JDPFu.com 2025

A few months ago, I purchased Quicken 2012 Home & Business with the intent of upgrading my Quicken 2008 version which runs pretty well under Linux in WINE. I finally got around to trying to get it working. I’m sad to report that after over 8 hours of attempts, I was unable to get Quicken 2012 to startup and stay running for more than 10 seconds before crashing under WINE. Sorry.

There are instructions over at the WineHQ to get Quicken 2012 running. These did not work for me.

For most readers, that is enough to move along.

Shmoocon is a security/hacker conference where security people show how to hack and how to protect against hacks for personal and corporate needs. If you know how to hack someone else, then you are better equipped to prevent those same attacks against yourself, your clients, and your company.

At Shmoocon, a presenter showed how to use those convenient RFID payment chips inside Debit and credit cards for fraud

Just because something is easy, doesn’t make it a good idea. Look for the full video link later in the comments.

Passwords Too Short?

Sometimes websites don’t allow strong passwords. No punctuation, spaces or over 20 characters, so what can we do to increase the security just a little?

Change our login account ID to something long and random. Often, userIDs don’t have to be an email address or your name – they can be anything – perhaps 30 characters long. So, use a long, random userid for those websites that can’t allow long, complex passwords for whatever reason. Combined the userid and password will hopefully be more secure in this way.

The Question

If wiretaps and intercepting snail-mail both require a court order in the USA, then why doesn’t listening in on internet communications also require a court order?

Ever wonder what PC card designers are thinking? A system here has an adapter that converts Infiniband into 4 internal SATA ports. That’s fantastic, but the design of that adapter is less than desireable. It takes up 3 PCI slots. I’ve lost the use of 3 PCI slots just due to poor design.

Thought we’d get off the software and virtualization track a little with this post. I hope you don’t mind.

Below is a photo of the rack setup for my home-office here. Notice that the rack is a steel rack on wheels, like you may see at a bakery or in restaurant storage areas. There are 5 cables that leave the rack. Everything else is connected on the rack itself. Those external connections have plenty of slack.

When I need to work on connections from the back, I’ll swing the entire rack out for easy access.

The keep the noise level low, the lowest rack has some carpet. It is amazing how much this helps reduce vibration noise. Simply amazing. Before the carpet, it was tough to work in this room.

There is other equipment not pictured (storage, routers, computers, portable devices) on the network too. Nothing too exotic or expensive. Most of that other stuff is 4+ yrs old. Heck, most of the stuff shown in the photo is over 4 yrs old too.

I suppose that most of you know I’ve contributed a few articles over at Lifehacker in 2011.

• Linux System Maintenance
• How to Block Unwanted Ads in All Applications and Speed Up Web Browsing with the Hosts File

Well, one of those articles made their 2011 Top Articles on Linux List!
Sweet!

You probably want to look at the slightly updated version of the Linux Maintenance article instead.

Writing those articles took lots of time and I felt like most of my normal readers would know that stuff already. Still, for the LH crowd, it seemed right on target.

Are there any articles that you’d like me to attempt?
Perhaps a series on a less-trivial topic?

I’ve been doing lots of presentations lately, but those topics don’t really translate into blog entries. Actually, my blog entries feed into the presentations.

Sometimes when I look at other people’s code, I cringe. They do not write defensive code, code that prevents common mistakes and helps us find programming errors sooner than later.

• Some of these recommendations will slow down your code.
• Some will look funny.
• Others were hard learned.
• You will still make mistakes and you will still introduce bugs, but at least these will not be trivial in their nature.

Reading Best Practice guides for your language of choice is always a good idea too. Many programming languages have tools that help recommend best practices or point out common mistakes – things that are often coded improperly for the intended use. Lint and Perl::Critic are examples.

Look for design patterns and follow them where reasonable. Design patterns will help you avoid mistakes made by others over the years. Learn from mistakes that others have made.

On a Xoom Android Tablet, this code works

 protected static boolean isAirplaneModeOn(Context context)

{

    return 

Settings.System.getInt(context.getContentResolver(),

                Settings.System.AIRPLANE_MODE_ON, 0) != 0;

} 

But on an Acer Icona A500, it does not. However, this

 protected static boolean isAirplaneModeOn(Context context)

{

    return 

Settings.System.getInt(context.getContentResolver(),

                Settings.System.AIRPLANE_MODE_ON, 0) == 1;

} 

works on both devices. If you've read the Android SDK documentation, it is less than clear about the distinction. I've found example uses for the first code online, so I guess many programs may not properly recognize Airplane_Mode. As a C/C++ dev, we expect comparisons to be against 0 or non-zero, not some magic number, 1.

This week my main file server hit 100% utilization on the main, /, partition. Normally, only 4GB or so is used on the 20GB partition. Something was wrong.

To find big files on just the root partition, use:

sudo find / -type f -size +200M -xdev

The -xdev switch tells find to stay on the same partition, so mount points under /, like /mnt or /export will not be considered.

Very handy when your HDD says 100% utilization. Starting with 200M, should remove almost all OS files. I had to drop to 100M to see just 3 files on / before finding the storage eating issue.

Root Cause

In my situation the root cause was a backup partition that wasn’t mounted after a reboot, so when the backups ran, they used all the available storage under /. Not good.

Anyway, find has lots of options, more than most of us can remember. Checking the man page was necessary. Other options like this are those that follow symlinks or not and there’s a way to limit the depth of the directory structure followed down.