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Tag Archives: tools

Ubuntu School – Get Rolling with Webmin on Ubuntu Server 11.10

Even if some Linux purists would have you believe the command-line is the only way to go, the pragmatist in me will always take an appropriate GUI over a complicated command-line any day. You can run a lot of powerful services for your home network using one or more Ubuntu server machines. With the right tools you don’t need to be a Linux expert to make that happen.

The tool of choice is Webmin. This is a set of web-based tools which allow you to control virtually every piece of server-side software on you Ubuntu server. The GUI is intuitive and straight-forward, the documentation is excellent, and the project is under active development.

Because Webmin isn’t in the standard repositories you will have to do a couple of quick command-line changes to configure your system to be able to find and download the apt package.

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Once the file is open, add these lines to the bottom of the file

#########################

Package Sources for Webmin

deb http://download.webmin.com/download/repository sarge contrib deb http://webmin.mirror.somersettechsolutions.co.uk/repository sarge contrib

Those lines will add the necessary sources to apt for it to find the Webmin package. The Webmin package has also been digitally signed by its author. By default you will need to download the author’s key so that apt can use it to verify the Webmin package at install time. Fortunately, this is really easy to do.

wget http://webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc sudo apt-key add jcameron-key.asc

Now that all the prep work is done, it’s time to install Webmin.

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install webmin

All done! Now you can access administrative functions of your server’s services from the Webmin console: https://yourservername:10000/. This URL is also shown in the last few lines of the apt install details that are ouput to the command-line.

XKPasswd – Generate Secure, Memorable Passwords

On the heels of Steve Gibson‘s Password Haystacks website, which demonstrated how long memorable passwords can be far more secure than randomly generated characters simply by virtue of being longer, Bart Busschots has created a new password generation tool called XKPassword.

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.

Super web colour picker — AllScoop.com

I was helping Raul out with a CSS issue tonight and pointed him toward a colour picker that I’ve used a number of times for my own projects.

The tool features the full range of hex-code colours but breaks them down into three categories:

  • Web-Safe – The 256 “safe” web colours
  • Web-Smart – An extended range of colours for most browsers
  • Unsafe – The remaining colours which will work fine for applications, but aren’t necessarily suitable to the web.

Colour Picker

The colour picker itself is a nice basic version based on DHTML and a images. I like this because it makes the tool accessible to more platforms by not requiring Flash or Silverlight or some other complexity that simply isn’t required.

As an added bonus, there’s a downloadable version of the colour picker, which again just consists of the one HTML page, and the PNG graphic which shows the colour wheel.  This is a great addition.  (Note: some browsers don’t like you to use offline javascript, so you may need to approve the offline version from a warning bar.)

The page is hosted by AllScoop Technology and I have to admit, until tonight I never bothered to look at the rest of the site.

As it turns out they’ve got a ton of great resources so don’t be surprised to see more of their stuff featured here, or on the AGP in the future. :)

If you need to use a colour picker, go check this one out.

Twitter Acquires Sandy and Stikkit

twitter logoHere’s a clip of a post I did over on the AGP Blog about the acquisition of Sandy & Stikkit by Twitter. It’s going to be very interesting to see what Twitter decides to do with the newly acquired technology, particularly in the wake of reduced services in nearl every country outside the US (read: no more SMS!!!).  Here’s a clip from the feature-length version:

Twitter has snapped up the IP behind a couple of popular Web 2.0 services.  I Want Sandy and Stikkit were both acquired by Twitter a few weeks ago.  The services were originally scheduled to go offline last week, but this window has been extended until the end of business (17:00 PT) this Friday, December 19th.

Check out the original post over on the AGP blog.

Time will tell…

Get more written: Write or Die

I came across this web application a few weeks back while listening to AmberMac‘s dulcet tones on CommandN #156.  The application is called Write or Die written by Dr. Wicked, and its aim is to make you a more productive writer.

Write or Die provides you motivation to write not based on the positive reinforcement of a job well done but on the fear of a web-based application inflicting consequences upon you.  Write or Die offers varying levels of “difficulty” from forgiving through to evil, and three types of consequences.

  • Gentle mode provides a polite pop-up reminder to keep writing
  • Normal mode plays REALLY awful music/sounds in the background
  • Kamikaze mode will begin deleting one word per second while you’re delinquent

The fear of having one’s work deleted is a serious motivator to keep writing.

If you’ve got a writing project to do whether it’s a paper for school like me, or you’re participating in a novel-writing event (WoD was originally built for authors participating in NanNoWriMo) give Write or Die a try.