The idea of the generator is along the same lines of the original generator posted on the GRC website, but has been done as an implementation example of Bart’s perl library xkpasswd — the “xk” being a reference to the xkcd comic which discussed the same subject around the same time as the Security Now episode talking about password haystacks.

The general theory behind haystacks is that you take an easy-to-remember password like monkey (or m0nk3y) and bury it an easy to remember, but very long “haystack” of other characters. The sheer length of the password makes it orders of magnitude harder to guess than the original password.

Example: !@#$1234-Monkey-1234!@#$ and just like that you have created a 24 character password with upper case, lower case, numbers and symbols which (if you look at it for a minute) is going to be really easy to remember — especially if you recycle the “haystack” portion and pair it with other simple words to create a multitude of never-have-to-write-em-down passwords.

So what about xkpasswd? Well the idea is this, the tool will generate for you a list of easy to remember words buried in a haystack of simple padding characters. He has also added a number of presets for things like an Apple ID, WPA2 wi-fi security key and web sites (short and long) in case you do not want to tweak the raft of available options.

It is a great little tool for generating passwords that adds some intelligence that you do not get from the typical random password generators like the ones built into LastPass, 1Password or SuperGenPass. I highly recommend you check out xkpasswd if you are looking to augment your password arsenal. If you are a developer, check out the library available from Bart’s website if you want to include this functionality in an application that you are developing.

Random Image Selector - Downloads Per Day

I’m glad that it’s proven useful for people and there will be a major update coming out over the Christmas break to coincide with the WordPress 2.7 release.  This update will include a few bug fixes, a couple of minor feature changes and one significant addition.

Thanks to everyone who has downloaded the plugin, and to those who have left feedback on the blog!

In your LocalSettings.php file, add this to the bottom: #Disable Anonymous Editing $wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

It should be noted that this fix is for MediaWiki 1.5 and later. If you want some ideas on additional things that you can do with MediaWiki security, check out the MediaWiki Manual.

In setting up this new environment, I needed to decide how to cope with my Windows XP disc being an original, pre SP1 disc.  The solution: Slipstream.

Slipstreaming allows you to create a Windows XP CD that has updates like the most current Service Packs.  In this case, I’ll be adding Service Pack 3.

There are lots of guides on how to do the Slipstream process, including these two on HowToHeaven and Invisibill.  These are great step-by-step tutorials that show you everything involved in the process.  But they’re also very manual.

The tool I’ve chosen to go with is nLite.  This slick little application provides the ability to not only Service Pack your XP installation, but apply lots of other custom features as well.  Here are the steps I went through for my Slipstreaming adventure.  (There is also a step-by-step guide on the nLite Website)

Step 1: When running nLite is to show it where the Windows installation is located.  After that, you’ll need to specify a location for nLite to perform it’s magic.  I chose C:slipstream.

Step 2: The next phase is to select the options for your installation.  I’m a whole-hog kinda guy, so I elected to go with every option if for no other reason than to browse the options and screens.

Step 3: Pick your Service Pack.  Once you’ve selected a service pack and applied it, nLite will perform the Slipstream operation and integrate the service pack.

Step 4: Updates & Hotfixes.  The more that you can download and apply here, the fewer there will be to apply once the windows installation is completed.

Step 5: Select components to remove.  nLite gives you the opportunity to eliminate components from the final installation.  This can lighten not only the ISO, but also the final installation.  Beware removing too many options.  By eliminating support for hardware or drivers the usage of the installation will become more limited.  However, if you have a specific application in mind it can help to streamline the process.

Step 6: Unattended Install. The next screen provides the ability to streamline the installation for a smooth unattended install.  If you want to use this option, you’ll need your Windows XP CD key at this stage.

Step 7: Installer Options. This screen allows you to customize some of the behaviours of the installation process including boot-time messages and BIOS backup retention.  If you don’t understand an option, take the default.

Step 8: Tweaks. Wow.  This section has dozens upon dozens of options to tweak and adjust virtually every major setting in Windows.  And a whole bunch that aren’t so major.  Take your time with this and make sure to read the little captions for each option.  There are so many possibilities.

Step 9: Integrate all the changes.  nLite will begin to create the installation image, merging together all the changes you’ve selected.  This process will take quite a while.  On my machine it took about 10 minutes.

Step 10: Burn the ISO.  Set any last settings you want for the ISO, and click the Create ISO button to start writing the image.  Once the image is written, it can be installed to a VM (VMWare/VirtualServer) or burned to a disk for installation at a later time.

After some searching on Google and the WordPress.org forums, I came across a relatively easy fix.  To restore this button, and add a few others, you can install the TinyMCE Advanced plugin.  TinyMCE is the editor that’s built in to WordPress’ visual editor.

Once the plugin is added, all the functionality you had before will be restored, along with a ton of cool new neato features!

Backup your Files to a Remote Computer

One of the things we all need to do is keep backups of our data.  It’s easy enough to re-install your OS and all your apps, but if your system dies and you lose your data, the results can be heartbreaking to say the least.  So be proactive and schedule yourself a backup using xcopy.

xcopy "c:documents and settings<username>My Documents" "f:<username>" /C /D /E /H /Y

So lets examine what this does.  Normally the copy command can only copy single files, and doesn’t handle large file structures very gracefully. This is where xcopy steps up to fill the void.

• /C — Continue to perform the backup even if an error is encountered (like a file that’s currently open/locked by another program)
• /D — Copy only files which are newer than the ones on the destination drive (Don’t copy that 1.2GB movie file that you backed up last week)
• /E — Copy all files and sub-directories under the one you’ve selected including empty ones (To exclude empty directories, use /S instead)
• /H — Copy Hidden and System files (use this to make sure you catch those thumbs.db files that hold thumbnail caches for your pictures)
• /Y — Automatically override destination files without prompting

Get a list of all your MP3 files (or anything else!)

Once in a while you may want to generate a list of files from your system.  This isn’t always an easy thing to do, particularly if those files are buried in a large series of well-organized subfolders.  But there is a way.

dir /B /S "c:documents and settings<username>my music*.mp3" > "c:documents and settings<username>my documentsAllMyMusic.txt"

The dir command is used to get a list of files and typically display it to the screen.  By changing where the output of the command goes using the greater-than (>) symbol you can print the output of the dir command (or any other command for that matter) to a file.

• /B — Show a bare directory listing, files only no other information or headers
• /S — Recurse through sub-directories to find all instances that match

In this case we set the search up to look through the My Music folder.  If you had already pointed your command prompt to the location you wanted, you could leave off the folder location, and just use a file string (.mp3, *.doc, DSCN.jpg) to search for the files you want.

Find out who’s logged in

This tip is aimed squarely at administrators that would like to know who (if anyone) is connected to a given computer.  If that computer is running Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 or a later OS this can be discovered by way of a couple of Terminal Services commands.

qwinsta /server:<hostname or IP address>

This will return a list of user IDs and will also indicate which session they’re connected to.  The console session (session 0) is the physical UI of the server.  That means that a person who is using the console session may in fact be in physical contact with the system (they may not too, as this access can be achieved remotely as well).  Session IDs higher than 0 indicate a connection using a MS Terminal Services client (mstsc).

If a user is connected to a computer, but has simply left the session disconnected (consider this an un-tidied session that’s no longer wanted.

If you find that you want to terminate a user’s session, this can be acheived through another command:

rwinsta /server:<hostname or IP address> [0|1|2|...|n]

By entering the name of the server, and the numeric session ID you can forcibly terminate a user’s session.  This can be much easier than trying to attempt a reboot of the server… particularly if the server is providing other services on your network.

So there you go, a few quick command line tips to help you become more productive with the Windows command line.

fseventer First off this week is a tool from FernLightning called fseventer.  This app gives you new visibility into just what files on your hard drive are modified by the tools you use every day.  It was quite remarkable to me to start fseventer and just allow it to run while I wasn’t using the computer.  In a matter of seconds my “idle” computer had performed dozens of operations and written to lots of files.

The tool presents the information in a variety of ways not the least of which is the uber-cool tree view.  This app seems to do a pretty good job of finding all of the changed files, but I haven’t tried doing ay specific research with the tool.

Warp Warp is an application that uses mouse gestures to control switching between your OS X Spaces.  I realize that I’ve been on the anti-mouse bandwagon for some time now, but some things are so slow and unproductive that you can fix them with mouse gestures.

The application installs an OS X preference pane to control Warp which is tied to the existing Spaces panel.  When you activate warp it also verifies to ensure that Spaces is active.

Warp is a great shortcut for those who use the mouse alot and don’t want to memorize keyboard shortcut; or for those who simply prefer shudder to use the mouse.

Download Warp by Kent Sutherland.

Teleport If you’ve ever wanted a great way to control multiple macs in your house from one keyboard & mouse the AbysSoft‘s Teleport just might be the solution you’ve been looking for.  This gives you much of the same functionality that you’d get from using a KVM switch, but without the unnecessary hardware.

Teleport provides a single interface for controlling other Macs that have teleport installed.  In some ways it behaves like Spaces, but with each space being a separate physical machine.  I really wish I’d had a chance to try this one, but with only the one Mac in the house, that makes things a bit difficult.

Teleport a great way to make use of existing network infrastructure to reduce your cable load and make your digital life that much easier.

Licensed This next application is one that should be in everyone’s utility toolbox.  Licensed by Amar Sagoo is designed to one things, and one thing only: keep track of your software licesnses.  Licensed has a quick to learn and easy to use UI and takes no time to learn

Licensed falls into the category of tools that most good freeware and open-source applcations are famous for: simple applications that do what they say they will.

One thing I would suggest is a prompt on the delete button.  Not a big deal, but usually a good practise to avoid accidental loss of data.

Front Row “Remote Control” Last up this week is Bert Ramakers’ software-based Front-Row remote.  This app allows you to control Front-Row over the network on other machines that are Front-Row enabled (Tiger and later).

It’s not clear whether this application will work with other applicances like the Apple TV, but its a creative remoting solution nonetheless.

Thats it for me this week.  Due to the trouble with the TPN servers there will be no show again this weekend, but we’ll have another one out as soon as life and fate permits.

http://bertramakers.com/?page_id=19

Avast did a great job of finding most things and cleaning them up.  What it had trouble with was a few DLLs that were in use by the executing trojan.  I was pointed toward Unlocker to free the DLL’s of their executing process and remove the lock that windows places on these files.  Once the file was unlocked, it was able to be deleted by Avast and all was well.

(Photo Credit: bigux on Flickr)

The trouble had been finding the right WP theme.  Many of the ones I like visually didn’t have enough support for gadgetry & widgetry.  Being the geek that I am, this is something I prize.  Secondly, and more importantly to some, I wanted a theme that would actually pass XHTML validation and be a bit less of an SEO roadblock (that, and I’m a bit of a perfectionist geek).

I found, though a fortuitous series of bounces the Options theme by JustinTadlock. XHTML compliant, full of widgetable sections and completely customizable through CSS.  Perfect.  Now I just have to get some help with the design work… ’cause I suck.

First, THANK YOU to everyone who has downloaded the widget.  It has been downloaded an astonishing 2300 times since the inaugural release on August 14th of last year.

The most significant changes for this version are the addition of two new links that you can add to your site:

1. Edit This Post
2. Edit This Page

These links provide you the opportunity to edit a specific page or post from a link in the sidebar whenever you’re viewing a single page or post (ie not the front-page, or a search result).  This is particularly useful for blogs which don’t have an edit link built into their current theme.

Please take a moment and download the latest version of the plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.  And as always, if you have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment on the blog.

The project in question was a very simple installation of TwitterFeed on my blog. In my recent rediscovery of Twitter, I’ve noticed lots of folks seem to be auto-creating tweets when new posts go up… and quite frankly, I wanted in on that action.

First, a description of the problem. The scope creep I talk about tends to come up when a simple project begins to show you options that you just have to could implement. Each option can really be a project in and of itself, and as a result the original project (which should have taken 10 minutes) has taken you the whole night and you’re up until one in the morning working on it and then blogging about the problem!

Here are the basic instructions for setting up TwitterFeed:

1. Step One: Decide you want TwitterFeed
2. Step Two: Provide OpenID credentials
3. Step Three: Start using TwitterFeed
4. DONE!

Here is the example of what happens when you let your curiosity about the extendability of the same plugin get the better of you. Instead of getting this all to work as expected, it causes an evening of frustration.

1. Step One: Decide you want TwitterFeed
2. Step Two: Discover that TwitterFeed uses OpenID
3. Step Three: Read the OpenID tutorial and discover that you can host your own OpenID server
4. Step Four: Download the OpenID code
5. Step Five: Read the roll-your-own-OpenID tutorial and discover that you should use OpenSSL
6. Step Six: Do trial and error until you find a way to actually get the OpenSSL working
7. Step Seven: After 2 hours of searching, submit a support ticket and give up on the SSL for now
8. Step Eight: Go get something to drink. Something strong
9. Step Nine: Configure phpmyid
10. Step Ten: Add code to your site.
11. Step Eleven: Realize that it doesn’t work and use a regular OpenID account until you get more time…
12. DONE!

I rest my case. So let this be a lesson to you:

1. Figure out what you need to get done
2. Get it done
3. Make notes of the other options along the way
4. DONE!

This plugin does a great number of things and has an options screen as long as my arm.  Aside from having the ability to ignore administrators, it also has the ability to add in tracking to all of your outgoing links and downloads.

If you use WordPress and you use Google Analytics you need this plugin.

The software included in the bundle is:

• ForkLift
• RapidWeaver
• Swift Publisher
• Marine Aquarium
• Xslimmer
• Memory Miner
• Yep
• XMind 2008 Pro
• iStabilize
• PulpMotion (still locked)

Full retail cost for the bundle is nearly $600.00, and the bundle will be going for about $50.00 USD until Tuesday.

I’ve tried using various incarnations of Red Hat including the Fedora Core (5 & 6) series, but eventually I hit some kind of a wall and give up. After all the technology is supposed to be there to serve me, not the other way around.

Photo Credit: IO_Burn on Flickr

Last week I listened to the second episode of the Knightcast. This was the continuation of the series “the Grid”. The main focus of the episode was getting started using Ubuntu as a “power-station” in a home or (very small) business network.

I listen to most of my podcasts in the car, so the first time I listened to this episode, I was driving around the city on my daily commute and it gave me lots of time to think about just how useful this type of “home server” might be. When I got home, I pulled the podcast up and went through the first part of it again, the bit that explains some of how the server could be put to good use. Most of it is pretty common sense stuff. The “power-station” server machine allows for a central place in your home where documents, media and other files can be stored and it provides a mechanism for making that data remotely accessible.

Knightwise also discussed a couple of options for remote administration, which is always a good thing. I’d much rather be able to addess and deal with my server by way of my MacBook from the deck (or the bedroom) instead of tromping all the way downstairs where the (very noisy) desktop machines have been relegated.

Almost immediately a few new possibilities began rolling to mind…

For some of the software development that I do, it would be very handy to have access to a SubVersion repository that I could use to manage the code from anywhere on the Internet. Oh sure, there are other services like SourceForge and GoogleCode which offer similar services, but it never hurts to be able to have full control over your machine, and your information.

With a built-in server, adding FTP (or better yet SFTP) capability makes it that much easier to share specific files or data with friends and colleagues. Again you could sign up for a service like X-Drive or Box.net for this, but why not take advantage of owning all your own data. If done correctly, the self-hosted model can be much more secure.

Add to this the fact that my router, by way of it’s spanky new DD-WRT firmware, supports several free DDNS services, and I have a new server set up to serve my content on the web or anywhere else. And I don’t even have to remember my IP address (which admittedly hasn’t changed in the over 2 years I’ve had my service… thank you Mr. ISP!)

It sounds like there are going to be some more great tips coming up in future Knightcast episodes featuring “the Grid”. I wonder what else my 6-year old P4 desktop will be able to do for me!

This afternoon, I was checking out my Google Analytics statistics and realized that I was still getting quite a bit of traffic to the old blog at krell.cellsandbytes.net. I was wishing that these people would be kind enough to click on my new links on the new blog… but alas this was not the case.

So I set about trying to figure out how to make all of my old blog pages redirect to the ones on the new site. For your convenience, I’ve documented the steps involved in case you need to do this too!

1. Make sure that the permalink structure on the two blogs matches (otherwise things get messy)
2. Make sure you have access to edit the .htaccess file in your website’s directory
3. Add the following code to the .htaccess file (most likely at the top): RewriteCond %{query_string} ^(.*)$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://kdmurray.net/$1?%1 [R=301,L]My .htaccess file in my WordPress installation now looks like this: # BEGIN WordPress <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d #RewriteRule . /index.php [L]RewriteCond %{query_string} ^(.*)$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://kdmurray.net/$1?%1 [R=301,L] </IfModule> # END WordPress I had to comment out the line #RewriteRule . /index.php [L] to make the vanity URLs function correctly.
4. Test your website

I was able to make this work for static pages (/index.php) as well as the vanity URLs (/2007/06/15/flickr-vs-photoblog/) and everything seems to be working swimmingly. This will successfully re-route all the traffic from links, or bookmarks to my old site, and ensure people land on the right page on the new site.

Credit: Thanks to jdMorgan a moderator at webmasterworld.com for the original rules & regex.

MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts) is a package manager for Mac OS X which can handle the installation, removal and updating of many tools. The vast majority of these are command-line programs. They run the spectrum from development tool like Subversion or Ruby on Rails, to network tools like bind or arpwatch.

Typical syntax for installing a MacPort is:

sudo port install some-application

A quick note about the Subversion install: you may need to ensure that your MacPorts install is up-to-date. I needed to run a “self update” of MacPorts before my subversion install would complete. See the transcript below to see what I mean…

titanium:~/Projects/WP-Plugins kdmurray$ su root

titanium:/Users/kdmurray/Projects/WP-Plugins root# port install subversion +tools

If you’re working with command-line tools on your Mac, and trying to compile linux tools from scratch, give MacPorts a shot. It will quite literally save you hours of time and frustration.

Enter Pluginstaller.

This WordPress plugin created by Henning Shaefer revamps the Plugin screen in the admin panel and provides a method for downloading, updating and activating plugins.

In my opinion, the two features which make Pluginstaller so effective are:

1. It’s ability to download and install a plugin from it’s original source
2. The re-organization of the plugin screen, separating the activated, and inactive plugins.

This was one of the first plugins I added to the new site. Definitely going into the WordPress arsenal for the other projects coming up this summer.

It’s amazing to me how much Internet bandwidth must be consumed by spam-bots posting to blogs and forums. The official Akismet website hosts a segment they call the Spam Zeitgeist. I’ve included a screenshot of the stats as they are at the time of this post. Currently 94% of all comments processed by Akismet-enabled blogs are spam. That’s just wrong.

Since the folks from Akismet started measuring the number of Spam their nifty little tool has caught back in March of 2006, it has eliminated over 2.03 Billion (yes, with a “B”) blog spam messages. That’s an average of over 135 Million every month!

Thank You Akismet for keeping us all safe!

The service is MyOpenID.com, which provides a persistent login mechanism across websites which support the technology.  This allows you to provide only your MyOpenID.com user account name to sign up for certain sites/services.  This “single-sign-on” technology can greatly reduce the number of times you have to enter a password while surfing the net.

Add to that the fact that Dr. Nic Williams has recently blogged on his site about a plugin for WordPress which will allow you to accept sign-ups from MyOpenID.com users without them having to go through all the steps to create an account for your site.  Great Find!

The MyOpenID.com service will allow you to have more than one “persona“.  This means that if you have a separate set of websites you visit (say the Online Play-by-Post Star Trek role playing sites) you can easily keep those worlds separate while using the same ID.

This is definitely making the list of plugins for the new site!