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Showing posts from August, 2008

Your grandmother will never learn linux and other absurdities

Operating systems are much like religion. Everyone believes they have the right one and no one is willing to even listen to the other side's argument. Now before I begin I must acknowledge that I'm a multi OS guy. I run Ubuntu Linux on my desktop. Windows XP on my laptop, my wife's desktop also runs XP and she recently aquired a MacBook through her new school. All the servers for Fundi run CentOS (Linux). I prefer CentOS over all of them though Ubuntu is kind of nice for just getting everything going easily. That said I don't care if people use or even if they like windows. I recommend what I think is the most useful and less fuss. I also don't play a lot of games other than on my Wii so I can completely understand people wanting to use Windows from that standpoint. However one thing I often here is "Your grandmother (or mom, or sister or other random family member) will never learn Linux". Right ... well let me give you this: Your grandmother can'

This boys and girls is why you don't put a config file full of passwords into a web accessable directory

OMG!! An actual POST. (more on that later) So I'm playing with StumbleUpon earlier and I hit the button and suddenly a strange page. Full of code. To my surprise its actually their code ... more specifically it seems to be a configuration file for databases, and network topology and it includes the passwords. (and to answer everyone's question: I didn't use the information for evil, nor is the information available to anyone for evil or otherwise. As much as I wanted to keep it for posterity, I deleted it. No chance of someone using my computer and finding it, or my own temptations getting the better of me). A combination of PHP, inexperienced developers as well as the rise of cheap shared hosting have made this a wide-spread problem, not just for StumbleUpon. One thing I really like about Perl is the "use strict" pragma, which forces you to say "my included file is right here in this directory" ... otherwise it looks only in a specified path. PHP inc