System Overlord

A blog about security engineering, research, and general hacking.

Life Changes

21 Feb 2009 in Personal (Reading time: 2 minute)

A couple of updates, since it's been a while since I've posted anything meaningful.

On March 2nd, I will be starting a new job as an IT System Support Specialist III at Kennesaw State University.  Typical of a government job, the title is rather meaningless.  To be specific, I will be supporting a variety of Linux and Mac OS X servers for the university and the platforms running on them (Drupal, Moodle, and other technologies.)  The production servers are RHEL and the development is on CentOS.

Of course, every good turn comes with a down turn. 

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Website

03 Feb 2009 in Meta (Reading time: 1 minute)

I haven't had a real personal website up in a long time, but I'm trying to get back on the ball.  Not a whole lot of content yet, but it's coming along.  Take a look at http://www.tuxteam.com.

Kubuntu Issues

09 Oct 2008 in Linux (Reading time: 2 minute)

I was inspired by Jono Bacon's post here and "Kubuntu, the Blue-Headed stepchild".  This started as a response to the latter, but I decided this is a better venue.

My experience with Kubuntu has been frustrating, to say the least, and I doubt it has much to do with the Ubuntu team.  Firstly, the insistence on making everything "big" drives me crazy.  How can I use KDE when it won't let me resize panels?  I also can't find a way to create custom launcher icons on the panels (in gnome, I have a few set up to open ssh connections I use very often).

Also, how can I get a functional Application menu in Kubuntu that has proper icons and does not replace one menu section with another?  It's ridiculous that it hides the list of application categories to display the applications themselves, unless the user is supposed to always know what category something is in.

Basically, I completely agree with the comments posted here: http://meta.ath0.com/2008/01/18/kde-4-ui-critique/ and am wondering if anyone knows of ways to work around them.

OOXML Debacle

09 Oct 2008 in Misc (Reading time: 1 minute)

There's a lot of issues going on around OOXML these days.  Specifically, there's alledged copyright violations by posting the OOXML specs by members of the Boycott Novell group.  I want to address a specific issue: why is something applying for ISO standardization so secret?

International standards (e.g., ISO) should be open and royalty-free.  It's ridiculous if there's a "standard" that's locked in to a single vendor.  Can someone explain any sanity to this situation?

File System Organization

08 Oct 2008 in Misc (Reading time: 2 minute)

For some reason, I have a habit of placing all kinds of random files throughout my home directory on my laptop.  Sometimes things end up in ~/Documents, other times ~/Desktop, and still others just in ~.  This is bad.

My desktop, on the other hand, I keep squeaky clean.  On the other hand, I sometimes have related files on my laptop and desktop... so even more filesystem mayhem.

So I think I need a good way to manage my laptop files.  First off, more self discipline.  :)  Secondly, I'm thinking of a small utility to merge files between two systems.  Perhaps some sort of bi-directional rsync based on modified dates?  Maybe also a method for mapping particular files/directories on one system to the other.  From the days of Windows 9x, I remember something like Windows Briefcase (if that's what it was called) and it now seems like a decent idea.  Anyone know of this?  If not, maybe it's time to learn some Glade and pyGTK.