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Archive for May, 2009

Drupal Upgrade Procedure

May 29

Posted by The Gunslinger in hardware & software | No Comments

Drupal is a content management system — you can think of it as WordPress on steroids.

I would like to say that Drupal is majorly lacking in its upgrade procedure. The Drupal upgrade procedure is stone age. Security advisories seem frequent (good or bad?) which force the need to upgrade.

Who the hell has a 13 step upgrade procedure anymore? With WordPress the update can be handled with a few button clicks from the admin interface. Drupal requires you to FTP into your site….and it doesn’t end there…

I think we need to get a discussion started about whether or not frequent security advisories is a positive or negative.  I can think of arguments for both sides.

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Best Disk Cloning Software – Freeware

May 28

Posted by The Gunslinger in hardware & software | 1 Comment

Recovery Live CDs:

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VLC Update

May 27

Posted by procload in news | No Comments

If you’re not already using the VLC Media Player I highly recommend it.  First and most important it has a great security track record (it’s open source!)  Second it’s bundled with just about all the codecs you’ll ever need (forget downloading DivX etc separately).  Last, it’s multi platform!

0.9.9 has just been released and no security issues were addressed (actually a good or bad sign depending how you look at it)

Biggest highlights:

  • Improved Intel-based Mac performance
  • New decoder included for Real Video — however, how popular is real these days?

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Spam Gourmet

May 26

Posted by The Gunslinger in news | No Comments

I’ve just started using Spam Gourmet over the weekend and I can preach enough about it.  The best part is once you sign up you never need to return to their website; there’s no ongoing administration required.  Instead of trying to explain it I will quote directly from their website.

How spamgourmet works

If you give your email address to everyone, you are bound to receive spam emails, and you won’t know where they came from. Wouldn’t it be convenient to give a different email address to every business or web site, while getting all your email as before? Wouldn’t it be easiest to assume the address will be given to spammers, and have it work as a spam blocker by shutting off automatically unless you decide otherwise?

That’s exactly what spamgourmet offers! There is nothing to install on your computer, and once you’re set up, it’s likely you won’t ever have to come back here. This is what makes spamgourmet one of the most convenient and effective anti-spam tools available.

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Wolfram|Alpha stock projections

May 22

Posted by The Gunslinger in news | No Comments

Wolfram|Alpha was released to the public this past Monday May 18.  One interesting feature I haven’t heard much talk over is its ability to project stocks two years into the future.  Try it now.  Enter a public company or stock symbol (NKE) and “compute.”  Unfortunately it doesn’t show much of a rebound until at least 2011….

Blowfish cracked!?

May 20

Posted by The Gunslinger in news | No Comments

Blowfish, the encryption algorithm designed by legendary privacy advocate Bruce Schneier, has been cracked — at least according to the popular Fox sitcom “24.”  On a recent 24 episode they claim they discovered a backdoor to the algorithm.  Of course I’m sure this is bogus as the algorithm has been dissected by countless mathematicians since it’s conception in 1993 — still funny none the less.

The transcript of the episode mentioned can be found here.

Also, I loved this headline Skanky Garofalo Can’t Crack Blowfish on 24.  Janine Garofalo is the first analyst on 24 who tries to crack the encryption and can’t.  Hilarious….