jump to navigation

Dear VMware 2006 May 31 21:57

Posted by diamond in : Random , add a comment

Today i received an email from ‘The VMware Team’. The pertinent parts went thus:

Dear Stephen Shirley,

You are receiving this email because …[you have] one or more of the follow characters in your User ID:

( ) * + , ; \ ~ / :

As of 6/22/06 VMware will no longer be accepting User IDs containing these characters.

I would like to respond thusly:

‘Dear’ VMware:
If you choose to use people’s email address as their ‘User ID’s, suddenly deciding that characters that are valid for email addresses are not valid for your website is just retarded. You either get to choose one or the other. Have a ‘nice’ day.

Steve

Sanity re: home & end on osx 2006 May 30 22:49

Posted by diamond in : Random , 4 comments

Steps required to get the home and end keys doing something useful in Terminal.app on osx:

  1. Go to the keystrokes editor (Terminal->Window Preferences->Keyboard)
  2. Select ‘end’ in the ‘Key Mappings’ list, click edit
  3. Change the action to ’send string to shell:’
  4. Set the string by hitting the following keys (without spaces): esc [ 4 ~
  5. Click ‘OK’
  6. Select ‘home’ in the ‘Key Mappings’ list, click edit
  7. Change the action to ’send string to shell:’
  8. Set the string by hitting the following keys (without spaces): esc [ 1 ~

Ok. That’s enough to get the keystrokes to be sent correctly to your shell, and any apps you’re running in it. To get your shell to do something useful with those keystrokes, you probably want something like this in your ~/.inputrc file:

# some defaults / modifications for the emacs mode
$if mode=emacs
# allow the use of the Home/End keys
“\e[1~”: beginning-of-line
“\e[4~”: end-of-line
$endif

*shakes fist at wordpress that it doesn’t respect the indentation of stuff inside code tags*

For this to take effect you’ll need to start a new shell. If you’re not using bash, the question would be ‘why?’.

Firefox software security device 2006 May 28 22:02

Posted by diamond in : Random , 6 comments

Firefox, by default, will offer to remember usernames/passwords etc for sites. I find this to be a very useful feature. However, i’m not all that happy about leaving such potentially sensitive material lying around unencrypted. So, when i found the following option, i was able to sleep much happier at night.

The software security device in firefox allows you to set a master password which is used to encrypt the passwords it stores on your hard drive. Once you set it, you’ll be prompted for the master password the first time firefox needs to access the data that session (though, annoyingly, i think this has been changed to being asked immediately on startup in the most recent releases).

To set the master password go to tools -> options -> advanced -> security -> security devices -> software security device -> change password.

*Update*
Thanks to mikael for pointing out there’s a much easier way to set it these days.

No, i don’t understand why the windows and linux layouts are different. Osx at least has a decent reason for differing.

Do you know where your towel is? 2006 May 25 12:42

Posted by diamond in : Random , 7 comments

Happy Towel Day everyone.

towel day cubicle

Learn from the US DoD about the internet 2006 May 23 20:26

Posted by diamond in : Random , 3 comments

I just came across the Department of Defence Network Information Center faq. It’s distinctly… retro. It refers to BITNET (which waned quickly after the early 90’s) as a competing network to the internet. It claims “The three main protocols in the TCP/IP suite are SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and the TELNET Protocol.”. Other gems are “The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly called “the web” , is a project initiated by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), located in Switzerland.”. Oh the nostalgia.