Honeypot.net

I wrote an earlier post on converting a Drupal site to Blogofile. I couldn't be happier with how that turned out as it allowed me to immediately start using Blogofile while still keeping my old Drupal content online. Sweet! But who wants to continue running the two systems in parallel forever? I certainly don't, and after a code sprint I came up with a way to completely transition off Drupal.First, I manually converted the most popular nodes on my Drupal site to Blogofile. I moved all of my Project content to GitHub, and wrote a Blogofile photo album that replaced...

I was reading a story about a hacked password database and saw this comment where the poster wanted to make a little program to generate non-random passwords for every site he visits:I was thinking of something simpler such as "echo MyPassword69! slashdot.org|md5sum" and then"aaa53a64cbb02f01d79e6aa05f0027ba" using that as my password since many sites will take 32-character long passwords or theywill truncate for you. More generalized than PasswordMaker and easier to access but no alpha-num+symbol translation and only(32) 0-9af characters but that should be random enough, or you can do sha1sum instead for a little longer hash string.I posted a reply but...

I have a Drupal site with nearly a thousand nodes, several having over 100,000 hits. I wanted to migrate to Blogofile but absolutely did not want to start over or make this a major hassle. Instead, I used some Apache RewriteRules to gradually and seamlessly switch from Drupal to Blogofile one post at a time. Here's how I did it, using my site's real name of http://honeypot.net/ to give concrete examples:Migrated my comments to Disqus. Drupal's own disqus module has built-in export functionality to make this a snap.Set up internal DNS to add a new A record, drupal.honeypot.net, for my...

I needed to run a BIOS flash utility that was only available for DOS. To complicate matters, the server I needed to run it on doesn't have a floppy or CD-ROM drive. I figured I'd hop on the Internet and download a bootable USB flash drive image. Right? Wrong.I found a lot of instructions for how to make such an image if you already have a running Windows or Linux desktop, but they weren't very helpful for me and my Mac. After some trial and error, I managed to create my own homemade bootable USB flash drive image. It's available...

While waiting for Jen to return from a conference, I thought about calling her to get her estimated time of arrival, or her ETA. I realized she might be might be pretty far away still and thought I better ask for an estimate of the accuracy of the estimate, or meta-estimate: her META. Hey, neat! META can be a recursive acronym for "meta-ETA", so it also references the nature of the acronym itself, sort of making META a meta-acronym, which truly makes it both meta and META....

There is a new time management application for BlackBerry phones called FCmobilelife. Just as a warning, potential users should know that FCmobilelife was written by SCO, a bankrupt company famous for suing AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler, customers who were moving away from SCO's software to something else.Now, I won't directly tell anyone to avoid FCmobilelife, mainly because I think SCO is a collective of lawsuit-happy cretins and I don't want them coming after me, but would urge users to be extremely careful about building business relationships with its developers....

The PgDBF project is moving to its new home on SourceForge, at http://pgdbf.sourceforge.net/. All new updates and code will be posted there....

There are few joys in life like using something that is the perfect expression of its intent. Each trade has its representative tools, and their common trait is quality, even if it's not obvious to the casual observer, and often counterintuitive. The best tools in a category are almost always the least flashy, and rarely the ones a new practitioner would choose.The Model M keyboard is like that: it's loud, ugly, heavy, and utterly lacking modern niceties like buttons to change your sound volume or check your email. And yet, it has that transcendent feeling that's hard...

A man calls into a radio show because his son received an obviously-spam email telling him that he's been kicked off of Facebook. The host gets worked up and sympathetic and wants to handle it like a legitimate eviction notice, even though no one's verified whether the kid can still log into his account.Another man calls a radio show because his business stores a lot of personal information about its customers, and he wants to know what he should do to keep that data safe. The host tells him to install Norton Internet Security.What do they have in...

In another article, I described a replacement for Python's built-in map() function that could take advantage of multi-processing systems. That one was based on the standard Unix fork(). Since then, I've written another based on Parallel Python that is much simpler and lets other, better-tested code do all the hard work. It could also be easily extended to run on a cluster instead of just the local system, but I haven't been inclined to tinker with that too much yet.Note one possibly important difference from the builtin map() function: this version returns a generator that yields values...