I was upset to learn about Aaron Swartz's death last week. I continue to be upset about his loss, and about our loss. He didn't just show promise of great things to come in the future -- he had already done more work for the public good than many of …
Articles by Daniel Kahn Gillmor (dkg)
universally accessible storage for the wary user
A friend wrote me a simple question today. My response turned out to be longer than i expected, but i hope it's useful (and maybe other people will have better suggestions) so i thought i'd share it here too:
Angela Starita wrote:
I'd like to save my work in a …
libasound2-plugins is a resource hog!
I run mpd on debian on "igor", an NSLU2 -- a very low-power \~266MHz armel machine, with no FPU and a scanty 32MiB of RAM. This serves nicely to feed my stereo with music that is controllable from anywhere on my LAN. When playing music and talking to a single mpd …
set default margins for OpenOffice as a sysadmin?
I'm maintaining a lab of debian squeeze machines that run OpenOffice.org (i'm considering upgrading to LibreOffice from squeeze-backports). I'd like to adjust the default page margins for all users of Writer. Most instructions i've found suggest ways to do this as a single user, but not how to make …
Error messages are your friend (postgres is good)
Here is a bit of simple (yet subtly-flawed) sql, which produces different answers on different database engines:
0 dkg@pip:~$ cat test.sqldrop table if exists foo;create table foo (x int, y int);insert into foo VALUES (1,3);insert into foo VALUES …more proprietary workarounds, sigh
In supporting a labful of Debian GNU/Linux machines with NFS-mounted home directories, i find some of my users demand a few proprietary programs. Adobe Flash is one of the most demanded, in particular because some popular streaming video services (like Amazon Prime and Hulu) seem to require it.
I'm …
KVM, Windows XP, and Stop Error Code 0x0000007B
i dislike having to run Windows as much as the next free software developer, but like many sysadmins, i am occasionally asked to maintain some legacy systems.
A nice way to keep these systems available (while not having to physically maintain them) is to put them in a virtual sandbox …
Compromising webapps: a case study
This paper should be required reading for anyone developing, deploying, or administering web applications.
It's also interesting to read the perspective of the folks operating the compromised webapp (details are in the section titled "Digital Vote-By-Mail" on pages 34 to 38).
Adobe leaves Linux AIR users vulnerable
A few months ago, Adobe announced a slew of vulnerabilities in its Flash Player, which is a critical component of Adobe AIR:
Adobe recommends users of Adobe AIR 2.6.19140 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux update to Adobe AIR 2.7.0.1948.
[...]
June 14, 2011 …
unreproducible buildd test suite failures
I've been getting strange failures on some architectures for xdotool. xdotool is a library and a command-line tool to allow you to inject events into an existing X11 session. I'm trying to understand (or even to reproduce) these errors so i can fix them.
The upstream project ships an extensive …