set. You even have the option to display all public content from everyones uploads, and yes you can specify specific tags for this as well.

To get the layout I use, select not to display your portrait, leave the number of images to display at 3 (4 isn’t an option we will override this in the next step anyway). Choose to display your most recent images, (or you can opt to display random images) Select Square for the size and for orientation select None (Because you want to style it yourself).

Go ahead and skip the Colors step because we are going to style this ourselves with a bit of CSS. Don’t worry what it looks like at this step, in fact we only care about one thing on the next step, the bit of code I highlighted in the image. However we need to change this code just a bit to load 4 images instead of 3 and to make the code Valid. First lets replace all the & with & and then we need to adjust count=3 to count=4 your end code will look somewhat like this (This will pull MY 4 images not yours be sure to get the code from the flickr page to pull your images).

Now that we have the little bit of code we need, lets get it ready to place in the WordPress sidebar. WordPress Widgets are also known as “sidebar accessories” which are WordPress Plugins or add-ons to your WordPress blog sidebar. Developed by Automattic for WordPress and WordPress.com blogs, WordPress Widgets allow the easy addition of design elements, gadgets, content, images, and more to your WordPress sidebar to personalize your blog without knowing HTML, PHP, or any code. Many WordPress Plugins now come with a Widget version to allow easy addition to the sidebar. One Widget type is Text which allows us to input our own HTML or Plane text, We are going to use this Widget type.

Now that we have the Basic code put together, we need to style it, so we need to add some CSS to the WordPress CSS file, Don’t worry its not as hard as you think, WordPress has a built in editor for doing this. (The following Instruction’s assume your running the latest and greatest Version of WordPress, If your not UPGRADE! if you don’t know how, Use the Contact link at the top of the page or leave a comment to get ahold of me, I offer WordPress Upgrades as a service, contact me for more details)

Select Appearance from the Left Sidebar, then select Editor, okay we are going to edit the Style-Sheet at the bottom. Once the editor is up scroll all the way to the bottom and Paste the following code in.

written by Brandon Leon \\ tags: Broswer, CSS, Design, Flickr, Howto, Software, Web Design, wordpress