Monthly Archives: June 2015

All Your Conversations are Belong to Us

LWN.net is reporting on a Debian bug report complaining that Chromium, Google’s open source version of their Chrome Browser, was downloading a binary blob after it started. The responsible Debian maintainers did not have access to the code for the … Continue reading

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There is No Cloud

A handy reminder from vierito5 (via Karl Voit): Periodic reminder: There is no Cloud. It's just someone else's computer. pic.twitter.com/v4MxtTHR0f — vierito5 (@vierito5) June 15, 2015

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Undoing Git Actions

Git is a wonderful thing and despite its reputation for being really hard to use, is easy to understand and use for the usual cases. The problems occur when you make a mistake and the easy mental model you have … Continue reading

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Trust Us—We’re Wise

The next time the government asks you to trust in their good and mature judgment, remember this.

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Org and Beamer

Presentation software. Windows has Power Point, Apple has Keynote, and Linux has Open Office. Everyone hates presentation software and everyone uses it. If you’re someone who works on multiple platforms, you might have to learn to use two or more … Continue reading

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I.F. Stone, Call Your Office

Glenn Greenwald has a blistering evisceration of the recent (UK) Sunday Times front page article claiming that the Russians and Chinese have cracked the Top Secret cache of Snowden documents and that MI6 is pulling out their officers to prevent … Continue reading

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Computer Security and the U.S. Government

If you’re interested in security, you really should subscribe to the semiweekly SANS Newsbites newsletter. The subscription is free except for the occasional email notifications of SANS courses and events. Each letter comprises a series of short (typically a paragraph … Continue reading

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A Handy Calc Tip

mxavier has a nifty tip for calc: Tiny but nice #emacs TIL: in calc-mode, y will insert the current calculation into the buffer from which you called calc-mode. — mxavier (@mxavier) June 12, 2015 It’s hard to put a lot … Continue reading

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Storing and Retrieving Files by Tags

Wilfred Hughes points us to this interesting paper on tag-based file systems. The idea is that rather than storing files in the traditional hierarchical manner, they are stored and retrieved by tags. The idea of tags is quite general and … Continue reading

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Adding Custom CSS to a WordPress Site

When I first started blogging with WordPress, I needed some custom CSS. Being a WordPress n00b, I simply added it to the theme’s CSS file that controls what the site looks like. Of course, that bad decision came back to … Continue reading

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