Author: Rowan Rodrik

http://blog.bigsmoke.us/

Commenting fixed for blog.bigsmoke.us

To my great surprise, thanks to Tobias Sjösten, I found out that commenting was broken on blog.bigsmoke.us. I couldn't pinpoint the exact problem, but it must have been introduced with some WordPress upgrade somewhere along the line. I never noticed it because it did work for logged in users. (If I must really guess, I suspect a silent ReCaptcha version compatibility problem.) Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, today, 1 hour ago, on February 04, 2012, at 13:02 | No comments

Psychopathic Saturday

I'm trying to pump up myself to write a piece of text about psychopathy. All three other group members already wrote their part. We're making a scientific poster titled “Is there a psychopath hidden in your brain?” But, do I even want to know? It's all very close to home, with a mother who's been accusing her ex-husband (my dad) of being a psychopath for, like, forever, and, simultaneously, this monkey in my brain, pointing it's accusative little finger straight at me. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 weeks ago, on January 21, 2012, at 14:01 | 4 comments

I am naked and feeling very vulnerable

There are many clever ways to tell you this. There are many ways to deceive. But in the end I feel that more often than not the deception merely serves to reinforce that image of a very vulnerable naked man. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 weeks ago, on January 20, 2012, at 00:01 | No comments

MediaWiki ConfirmEdit/QuestyCaptcha extension

Since I moved my LDAP wiki over from DokuWiki to MediaWiki, I've been burried by a daily torrent of spam. Just like with my tropical timber investments wiki, the ReCaptcha extension (with pretty intrusive settings) doesn't seem to do much to stop this shitstream. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 weeks ago, on January 17, 2012, at 15:01 | No comments

Safari: don’t give gzipped content a .gz extension

Yesterday, while helping Caloe with the website for her company De Buitenkok, I came across the mother of all stupid bugs in Safari . Me having recently announced payformystay.com, I loaded it up in Apple's hipster browser only to notice that the CSS wasn't loaded. Oops! Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 3 weeks ago, on January 16, 2012, at 00:01 | 1 comment

Announcing payformystay.com

Januari the first, a very good day to announce a new project that I've been working on this past year. Which I did, on Facebook and Twitter. Now, five days later, it's time te repeat the announcement to give it some much-needed link-juice. I know that normal people don't follow this blog. (I don't even follow this blog!) But it does have PageRank. And it does have 4000 monthly visitors. Time for some link-whoring! Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 4 weeks ago, on January 06, 2012, at 23:01 | No comments

Ubuntu Desktop Linux and Acer TravelMate 7513WSMi

My youngest sister has retired her big-ass (17") Acer TravelMate (model 7513WSMi 7510) with a more modern offering from Sony. That was last year. Now, she thought it'd be a good idea to donate it to our oldest sister. But since the thing has always “run” like a pig with Windows Vista, her girl-geek instincts thought it better if I'd equip the old monster with Ubuntu Linux instead. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 year ago, on February 03, 2011, at 00:02 | No comments

Making a shell-script run with setuid root

If you want to run a process with root privileges that you can invoke as a less unprivileged user, you can make the program setuid root. This can be very useful, for example, when you want a PHP or CGI script to call a backup process, or to create a new site or irrevocably delete you whole system. The latter example points to a serious security problem: if anyone can figure out a way to make your program do something you don't want, you're screwed, because you just gave them root privileges to wreak maximum havoc. That's why, normally, scripts (anything executed by an interpreter by the kernel because of a shebang) won't get elevated privileges when you set their setuid bit. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 year ago, on February 03, 2011, at 00:02 | No comments

Remove appending slash from a path using Sed

Here's how you can remove the appending slash from a path using sed, the stream editor: Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 year ago, on January 29, 2011, at 21:01 | No comments

Ubuntu and SiS 671 VGA chipset driver

The video on my mom's laptop, A Fujitsu Siemens Esprimo Mobile V5535, had recently gone awry. At the time, the laptop was running Ubuntu 9.04 (I think). Reconfiguring the driver didn't do much good, so I upgraded the machine to 10.04, hoping that that would fix it. It didn't. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 1 year ago, on January 18, 2011, at 23:01 | No comments