fak3r

Posted August 17, 2011 by fak3r & filed under geek, linux, privacy, security.

: DEFCON 19 logo

UPDATE you can now view a video of my slides, along with the audio of my talk on the DC archive page (45 Megs)

Two weeks ago, at this year’s DEFCON conference in Las Vegas, I gave a talk covering privacy and security issues concerning Dropbox, which led into questions about how much we should trust ‘cloud’ services, and my solution, the open source project lipsync. The full title of the talk is, Taking yourball and going home; building your own secure storage space that mirrors Dropbox’s functionality, and shows what can be done when you use multiple open sources applications to make something with new functionality (or at least new functionality to to open source world). You can view it below, but you should also view it from the previous link, so you can see the ‘Speaker notes’ which give the details I covered during each slide. (visitors to my site will recognize the timeline, and as you see in the talk, this all started with a post I made here in September 2009 titled HOWTO build your own open source Dropbox clone. This drove initial discussions about the idea that eventually convinced that this would be a good thing to build a project around). Enjoy…

View more of my presentations at Slideshare.

Some pictures of me, during my talk in Track 2 at the Rio on Sunday:

Me talking at DECON 19

Special thanks to my old friend Fern, and time traveler Dave for coming in town, enjoying the insanity and showing their support. DEFCON is the annual meetup that never disappoints, and I was really humbled to be part of it this year.

Me talking at DECON 19

And a feel for what it looked like from the crowd; you’ll notice a bunch of people gathered around me at the table asking questions, and helping themselves to the free Tootsie Pops I brought for everyone! Ya, it was a big hit, and helped me distribute the simple (personal) business cards I printed at home (DIY FTW!)

The crowd at DECON 19

The DEFCON conference this year was held at the Rio for the first, time, which was a huge improvement over the Riviera in terms of conference space, and amenities. While the crowd was recently estimated as being 11,500, there were very few lines, and none of the overcrowding that pervaded the prior years (I’ve been coming since DEFCON 14) we saw at the Riviera.

Posted July 7, 2011 by fak3r & filed under geek, howto, linux, privacy.

fetchmail logo

I’m starting a new gig Monday, so I got a new email address for use while I work there. Now of course, I have many, many email addresses, but thanks to Google Apps, I still check them all through a Gmail frontend, and can ‘send as’ any address I want; which makes it almost seamless to integrate new email accounts. However, today we hit a snag, whereas my last client offered to simply forward my mail to another address, the new one wouldn’t with something about auditing as their reason, which I can completely understand, as long as they understand, having to check email via multiple clients just won’t scale. That’s right Anthony, ‘this won’t scale’. So, since we’re rocking Linux and open source we know we can fix it some way, and that’s what I live for, the challenge. Ya, that’s right, I was given a stumbling block, I stared it down and proclaimed, “challenge accepted”. Read more »

Posted April 25, 2011 by fak3r & filed under howto, linux.

Using a key to gouge expletives on another's vehicle is a sign of trust... and friendship.

Ok, a quick one today – at work I had the problem of needing a process to be automatically started during boot, and have it running in the background, but it didn’t have its own init.d script. I knew there was a way I could use GNU Screen (one of my favorite ‘must have’ sys admin tools) to do this, but it took me some time searching to find the right syntax to translate for my needs, so I’m posting it here.

su - phil -c "/usr/bin/screen -dmS solr /opt/start_solr141.sh"

Let’s look at what’s happening here, first we use `su` to run this as a different user, then we define the user (phil), then in the command, called out by the -c and encased in double quotes, using the screen command with -smS to start a new detached session, giving it a name, and finally giving it a command to run in that detached screen session. Now put this line in something like /etc/rc.local, and it will run that command, in a detached screen session, automatically on boot. In this case a shell script to kick off the Apache Solr process in a detached screen session that you can attach to later. Yes, I could have written a ‘real’ start-up script and made it into an init.d file, and I know you can run Solr under Tomcat, and I do, on production, but with test and development versions it’s nice to be able to just spin new ones up quickly like this. Plus you can use the above line to start anything in a screen at boot, which is all I wanted to show in this example. Thanks!

Posted April 22, 2011 by phil & filed under geek, media, video.

The timeless classic, Super Mario Brothers, visualized on a curb. What more is there to say?

Posted April 11, 2011 by fak3r & filed under commerce, music.

UPDATE: My wife got a great picture of me enjoying myself at Euclid Records (see it at the bottom of this post) celebrating Record Store Day 2011 – such a great day! Thanks again to all at Euclid, thanks to Dave the St. Louis PBR rep and to RSD organizers everywhere!

BONUS: I’ve got a shot of the finished sign, installed in my yard, at the end of the post now. Enjoy, and I’ll see some of you Saturday!

As you should know by now, Record Store Day (April 16, 2011) is rapid approaching, and to me it’s more of a holiday than most holidays. As a quick intro, their site states that, “This is the one day that all of the independently owned record stores come together with artists to celebrate the art of music. Special vinyl and CD releases and various promotional products are made exclusively for the day and hundreds of artists in the United States and in various countries across the globe make special appearances and performances. Festivities include performances, cook-outs, body painting, meet & greets with artists, parades, djs spinning records and on and on. [...] Record Store Day is now celebrated the third Saturday every April.“ As I’ve blogged about it, each year, since it started – I wanted to do more this year, I wanted to promote Record Store Day to all the people in my neighborhood that might not appreciate the local record shop (Euclid Records) that I’ve spent time in for over 25 years. To do this my thought was one of getting offline, ya, going analog, taking it to the streets as it were, so I checked with @recordstoreday on Twitter to see if they had any ready made posters I could print out…