Older blog entries for bstpierre (starting at number 73)

User Interface Hall of Shame

I’m taking MIT’s 6.831: User Interface Design and Implementation through their free OpenCourseWare website. One of the homework assignments is to find two examples each for the “UI...

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Syndicated 2012-02-22 15:06:11 from The Daily Build

Maintaining “Privacy” Under the New Google Privacy Policy

I put “privacy” in quotes, because under the scheme below you’re still giving up a lot of data, but you can (I think) still maintain “silos” of data so that, for...

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Syndicated 2012-02-03 02:59:01 from The Daily Build

Turning Photos to a DVD Slideshow

The task: take a bunch of photos from my digital camera and burn them to a DVD that would play the photos as a slideshow in any DVD player. (Actually, the task was to figure out how to do this in the...

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Syndicated 2012-01-24 15:36:00 from The Daily Build

Tightening UFW Firewall Rules to Limit SSH Access

The auth.log on one of my servers (really, on all of the servers I have access to) is full of stuff like this: Dec 8 03:19:33 localhost sshd[4718]: User root from 10.1.2.3 not allowed [...] Dec 8...

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Syndicated 2011-12-08 23:54:21 from The Daily Build

Using SSH for IPv6-enabled HTTP Proxying

My ISP has apparently made no progress whatsoever with IPv6, but I’ve got an IPv6 enabled VPS. SSH makes it trivial to use that VPS as a SOCKS5 proxy. Just do: ssh -D 8080 myvps.example.com...

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Syndicated 2011-11-11 16:50:26 from The Daily Build

Fixing Certificate Errors with Cisco AnyConnect

“AnyConnect cannot confirm it is connected to your secure gateway. The local network may not be trustworthy. Please try another network.” There may be several reasons for this error,...

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Syndicated 2011-11-06 15:50:20 from The Daily Build

Preserve Your Sanity When Dealing with Unicode in Python

I have not yet played with python 3, which sounds like it makes working with Unicode easier. In python 2.x, working with Unicode can be annoying, but when you remember this rule of thumb, it’s...

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Syndicated 2011-10-05 16:09:13 from The Daily Build

My First Android Adventure

Here are my notes about getting the Android SDK up and running using only the command line tools that come in the SDK. The following worked for me on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS as of September 2011. I find...

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Syndicated 2011-09-27 02:43:37 from The Daily Build

Change directories faster with zsh

Something I didn’t know until recently: zsh does not require cd to change directories. Using the directory as a command implies “cd”. For example, instead of doing:...

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Syndicated 2011-07-25 15:23:44 from The Daily Build

Use Linux to build win32 installers for Python apps

A python-based project I’m working on has a win32 user that I need to support. Until yesterday I’ve been moving to a win32 laptop in order to run python setup.py bdist_wininst so I can...

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Syndicated 2011-07-20 15:00:36 from The Daily Build

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