Tormenting one engineer at a time.
Technology
Technology related items
Tools that I use – Mostly free
04 weeks ago
{EAV:01d1e13f8488f007}
Well, I figured it’s been a while since I posted. I thought I’d write a post about the tools that I use, their links, and the like.
Browsers
I currently use Firefox‘s Aurora browser. It’s just like Firefox, just a little more cutting edge. I have installed all of the others that matter to me, Chrome and IE, but recently the addons available for Firefox has been a blessing (and a curse). I only use IE when I have to.
Communication
I currently use Thunderbird for email. I rarely use the web sites of those email services I use. I have three seperate gmail accounts, a hotmail, an AOL and a Yahoo, which all work for free within Thunderbird.
For IM’s and the like I use Trillian. The skinning capability of Trillian allows me to run the dark skin I like, fitting with my Windows 7 Aero theme. I also run Windows Live Messenger for now, but that’s likely to change here soon and bundle it into Trillian. Trillian will allow you to connect most, if not all, networks you could ever want to be connected to. Facebook, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk and Jabber are the ones I use. If I have to connect to an IRC network at all, I can do so through Trillian as well, although it’s IRC features are lacking. Skype requires it’s own download, but does integrate with Trillian.
For any major communication through IRC still, I use XChat 2.
I have tried alternatives, like Digsby, Pidgin, mIRC and whatnot. Just doesn’t keep my attention like Trillian and Xchat 2 does.
Documents
I use Google Docs the most for documents. Skydrives abilities leaves something there for desire, where Google Docs allows me to get everything I could possibly want as long as I have an internet connection. For more offline documents, I’d use OpenOffice or it’s spawn LibreOffice.
For PDF’s, I typically do use the Adobe Acrobat Reader. I have tried alternatives, but one or another feature is missing and stuff doesn’t display right, so I stay with the maker of the PDF format.
I’ve started trying out Mindmaps and Gantt software. The easiest I’ve found to use for mindmaps is FreeMind. You can just start putting your ideas down in the hectic style that is your brain. Gantt charts and the like are taking me a while to get used to and set up, largely because i’m not an organized person. GanttProject is the best that I’ve come across so far.
Ebooks are also starting to come to me in one form or another. I started using Calibre at the request of a friend. Easy to set up, supports the Kindle Fire, which is the only ebook reader I’ve tried, and many others that I may not think of. Does have a generic profile too for those no name ones.
Pictures, being a form of documents, are hard to manage as is. I use Picassa for integration with my Google account. Also supports features that are sought after in programs like iPhoto on the Mac. Faces, places and so on.
Music is a form of document as well. I mostly use Windows Media Player here, but Winamp is very good as well.
Programming
I stick with the typical Microsoft Visual Studio for programming. They have an express(free) version that would suit a programmers needs from the beginning. I also use Eclipse for the Android development, since it seems the best integrated IDE for Android. Code::Blocks didn’t grab my attention and wasn’t as easy to use really.
Unity appears to be the best platform to use for game development without making your own base. Uses javascript for game controls, imports most of the major 3d modeling software formats that I know of, including Blender‘s. I’ve downloaded Blender, but I’m no good at it.
GIMP for image manipulation is going to be my choice. Not much to say here except it’s a free version of photoshop. Again, not being artsy, I’m not good at it, but it gets the basics done.
For remote projects on Linux boxes and the like (web development, php and SQL, or MUD’s), I stick with Putty for the SSH stuff, and WinSCP for file transfers.
Entertainment
Other than music, listed above as documents, I use the Hulu software for most of my entertainment with videos. I also use my internet browsers for things like Netflix and Youtube. VLC is great for the downloaded videos, like camcorder stuff and shared videos because it plays almost every format out there.
Games that I play range from EVE Online (I have a seperate blog for those adventures) to World of Warcraft to Guild Wars to other items that is free. Need For Speed The World is a different change of pace when you want to get away from the typical stuff you play, as well as World of Tanks, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Pirates of the Carribean (if you’re a fan) and Minecraft (cheap). This is expanding with some free stuff from Gamefly that I’m trying out, but I don’t know how long that’s going to last. Also, with any MMO, you’re looking at communication while in game, you can’t go wrong with Teamspeak or Ventrilo. I’ve tried Mumble, which is a great free alternative if you don’t want to buy/rent a server for more than 5 people.
Also to note, I use the Xbox 360 for a lot of entertainment. Randomly I’ll log into old MUD’s I’ve played with cMUD, zMUD’s reincarnate. MM2K (no longer developed, see link for MM2K6) and plain old Telnet doesn’t work well with me.
Downloads
Downloads happen a lot with gaming, programming, blogging and just plain boredom. For torrents (my dabbling into almost every major linux OS – Thank you VMWare) I use uTorrent.
For browser downloads, I use the DownThemAll addon for Firefox. Those that might not be in Firefox I use Free Download Manager (rarely).
I hope I helped you find some software that is free and great for your day to day use. If you have any comments, alternatives you’d strongly recomend or just want to comment on anything I’ve said here, please feel free. We use the Disqus plugin, so no need for another username and password.
State of the internet–Boring and predictable
01 year ago
Many times we hear about the abuse of the internet. Egypt having already shut down the internet in their country trying to disperse the rebellion going on there, child pornographers abusing open access points on the neighborhoods you’d lease expect it (you do have at least WPA on your Wi-Fi, right?) and various other stupid stuff.
I was bored tonight. I decided that I’m going to throw my self conscious ways out of the proverbial window. I turned on Chatroulette. Here’s what I found.
Before I get into my findings, let’s discuss the idea of Chatroullette and my expectations already going into this. Chatroullette turns on your webcam and microphone (You can turn these off, but what’s the fun in that?). It then selects a random stranger for you to chat with and connects the two of you. This is subject of many funny demotivational posters and topics on the internet, so I never got interested in it in the first place, but I was bored and disappointed already with the world. Why the hell not? I came into it many people skipping me. I have nothing unique to offer. I’m no 24 year old Justin Beiber. I can’t sing, dance or do anything on camera to force people to enjoy even looking at me, except maybe to mock me at how ugly I am.
For a good minute or so, I went through about 30 feeds on the website which the other end immediately clicked on to the next person, unsure what they were looking for. Most were male subjects, however there were two female in my night, which promptly clicked next.
The one person that didn’t click next on me responded to my “hi” with a butchered spelling of “hey jew bastard”. I promptly responded, not jew, perhaps a bastard (I didn’t know my father growing up) and I saluted him with two fingers and clicked next on him 5 minutes later, I hadn’t met anyone except for a guy that likes to call random people jew bastards.
Usually I find this typical, people don’t particularly enjoy working with each other or randomly meeting others. The whole dating scene is annoying, meeting people in your day to day job isn’t so bad some days and to deal with the people you already know and have expectations of you can be cumbersome.
Today, I took this as a sad state. A state of boredom and predictability. Mind you, I live in Iowa, small town of 90 thousand people, if I recall. We don’t have anything to do in this area, or surrounding areas. You know it’s bad when someone like me feels the need to call the State of the Internet a sad place to be. Games run wild, places like Second Life largely unpopulated because of the potential of complexity. Games of EVE Online abandoned quickly because you aren’t the best at something right off the bat. These are the normal interactions online, chatting with friends you do know, or grinding worse than your daily job of flipping hamburgers while you hold a PHD in business administration in the world of Azeroth. Forums of like minded folks show up, which is a great time if you don’t mind waiting hours or even days for response on a joke that grows old by the minute.
The state of society needs to change, and how we react online needs to change even more so. Anonymity can’t be sourced as a problem online, no consequences for what you say and whatnot, but to even require a law to be civil in a global environment means that our intelligence as a race is diminishing at an alarming rate. Here soon Chaos will reign because Ethan from Ctrl-Alt-Del had a bright idea that some moron thought it would be wise to imitate a cartoon (hrm, sound familiar?) and attempt to create AI on his own without properly debating how it reacts to people. Our relationships will be limited by avatars in games like WoW, Second Life and these little pictures that get sent as a representation of us (but not necessarily pictures of us) with our instant messages. Our thoughts will be provided by the government without the ability to start a revolution we need because once that thought does enter our mind, our Freedom of Speech Under Certain Restrictions Act of our Constitution allows our government to terminate the signal that allows us to breathe through our computer.
As I write those sentences, I find myself asking if I’m influenced by movies like I, Robot or The Matrix. I’d say so, but that’s only because the stories present themselves in completely realistic logical beliefs. My 2:30am rant is done at this time. Please come back for sleep deprivation mumblings of a guy who is just trying to get through the world with his pants on and his thoughts that of his own.
Cloudflare and this website?
11 year ago
If you scroll to the very bottom of this page, or any page for that matter, you’ll see a new icon in my footer. It mentions Cloudflare. This should go under the lessons of server management, particularly website management.
Often you may run into a problem where you might get “Dugg” or “Slashdotted”. Well, maybe not that often, but if you have a small home server like mine, it wont handle that kind of traffic if it does happen. That’s a crucial point as a webmaster. Your stuff is being read, and that’s a great feeling for anyone on the internet.
Cloudflare steps in where you might fail. Cloudflare is going to cache everything on your website and if your site goes down, it will serve it for you. No additional software installation and more importantly, no hardware. All I had to do to set it up was modify where my DNS was pointing. The only downfall to this method is subdomain folks wont be able to take advantage. Sorry “mybestwebsite.hopto.org” or whoever. You have to own your own domain from GoDaddy or 1&1, or my most favorable these days, Domain.com.
If the event does happen, here’s what the theory tells me. My server goes down. Cloudflare will recognize that and serve cached copies of my pages, seeing as its receiving all the traffic first. At that point, the server comes back online, and Cloudflare works with my server to get everything updated and good to go.
Let’s talk setup, what did it REALLY take to get it set up completely? Step 1. I signed up for a Cloudflare account. Easy and free. Step 2. I told it I wanted it to protect dethlefsmoreno.com. Step 3. It copied my existing DNS records into its system. Step 4. I went to my registrar and changed my DNS to point to the Cloudflare DNS (provided at the appropriate time by Cloudflare). Step 5. Wait about an hour (times will vary depending on your DNS provider, registrar, etc). I got an email when it detected the DNS change, and no interruption in service.
What else does it do? It’s also supposed to stop bad people from getting to my website. People like Viagra spammers, or so on. Also it implements my Google Analytics code into each page, regardless of what my website actually serves up. Also tracks, more accurately, my visitors. Because I’m having them control the DNS settings (but not the registration or the hosting), they have the ability to do a lot more than the simple stuff that plugins of WordPress, Joomla, SMF, etc attempt to do.
I suggest giving this a try. Mileage will vary, as this is a low traffic website (for now), so I’d be interested to hear how it helps (or hurts) your website.
Protect yourself from phishing
21 year ago
Some ask, “What exactly is phishing? Isn’t that just sitting in a boat and drinking beer?” Sadly, no. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to know about, nor protect ourselves, against phishing. Phishing is an attempt to STEAL your password. Most phishing attempts are websites designed to look just like another. Your bank, for instance, may be a potential phishing site. eBay and PayPal are common as well. They look just like the real thing, but instead of signing into your account after putting your password in it gives you an error message like “Due to technical difficulties, we can not sign you in.” or simply a white page. In the background, however, your password has been stored for someone to access it and use it against you and for their own personal gain. Here’s a typical phishing attempt:
I receive an email from eBay saying I won a bid for an item, let’s say an Xbox 360, for 20 bucks. Great deal, right? I click the link in the email and am presented with a page in my browser asking for my username and password. I try and sign in, it says that I have a bad password. Try again? Sure, I could have mistyped it. Nope… still not letting me in. Well, dang. Did I use a different password? I try all my normal passwords. Nothing. I click the reset password link, it says “Sorry! Due to technical difficulties we can not reset your password. Try again later.” Fine. I push it to the back of my mind, to be dealt with later.
Let’s think about this and derive how to protect ourselves from this attack.
1. I received an email, for an auction I did not partake in. RED FLAG. This is my first clue.
2. It’s a great item that I could easily get, but for much less than normal. RED FLAG #2. Xbox 360 for 20 bucks? Way too good to be true.
3. I clicked the link from the email, taking me to a page that looks like eBay.
4. I inserted my username and password, came back invalid multiple times.
5. I tried my other passwords that I may have used, thinking I was remembering the wrong one. The rest is pretty obvious.
Now, how to protect yourself from it. First, take everything in email with a grain of salt. Don’t believe it’s true. Secondly, if it seems too good to be true, IT IS. Third, never click a link that was emailed to you. If the email is true, just go to the site it proclaims to be by entering its address in your browser. Go directly to ebay.com and sign in there. If it’s important enough, the site will tell you on first login. If you feel there still might be a chance for a problem, most websites protect themselves with security certificates signed by Certificate Authorities recognized by big names. For instance, look at the following screenshots from Google Chrome:
Addressbar: Notice the green lock with the verified companies name in it. 
Clicking that lock provides something to this affect. Tells us the details and some technical information. Note this certificate is signed by VeriSign, a reputable Certificate Authority.
Clicking Certificate information on the bottom left of the above screen gives the below screen. Note it restates that the certificate was issued to signin.ebay.com and by VeriSign. 
This proves that it’s unmodified and as intended by the eBay company. The only way for this to still result in identity theft is if an attacker got into eBay, which is outside of your control and highly unlikely (so I’d hope). That’s for another article.
Lastly, NEVER send your username and password to people through email. I can be your Banks CEO if I word it just right through email.
I hope that this helps someone in understanding how phishing works and how to avoid it. Please comment with any other tips or feedback.
Take a lesson from me – Server Admin Lessons
01 year ago
There are many things that you should know about me. None of these are things like I like long walks on the beach, as a matter of fact I hate walks pretty much anytime. I, however, do trust technology a bit too much. Maybe more than a bit!
As a friend of mine said, paraphrasing, “For a techie, you have more computer problems than anyone I know.” Why does he say this? Let’s recount my record of recent events. I had my server fill the hard drive it’s using… twice. I had issues with my server to the point where it was easer for me to reformat my hard drive and start over. I use a virtual server from my main computer (yes… cringe at it, I know). It’s current iteration is a VirtualBox server running Ubuntu 9.10 Server with ISPConfig 3. During that reformat of my hard drive, I also reformatted my host computer back to default of Windows 7, which caused something to happen with the virtual hard drive, causing it not to boot anymore. Now I had to find a way to get at data stored on a Ext4 partition on a virtual hard drive that wouldn’t mount with that then version VMWare Server / Disk Mount Utilities! Not to mention, I forgot setting LVM on it, which caused about 4 days to be lost. Finally getting at that, I was able to recover one of the critical parts of the HDD, the latest backup for a site I host, Kristas Kakery. Now all that is done, I realize that this iteration of my server has been down for one of the previously mentioned reasons (full HDD) for a matter of days, and no one bothered to tell me! Not to mention that I have done live upgrades to items that have messed up the server, because I’m simply too lazy to spend the resources to copy over the virtual HDD, run it in a virtual server as well, and test changes first.
With all that covered, here’s a list of things not to do. Learn from me.
1. Don’t use a virtual server software on your main computer.
2. Set up some monitoring service to alert you when your site/server goes down. The linked one is free for one website.
3. ALWAYS have a development machine to test upgrades before making said upgrades/changes live.
I’m sure I’m missing a few, but it’s currently 1:15 in the morning, and I’m tired. I’m sure this isn’t the only part in the series of lessons I hope to relay to you, so you don’t make the same mistakes I do.