From: ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld.invalid
On Thu, 27 Dec 2012, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva, in article
, Adam wrote:
>Moe Trin wrote:
>Did you know that December 25th is the birthday of both Sir Isaac
>Newton and of Rod Serling
There's a song from Spike Jones (sung by George Rock and The City
Slickers probably around 1955) titled "My Birthday Comes On Christmas"
which described some of the major disadvantages of that coincidence.
I've a nephew who was close (born December 30th), so are aware of the
problem close-up.
[Thinkpad T60]
>> OK! But remember the priorities.
>I haven't even turned the laptop on in several days, and just looked
>at the books in bits and pieces, as well as postponing various other
>things. I even drove right by Staples without stopping in to look.
Let me get out the Simon Legree whip - "COLLAGE" "COLLAGE" ;-)
>> My solution to that is that the mail and news tools do not have
>> remembered usernames and "passwords". There is a file in the home
>> directory, with what seems to be babble - and most of it is. But
>> several lines are a Caesar "cipher" [...] All I need do is take
>> the third (space delimited) string from one line, the sixth from
>> another and the second from a third (for example)
>Sounds possible but awkward to me. How do you remember which strings
>go with which server and web site?
Well, yes and no - the "important" mail goes to one account, so it's
not a big deal. The other mail accounts won't be receiving critical
mail, but one way around that was using a mail retrieval tool - I was
using "fetchmail" from Eric Raymond of jargon file fame - to pull all
mail to my home server as an hourly cron-job. I later changed that and
wrote a wrapper that did spam filtering before trying to download the
mail using POP3 commands via 'netcat'. Then, I can just ssh in to my
home systems and read the mail there (the advantage of using /bin/mail
the text based mail tool).
>> bookmarks for me are a URL text file.
>I can see that some bookmarks ought to be left off the laptop's list,
>especially the ones under "Shopping".
Difference - my web use from the laptop is nearly all anonymous, and
I intentionally don't have that many website accounts.
>> The operating username need not be important - the names used
>> externally "should" be different from the operating names anyway.
>What do you mean? For example, I have several VZ email accounts, one
>being "adam707". I also have a few free mail accounts with Yahoo et
>al. (all POP3) and several news servers.
I'm sure you remember the days when the username would be something
like "first_initial_last-name" or "last-name_first_initial" - perhaps
with a numeric suffix if there were duplicates. Those days are long
gone. The user account names on the home systems are cars for me,
countries for my wife (like Bit Twister, separate accounts for the
various external tasks) . These name are not used outside - the user
account names at the ISPs are meaningless. The email accounts are
almost as bad - an example being "tms9901nl" which _is_ meaningful to
me (it was a support chip used with the Texas Instrument 9900 family
of microprocessors), or "rt322apg30a" (part number of the R/T unit of
a radar I worked on in the early 1960s). The "From:" address of mail
I send out might be something like "Moe Trin ",
not any more weird or mysterious as the CompUServ or Prodigy addresses
(the J47-GE-25WA was the engine on the Boeing B-47H from the early
1950s), but the names are not easily "predictable" or "guessable" by
spammers. Up-thread, I mentioned that as an aircraft ground-crew
member, you memorized a lot of numbers - this sorta confirms it. Like
I say, meaningful/memorable. to me, and thus usable. ;-)
>> It shouldn't, especially if you're smart enough to use one account
>> for "looking" and another (back home) for doing the actual buying.
>I can see there are some things I'd better not do at public hot spots
>at all. I think I'll just not configure the laptop for them, and use
>"stolid" for those when I'm back home.
Yup - because the wireless link key can't be distributed easily or
expired/replaced at (very) frequent intervals, the links are not
encrypted, and trivial to sniff. Yes, secure sockets level (SSL) can
encrypt a web session (https) or SSH, but things are simply not
foolproof. I'm rarely in that much of a hurry that I NEED to buy
something or check my bank accounts from a public hot-spot.
>> I don't know about you, but I've got a number of non-distribution
>> applications on my systems.
>Me too, but for all either the executable is in /usr/local or ~/bin,
>both of which are included in my daily backups,
That's good - as long as there isn't a non-distribution dependency.
>or else the source/tarball/package is in /mnt/download and most of
>those really do need to get backed up right away.
Another minor but related problem - remembering to check the source
site for errata and updates. Used to have a wonderful time trying to
remember where in the vast Internet did I _find_ this neat program.
>There was one app where an ordinary download wasn't sufficient -- I
>had to use Ubuntu's 'apt-get' in a VM which retrieved a bunch of
>other files that were necessary for the app to run, although now that
>I have those I can just copy them to Mandriva or wherever.
That gets into the argument about non-distribution packages. The
dependency data for an Ubuntu (or more likely, Debian) package is
described by the package version for that distribution, and often is
not translatable to package versions for "this" distribution. What I
tend to do in that case is to grab the (other distribution) source
package (which ultimately contains the tarball) and compile that.
While I may have to obtain some obscure library or similar, I don't
have as much risk of the alien packages clobbering an existing file.
[network configuration]
>>> else if my home Wi-Fi, use that with "ordinary" security; else if
>>> any other available Wi-Fi, use it with higher security.
>> That's a bit more difficult with the modern parallel boot setups
>> like 'upstart' or 'systemd'. In essence, you need to put a wrapper
>> around the firewall boot script (or alter it) to test the address
>> of the link (it may get interesting if the hot-spot has the same
>> address range as the 'home' setup - but fixable) and set the
>> firewall rules accordingly.
>Another thing for me to look into.
Yeah, it's always something. For what it's worth, I reduce the
complexity slightly because my home network range isn't one of the
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* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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