February 19th, 2010
I’ve used Palm OS for the past ten years, starting with a stone-age Handspring Visor, continuing with an elegant Sony Clie, and ending with a well designed Palm T|X. The calendar and the address book kept me organized. The failure of the digitizer in my T|X pushed me to find a replacement. I considered the iPhone and Palm Pre, but chose the Nexus One.
Once the Nexus One arrived, my task was to find a way to migrate my calendar, contacts, and passwords.
A coworker recommended GooSync, which he used to move from a Palm TX to a Motorola Cliq. From the description of GooSync, it sounded like neither the free version or the paid version would migrate all ten years of calendar entries over to Google calendar.
Google calendar supports import from an iCalendar file. Palm Desktop doesn’t export into iCalendar format. Jpilot on Linux does, but I found that the format is not compatible with Google’s import. So I synchronized my Palm TX with Evolution on Linux. Evolution’s iCalendar export was compatible with Google’s import.
Palm Desktop didn’t seem to be able to export in a format that Google’s contacts could understand. I used Jpilot on LInux to export each of my categories in vCard format, and imported them into Google one at a time. This worked well.
On Palm, I had used GNU Keyring to store my passwords. Android has KeePassDroid (among others). There was no easy migration path between the two. Jpilot on Linux has a plugin to display my GNU Keyring password entries. I installed KeePassX on my Linux box, and copied and pasted each password from Jpilot into KeePassX. When I finished, I copied the KeePass database onto the Nexus One.
I like the Nexus One. It’s slim, fast, and capable.
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February 19th, 2010
I saw that Git 1.7.0 has been released. For me, the most interesting feature is “sparse checkouts”, a feature that I use frequently in Subversion.
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February 19th, 2010
In a comment over at LWN.net, a reader pointed out that it’s a good idea to verify not just SSL certificate, but also doctors, mechanics, etc. He says, “it’s simply a requirement of a healthy society that it’s citizens have a healthy skepticism and be willing to put the effort into understanding what is going on around them. It’s not that you don’t trust them. Its that you do what you can, in your limited way, to make sure that you can trust them.”
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February 19th, 2010
Andrew Tridgell, author of Samba, says the best way to defend against patents in open source software is to 1. learn how to read patents and 2. learn how to rigorously work around patents
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February 19th, 2010
It’s good to remember that a benefit of open source software is freedom from anti-features. The wiki (the second link) has examples of anti-features. E.g. I wasn’t aware of the Vista anti-feature where it slows down network connections when it detects any sound playing.
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January 1st, 2010
I recently tried using Linux f-spot, with the intent to make it easier to browse, manipulate, manage and publish my photos. I wanted f-spot to manage my photo screen saver as well. f-spot seems to be good at importing photos, but getting photos removed is a bit more difficult.
I organize my photos by date an a directory structure such as “2010/2010.01.01 New Years Day”. The “2010″ directory contains several sub directories. Each sub directory consists of a date and a description. If, for some reason, I import photos into f-spot that I don’t want in its database, I know what directory the photos pertain to. Unfortunately, F-spot doesn’t allow me to remove photos from its catalog by filename or file path. That’s okay though, because it stores its database using sqlite.
I figured this out by running lsof -p pid-of-f-spot, and noticed a file descriptor opened to “/home/jared/.config/f-spot/photos.db”. Then I ran file ~/.config/f-spot/photos.db and it helpfully told me that it is a “SQLite 3.x database”.
After a bit of google research, I figured out I could install a SQLite manager on my Fedora system: yum install -y sqliteman, followed by running sqliteman ~/.config/f-spot/photos.db. I was expecting to see a command-line client, but to my surprise, I found a pleasant graphical interface. It was simple to browse the table schema and to run queries to update and morph the f-spot photo database. Note: I’d recommend making a backup copy of the database before altering it.
F-spot may not be everything I want it to be, but I managed to work past its limitations due to the fact that it used a well known, open data storage format.
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December 21st, 2009
As I was reading about techniques of scamming and of social engineering, I realized that urgency is a tool that is both nefariously and legitimately used — having a sense of urgency motivates us to stop procrastinating and to act. Salesmen get people to buy products by instilling a sense of urgency. Religious and political leaders get people to act using urgency. Urgency is a persuasive tool.
Persuasion is the act of inducing action or belief in others.
I asked myself the question, “what’s the difference between honest and dishonest persuasion?”. Someone who honestly persuades builds trust, and is trustworthy. They love others, have integrity, and seek to empower others — to build them up, to strengthen them. It is selfless, although it doesn’t preclude deriving joy from helping others.
Someone who dishonestly persuades (manipulates) destroys trust through deception and intimidation. They may withhold information, utilize evasion, character attacks, and impersonation. They attempt to impede critical thinking. Manipulation is selfish. The object of manipulation is power or possessions.
Laws of persuasion include
- Reciprocation
- Commitment & Consistency
- Social Proof (aka conformity)
- Likability (trust, friends, I’m like you, image)
- Authority
- Scarcity (urgency)
I’d add:
- Diffusion of responsibility
That last one can help an individual stand up to pressure from peers. At one point during my LDS mission, I had a companion that was a challenge to work with. My mission president told me that if I felt pressured to do something I knew was wrong, to call him and ask permission. His answer would be “no”, and I could put the responsibility of the decision on his shoulders. Normally, I like to take the responsibility of decisions, but in one case, I felt more pressure from my companion than I wanted to stand up to myself. Making that phone call diffused the responsibility somewhat. I appreciated being able to lean on a trusted authority.
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December 21st, 2009
Reading these articles from lwn.net: Minimizing instrumentation impacts and Debugging the Kernel using Ftrace, reminded me of Microsoft detours and Linux injectso (updated to work with current glibc, kernels).
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December 21st, 2009
There are many smart, rational people (and scientists) who believe in a dire future as a result of human-caused global warming, and that billions should be spent to reverse that trend. And there are many smart, rational people (and scientists) who see through the furor of faulty assumptions, faulty claims, and faulty conclusions. Here are several opinion pieces on Global Warming climate change.
Time for a Smarter Approach to Global Warming: Investing in energy R&D might work. Mandated emissions cuts won’t by Bjorn Lomborg (who believes in global warming)
Mr. Lomborg says that spending money on reducing Malaria, HIV, etc. will help people, but spending money on lowering CO2 won’t help people.
Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don’t add up, Dec 15, 2009
The Climate Science Isn’t Settled by Richard S. Lindzen, Nov 30, 2009
Mr. Lindzen is a meteoroligist at MIT, and is one of the chief critics of the climate “catastrophe” claims being made by Al Gore and others.
Fact-based climate debate by Lee C. Gerhard, Dec 16, 2009
Mankind does affect the environment. We are stewards over the earth, and we have been since the time of Adam. We ought to be good stewards, and there are many ways to do that. Reducing man-caused carbon dioxide emissions on a global level won’t improve our lives. Improving air quality has improved our lives, and it makes sense to pursue cleaner air in the future. Pursuing safe, clean energy is also worthwhile.
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December 21st, 2009
I read Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram monthly. It’s from there that I found most of these links, with the exception of the ones on social engineering. I found the first paper on scam victims to be especially thought provoking (although it’s long). The video clip demonstrating social proof was amusing.
Understanding scam victims: seven principles for systems security
Summary: Scammers manipulate people with distraction, deception, herd mentality, greed, time pressure and by impersonating authority. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Social Engineering [2] [3]
Summary: Social engineers exploit people’s tendency to trust and to be helpful. They do this with ingratiation, impersonation, diffusion of responsibility, urgency, appeal to conformity (aka “social proof” or herd mentality), intimidation, deception, and authoritative orders.
There’s an entertaining Candid Camera video clip demonstrating “social proof”.
The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users
Summary: Security practitioners often dole out advice that is perceived by users as too time consuming. So users ignore or reject the security advice. However, “Advice that has compelling cost-benefit tradeoff has real chance of user adoption…. the costs and benefits have to be those the user cares about”. Time is one thing users care about.
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