JDPFu.com 2025

There are lots and lots of IDEs out there. An IDE or Integrated Development Environment has been around for 30+ yrs. Many programmers my age remember Borland’s Turbo C IDE or Turbo Pascal. These had an editor, compiler and debugger built into 1 tool. They were small and fast AND very capable. Along the way, IDEs became more complicated and difficult to learn. They added connections to version control systems like

• SCCS
• RCS
• Visual Source Safe
• CVS
• Subversion
• git
• Bazaar

A modern IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio needs a college level class just to understand how to use it. With all the added complexity, we’ve lost something. Issues with the IDE prevent programmers from coding all the time. I know this first hand – by trying to get Eclipse setup to work for shared Android development with a friend running it on MS-Windows. It was too complex. When I was a development lead, my guys were always having slightly different IDE configurations that caused issues for the other members of the team. This problem is common in team environments.

There are lots of options for lighter IDEs, geany is one. Geany isn’t exactly lite at 139M of RAM, but compared to most other IDEs, it is a feather. There’s a joke about Eclipse needing a Core i7 and 32GB of RAM to run well. I suspect even THAT will not help.

Geany is based on Scintilla like a few other very popular editors.

Every few months, I decide to install a newer version of Oracle’s VirtualBox on my laptop. Usually, this is really easy and everything goes well. Whenever I load up a new clientOS, I have to remember all the dependencies required to get the guest additions to compile and link. I always forget something or end up doing it a less-than-perfect way.

When I got up this morning, I noticed that Zimbra 7.2.0 was eating 100% of the available CPU on a KVM server. Some quick searches point to a Java leap-second bug AND a fix.

\#  /etc/init.d/ntp stop

\#  date `date +"%m%d%H%M%C%y.%S"`

\#  echo “/etc/init.d/ntp start” | at now + 12 hours

It was amazing to see the CPU use drop immediately when the date command was run. Didn’t even need to restart any of the Zimbra processes. Amazing.

Life with Zimbra is good again. I’m just glad I was looking at the performance. If I hadn’t just done a Zimbra upgrade, I would never have bothered.

I’ve had dual monitors for years … many years.
I’ve had a KVM switch for longer. This lets us switch the main monitor, keyboard and mouse connections between 4 different physical PCs. KVM – Keyboard, Video, Mouse. Actually, you can chain multiple KVMs together and basically support over 30 different physical machines.

Brian Krebs Nails AntiVirus

I’m not saying AV is completely useless, just that users should behave as though it is.

Best statement I’ve seen about AV in years. If you don’t want to be infected with a computer virus, run an AV tool (if on Windows), but act like you aren’t running an AV tool when you use the PC.

• The AV advertisers claim 80-90% protection.
• Security experts believe the truth is closer to 50% blocks.

I know which I believe and it isn’t the advertisers.

Act like your antivirus doesn’t work when browsing the internet. That sums up internet safety.

I don’t know that email firewall is the right term for the ScrollOut F1 toolset, but that’s what the tool claims. It is definitely good at blocking spam. Most people would call this an inbound email gateway.

Setting it up was pretty easy on a stock Ubuntu 12.04 JeOS virtual machine following the instructions over at HowToForge . Understanding the settings was a little harder. A few minor issues were also solved.

The last few weeks, we’ve been using Ubuntu 12.04 Server for internal testing as a VM host running KVM. The VMs have been a mix of 12.04, 10.04. and 8.04 systems. It has been stable with zero issues on that front. Below are the other changes recently made that you may find interesting.

Sitting at my desk this afternoon and the power went out for the entire house.

The power here is really good, barely a flicker even during the worst thunderstorms, so I sat for about 15 seconds staring at 2 blank monitors before deciding that something needed to be done. I wasn’t worried about any computers. All have a UPS or they are laptops with a built-in UPS. No immediate worries.

Since the entire house was out of power, I thought it could be the circuit breaker and walked to the garage to check it. Oops. No lights. I need to find a flashlight. Found one, checked all the breakers – none were thrown. Is that good news or bad?

The entire time, a 1500VA UPS has been diligently beeping. It has been 3 minutes and the power doesn’t appear to be coming back. I should start shutting down systems. Remember that power issue last month – I still haven’t found a replacement UPS for the right price, so a switch and router aren’t on any UPS. That means the laptop screen that I’d planned to use to cleanly shutdown all the virtual machines and hosts wasn’t going to work wihtout some power reconfiguration. The best laid schemes of ….

Just as I was considering the next steps to be taken, pulling connectors out of the laptop to take it to another location where it could be opened and typed on, the power came back on …. and stayed on. After pressing the display button on the UPS, it said 10 minutes of power left. Bullet dodged. Life is good.

I really need to get another UPS. I really do.

Just saw that MySQL and MariaDB have a root authentication bypass issue

A remote attacker can gain the root login to MySQL and MariaDB RDBMS by trying any password 200-500 times

Basically account password protection is as good as nonexistent.

Said the security researcher.

Think of all the content that is only protected by MySQL tables around the world. Many very popular releases are vulnerable. Fortunately, Debian, RHEL, CentOS are not, but most other distros including Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, and OpenSUSE are.

Time to rethink your webhost OS?

It is definitely time to lock down network SQL access to only the specific clients that require it. Of course, patched versions will be available shortly. An out of cycle patch could be a good idea this week.

I’m like many of you. I use a few websites for convenience. About 3 yrs ago, I had 10 reused passwords, based on the importance of the service. Social sites got shorter passwords, more important sites like banks got longer, more complex, unique passwords. At that time, it made sense, and I had all these documented inside a plain text file that I kept ZIPed with a password.

Then I started using KeePassX, my password manager of choice. 20 or 60 character passwords didn’t matter. I was never going to enter them anyway. Complexity was handled by the built-in random generator and having a different password for every login became easy to do. That’s how I do it now.

I’m lazy. I didn’t go back and change every one of the old passwords to be more secure. Seriously, how important is a LinkedIn password?