jaegerfesting Comments

The next day

humblik — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:33:04 -0700

...so what happened the next day?

It is quite possible that I may have missed that somewhere.

Knives versus luggage

Jäger — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:43:53 -0700

My objective for securing my luggage is making it a little bit harder to access, and increase the chance that someone doing something untoward would be noticed. A sufficiently-motivated attacker could easily cut my luggage open, or attack the lock with bolt-cutters, or burn through the lock with a torch, or apply rubber-hose cryptanalysis, or perform myriad other attacks, but I'm not trying to outrun the dragon here, merely outrun the hobbit.

I'll keep my passport, money, and printouts representing my airplane e-tickets securely on my person at all times, so a successful attack on my luggage would merely represent a major inconvenience, not a catastrophe.

Secure luggage

Zan Lynx — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:08:26 -0700

Probably obvious, but since I was just thinking about my own luggage which is almost all flexible fabric-wall.

If you're concerned about securing your luggage, make sure you aren't using fabric-walled luggage. Anyone with a knife can very simply bypass the locks. You'd want to make sure you're using solid, hard shell luggage.

Printer rendering

Jäger — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:26:21 -0700

I did most of my debugging with gv, then fed my PostScript straight into lpr. On my setup, I think that hands it off to the printer to be rendered, though there are half a dozen ways I can configure my printer with CUPS and I haven't cared to look up the details, other than that it works most of the time. In any case, my PostScript should be directly renderable by any PostScript device. (The fact that my hardcopy used a default monospace font rather than a proportional font suggests that it's rendering on-printer rather than in my Linux print server.)

I was amused to see on the Wikipedia page about PostScript that the first Apple LaserWriters were in fact faster than the early Macintoshes they were connected to, which was necessary to render the PostScript properly.

Postscript

Linknoid — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 21:44:18 -0700

At my last job, I didn't have enough to do, and I hated the Microsoft Word based traffic diagram template (like 300K per page, which quickly filled up mail quotas), so I recreated the diagram template using perl to generate postscript, and then ps2pdf to convert that to a PDF. Output file was 5K instead of 300K, the layout was more flexible (it could handle anywhere from 2 way to 8 way intersections), I could manipulate the diagram using a text file as input instead of having to painfully manipulate individual text fields in Word. The downside was, I was the only person who knew how to use it, so I doubt anyone is benefiting from it now. I even went so far as to reproduce the old bitmap letterhead in vector format. Waaaay too much free time on my hands there.

So seeing that brings back memories. Do you run it through any conversion first, or do you just raw dump it to a printer?

Fun++

swinte — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 14:23:33 -0700

Fun stuff!

Oops

Jäger — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:02:33 -0700

After introducing this shiny new feature a week ago, I never quite bothered to double-check that my code was giving the right RSS url to all users. I managed to copy and paste the url to my version of the feed into the footer, rather than using my template engine to generate the cookie for each individual user. I've fixed the template bug and regenerated my personal cookie, closing this little security hole. Now that I feel fairly silly.

Awesome!

Brent Logan — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 16:46:56 -0700

I like it! Now I won't need to visit your site except to leave a comment. Thanks! :-)

Photos

Nemo — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:29:11 -0700

Thanks for the out-of-the-window photos.

My 2 cents

swinte — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:52:51 -0700

I tested out the Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix tonight on the Acer Aspire AOD250 I'm playing with right now. It has a fairly well thought out UI with minimal "bling", all hardware was picked up fine and the performance was acceptable. I'm still trying to figure out exactly how/where/why a netbook would fit into my world and whether the design tradeoffs of the smaller keyboard/gutless processor outweigh the low cost, long battery life, and portability.