JDPFu.com 2025

If you have more than a few accounts, you should be using a password manager. I didn’t use one for years and years, then I tried one about a year ago and became addicted. I bet you’ll like it too after you try it.

In a prior article here, I outlined some important things to ensure when you’re looking for a new laptop. With the release of Windows7, some of those things aren’t necessarily as important as they were under Vista and I’ve learned some new things in my shopping for a new laptop myself.

If you use a portable device, like a smart phone or if you use a computer at all, then you’ve come across the URL shorteners like bit.ly, goo.gl, etc. The title of this entry is URL Shorteners are Dangerous, but why?

The main reason I consider them dangerous is when you click on a shortened URL, you have no idea where it will really take you. None whatsoever. It could be a simple redirector or to download a file or embed javascript or download anything. Javascript is still dangerous.

We’ve all heard not to click on any links in an email, yet most of us still do. I know some people who won’t click on any link from anyone in an email, period. There’s a trade off.

I’m not suggesting there isn’t any place where a shortened URL isn’t more convenient or easier to type. I am just saying that without more information about the final link location, I’ll not be clicking on any of those … ever.

There are tools to preview the final location of the shortened URL. I’ve never used any, but suspect they make money just like free DNS services and URL shorteners make money – that is by selling our use data .

Call me paranoid, but also call me unhacked and aware of internet privacy. I surf without javascript enabled, BTW.

Blog Spam

I’ve noticed the number of blog spammers have increased significantly in the last 2 months. They use general “good job” or “nice work” comments, then leave their email and commercial weblink. I assume these are spam-bots – automatically doing it.

Moderated Comments

Since all comments are moderated here, I’ll do my best to weed them out if they aren’t related to the posted article. Only on-topic links will remain and generic posts will not be allowed. It isn’t like there are hundreds of spam posts daily. I know this will reduce the number of comments, but that is the price for non-spam comments today. Sorry. If you’re comment is on topic, it will be posted. Basically, any comment that is remotely on topic will be posted. Just those that are commercial or links to unrelated content will not be posted. For example, if the post is about virtualization and you provide a comment with links to an online vitamin store, that will not be posted. OTOH, if links in comments are to other articles on virtualization or even commercial virtualization products, then it will be allowed. The decision of moderators leans towards posting comments when in doubt.

Test Messages

I guess some people don’t want to bother writing a longer message if it won’t be posted. I get that, but a test message is not on topic either and won’t be posted. How does that comment add to the conversation?

Further, I’ve disabled comments for older articles. I don’t recall the actual cutoff day. It is probably 90 or 120 days, so it won’t impact the few, loyal, readers. Those articles do not have any way to enter any comments. If there is a comment field displayed, then your comment will be seen by the moderators.

Hello, Nice Article and other non-related comments were allowed previously, but are not going forward. Sorry. Those do not add to the conversation.

English Only Please

This is an English language blog. While we like worldwide viewers and understand that not everyone reads English, that is simply a limitation of our skills. I have translated some non-English comments previously. None were on-topic to the post. We may attempt to translate comments again, but you can visit translate.google.com just as easily as we can.

No Sign-up Required

We do not require any sign up to post comments. Heck, we don’t really want your email address either. An alias is preferred. If you leave an email address or web address, it will probably be included in the comment and publicly seen. That seems to be the way this software works. Our systems do log IP addresses, just like every other system out there does.

Example Blocks

A few of these spammers have been blocked at the router. Sure they can come from a different subnet, but I bet they won’t.

The financial planning and foreign internet diamond sellers are the funniest. Blocked.

Automatic Moderation

I’ve looked into viable solutions to allow non-moderated comments here and didn’t find one that I was willing to implement.
Here’s a site from 2005 with specific ideas to reduce, if not eliminate internet marketing on blogs. About a year ago, I came across another site where the blogger had placed a static Captcha with an simple arithmetic problem inside the image. The answer was always “42.” He never changed it, Never, yet it prevented 100% of the blog spam. I may introduce that here.

If I were running MT or blogger or some other highly popular blog tool, then I’d have a bigger issue. Since I’m running a little used Ruby blog with few internet users, I’m fairly safe just like Linux and Apple are safe compared to Microsoft.

Today, we are manually moderating comments about once a day.

Comment Edits

Occasionally, comments may be edited by a moderator to remove offensive content. We will say in the post that it was edited. Cuss words will probably be removed or exchanged for #$#%. Keep it clean, please.

Exceptions

We are people and regardless of the statements above, there will be exceptions for posting and not posting. Friends who post can say almost anything.

I use virtualization … a lot. I started writing an article entitled Converting WinXP from VirtualBox to KVM today, but couldn’t due to issues.

The latest thing I’m trying to accomplish is to migrate to KVM for all the current VM needs that I have. This may not be a good idea since we’re running Xen, VirtualBox and ESXi VM hosts. Today I attempted to convert a WindowsXP Professional install running under VirtualBox 3.x to KVM. I’ve attempted this conversion before, but it failed, badly. This time, I’m using VMware Converter and it failed before it even got started.

I watch lots of cloud computing articles. If you follow this blog, you know that I’m not a fan of outside cloud computing, but I love internal virtualization, an internal enterprise cloud, if you will.

Let’s look at some real-world pricing.

A brilliant article Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Being a System Admin, I Learned from Superman-

If you are an admin, remember that with great power comes great responsibility. I like Spiderman too. ;)

The behavior of Samba network shares changed with a recent patch. There was a security issue where unix extensions and softlinks created undefined behavior. I use softlinks, perhaps more than I should, for convenience.

Anyway, after I completely my normal weekly system patching today, I noticed that my samba shares weren’t working below a softlink from my HOME directory. I keep most things down this link since it points to the external RAID5 array, huge and fast. Fortunately, the security announcement included the settings to make it work again.

Just add

unix extensions = no

to the [Global] section of your smb.conf file.

Worked for me.

Here’s an insightful article at the Boston Review on How Software as a Service Takes Away Your Freedom. SaaS has been hyped as the way to deploy solutions quickly, pay for only what you need, when you need it, and avoid all the infrastructure costs. There are some important things that the hype leaves out.

Maintaining a computer with all the patching and updating required these days is tough. It is almost impossible to keep everything patched on the most popular OS out there, even for nerds like us. For non-computer people, it is impossible. Often, software updates have costs to get the new version too. That’s just another barrier for Grandma.

Which Programs does Grandma Use?

First, we’ll create a list of the computer tools our fictitious Grandma probably uses today.