In the same vein as Deleting saved form entries on Firefox, I’ve noticed a bad habit I’ve developed recently of typing my password when no password is needed.

Most recently, and most tragically, I was mindlessly leaving a comment on a friend’s blog, a typical WordPress install that requires a name, email, and url. Except my fingertips apparently thought I was logging into Gmail and typed my name, email, and password—and then immediately hit submit! Ugh. Suddenly there’s my strong password sitting out in the open, live on the web for all to see (as if it was my blog’s URL), e.g. http://myp4ssw0rd!/

Now chances are anyone who stumbled upon that would have seen a jumbled array of characters and thought I sneezed instead of entering my URL. But I didn’t want to risk one clever or curious person who might have tried to use it to login to my Gmail account, or my blog, or about 5 other places I used that password—all of which I’ve now changed.

I also find myself mindlessly entering my password at the command line in Ubuntu. I’ve gotten so used to sudoing commands, that sometimes I forget I’ve already sudoed, and I’ll enter my password at the command line right after running a sudo command. Oops. There’s probably a lot of mineable passwords in the .bash_historys of the world. I wonder what my sysadmin friends do/recommend when that happens…

The first thing I miss with a fresh install of Firefox is my own Copy as HTML Link extension, which I end up using almost daily in the course of blogging.

Out of habit, I install Firebug, the Web Developer Toolbar and Live HTTP Headers. I don’t use them that often (outside of work), but they do come in handy when troubleshooting web pages.

LastTab is one of those extensions I can’t live without. It modifies the behavior of Ctrl+Tab to switch between most recently viewed tabs (like Alt+Tab does with windows in the OS), rather than just moving forward one tab. (This should be core Firefox functionality, imho!)

I scanned through about 1000 of the most downloaded extensions at Firefox Add-ons and of those really only one caught my eye. Source Viewer Tab opens view-source windows (Ctrl+U) in new tabs, instead of new windows. Together with LastTab, I can see this becoming indispensable.

A little over a year and a half ago, I rebuilt my first laptop computer to occupy me during the 30 minute bus ride to work. It was small and light and since it wasn’t my primary computer, I didn’t care if I broke it. After that, two surprising things happened. I’d use it to start editing photos for a blog post on the bus, then I’d continue working on it once I got home. Then a few months later I bought a Vespa and stopped riding the bus altogether.

What’s funny is that I continued to use my 5+ year old ThinkPad X23 exclusively. Meanwhile my newer, faster, bigger T42 (that was only 2 years old at the time) sat unused under my nightstand. And it pretty much stayed there for the last year and a half. It turns out that my old laptop running Ubuntu was “good enough” for what I needed it to do, namely web browse and edit photos. And at just under 3.5 pounds, it’s the kind of laptop you can really snuggle up to.

Things were fine until last December, when I got a new 10 megapixel camera. Whereas my old 5 megapixel Canon would produce manageable 1.5 megabyte image files, the Ricoh was churning out 3.5 megabyte JPEGs. And that’s really the first time I noticed the X23’s 866MHz processor and 640MB of RAM start to drag. Previewing photos at 5 seconds a pop is not much fun.

Even so, I endured. I managed to hold on to my money (barely) when Lenovo released the fabulous X300 (a PC version of the MacBook Air). The truth is I didn’t have the spare three grand to plunk down. I started thinking about it again recently when their midsummer sale brought the price out of the stratosphere. But I couldn’t help thinking that I had a perfectly fine (albeit heavier) laptop sitting under my nightstand. Rather than spend $2500, I could buy a new hard drive (for all those photos) and max out its RAM for less than $150.

So that’s what I did. The only problem I’ve run into is that I can’t connect USB devices (like my camera) to the laptop at USB 2.0 speeds. What I thought was an uber-annoying Ubuntu/Linux kernel bug in all likelihood might actually be a hardware problem. I specifically remember getting these weird “This device can perform faster” messages back when I had Windows XP on the machine. And of course in Ubuntu if my camera even manages to connect, it will immediately disconnect. So it looks like my new old computer will have to settle for USB 1.1 speeds:

sudo modprobe -r ehci_hcd

Basically this is the stuff I can’t remember how to do when I’m setting up Ubuntu as a backup server. Tested with Ubuntu Server 8.04.1 (Hardy Heron).

How do I turn off the dang bell (aka PC speaker beep)?

sudo rmmod pcspkr
sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Then add:

blacklist pcspkr

How do I make arrow keys work in vi?

sudo apt-get install vim

How do I configure Ubuntu to have a static IP address?

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

Then replace:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

with:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.100
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.168.1.1

Note: This assumes your router’s (aka gateway’s) IP address is 192.168.1.1 and you want to assign a static IP of 192.168.1.100.

Finally run:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

How do I install an SSH server?

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

How do I find out information about my processor (CPU)?

cat /proc/cpuinfo

How do I find out my external USB drive’s device location?

sudo fdisk -l

How do I manually mount an external USB drive?

sudo mkdir /media/usb0
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/usb0

Note: Your USB drive may have been assigned a different device location than /dev/sdb1. Use sudo fdisk -l to find out.

How do I format an external USB drive?

sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

Note: Be very careful with this command. Make sure you have the correct device location.

A neat visualization of the work that the Federated Media Tech team (including me) has done over the last 14 months:

I put this together this afternoon using code_swarm. Andy uploaded it to Vimeo so the world can see: FM has tech!

Here’s a little explanation of what you are seeing:

This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.

In our case, red dots are PHP files, blue dots are HTML, CSS, and JS files, and turquoise dots are media files.