Comments for LinuxCommando.com

Comment on The Danger in Requiring Excessive User Input by web site design san diego

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Comment on Set Date with SSH by Tom

Tom — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 13:08:39 +0000

Make sure you have a ssh keypair so you don’t have to enter your password, else the timing will be off by a few seconds

Comment on The Danger in Requiring Excessive User Input by Dan Farrell

Dan Farrell — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 05:48:14 +0000

Incidentally, this has little to do with my point; I was trying to say that requiring more information from users pollutes your data and alienates your users.

But anyhow this data is very expensive. Very valuable, and voluminous to be sure, but expensive. And of course there’s always the issue of how to match up your members to external data sets. You’re over simplifying. If I go to your website how are you supposed to know my facebook account?

Further, this information doesn’t help at all with internal diagnostics – web logs are sufficient for that in most cases, and sessions would be a better way to differentiate different users at the same IP with the exact same user agent. Is a single visitor going to fill out a form 300 times? Of course not. And what they fill in there is totally unhelpful for diagnostics anyway. Same thing with accountability – data you collect from the user doesn’t give you the ability to ban them any better just because you’ve collected it. Account ID is sufficient for that, assuming you have an account-based website.

No, this requirement for excessive user input I think is motivated by marketers and content owners who fail to realize how stupid of an idea it is. But not any stupider than all of us dumb sheep who are constantly giving out our valuable personal data so that other more savvy entities can sell it for huge profits.

PS – Yes, thanks.

Comment on Use df and GNU sort to investigate hard drive usage by Dan Farrell

Dan Farrell — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 05:38:12 +0000

Thanks for the recognition! And in exchange, a link to your blog.

Comment on Use df and GNU sort to investigate hard drive usage by ¿Cuanto ocupan tus archivos en Linux? | Maldito Nerd

¿Cuanto ocupan tus archivos en Linux? | Maldito Nerd — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 05:27:09 +0000

[...] Muy útil para encontrar cual es el archivo ese que ocupa tanto espacio entre millones. Se lo robé a LinuxCommando. [...]

Comment on The Danger in Requiring Excessive User Input by Stephen

Stephen — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:23:12 +0000

Interesting perspective. Unfortunately the free sale of social networking profiles allows for a socially verified and robust unique IDs to be issued each individual visiting a site. This information is already available for the vast majority of users. I suspect that there are only three reasons why any website still requires this information: 1) internal diagnostics (did we really just get 300 hits from the same person?), 2) cost reduction (facebook charges too much per data point), and 3) accountability (we’re banning this user because he’s a jerk). On rare occasion where either IP or finance is involved they usually seem to use a more binding ID like a credit card number or license agreement, and I suppose there’s also the case with small businesses which are unable or have yet to link to another data source.

P.S. – Did you get your book back?

Comment on A Review of Delta In Flight WiFi by Dan Farrell

Dan Farrell — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:18:48 +0000

Jeff,

Thanks for stopping by.

The WIFI connection didn’t use any sort of encryption. It was just an open access point. Of course, they’re doing the standard funky routing stuff to make sure you pay before you can access the Internet, but the connection itself is open.

I wasn’t aware of any onboard power offering on my flight. I don’t fly a ton, and when I do I typically end up on an airbus or a 737, so the planes are old enough that they may not offer this yet – but then again, they had wifi. Or perhaps the power adapters are only standard on larger planes with higher ranges, like those that fly across oceans. I haven’t been on a trans-oceanic flight for some time.

Comment on A Review of Delta In Flight WiFi by Jeff Cotterman

Jeff Cotterman — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 04:09:31 +0000

First off, great blog!

Was the connection just a standard wifi connection? WEP/WPA? This is great news, ports being open, etc.

Also, have you tried any of the onboard power? My inverter I have for car use has an ‘airlines’ adapter, but I don’t recall seeing anything like that recently on a plane.

Comment on Synaptics Tap-To-Click in Xorg 1.6 by Dan Farrell

Dan Farrell — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 22:41:43 +0000

My understanding is that the scroll pad is no more than the extreme right edge of the touchpad sensor. It can be configured with the same tool. Although my vertical scrolling has always been enabled by default (unlike double-tap-to-click in recent drivers), I’ve discovered that it can be disabled with synclient VertEdgeScroll=0; therefore, I believe it could probably be enabled by the converse, synclient VertEdgeScroll=1. I couldn’t determine the effect of setting seemingly related UpDownScrolling field.

Comment on Linux 2.6.34 Released by Dan Farrell

Dan Farrell — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:04:44 +0000

Ceph is not production ready. I looked into it, since I’m always on the lookout for good distribution/replication systems, but unfortunately it’s missing a bunch of features that are more or less critical to any real world usage.

Nope, for real world scenarios, I think gluster is still probably the best – and nearly the only – choice.