I just added a note about how to reset Mac OS X v10.7 Lion to factory defaults. Thanks to Adam and Adrian for the hints (and Mark for the actual work-around on the Apple forum -> unverified, feedback welcome!).
Button-itis R.I.P.! No more “share” buttons on this changelog.
I decided to disable the “share” button plugin (“tweet”, “like”, “+1” etc.) on this changelog for the following reasons:
I) I have to use (and know about) these social sharing technologies as an IT professional. As a private person however, I disapprove of proprietary technologies that may unknowingly inflict people’s privacy online (for even more scary stuff, learn about browser fingerprinting and read this recent Wired story about undeletable cookies). I also recommend and support using plugins and tools like
- Brian Kennish’s Disconnect extension for Chromium based browsers
- SRWare’s Iron Browser (a better Chrome alternative, see Iron vs. Chrome)
- Tor Project
II) The way how social sharing (and “social” per se) is done today is just plain wrong:
- It’s proprietary instead of based on open standards.
- Data usually gets pulled into proprietary, closed, data silos instead of giving users full and exclusive control over their very own data.
- All the big existing social sharing architectures follow a vulnerable (in so many ways), centralized approach instead of a robust, distributed (or at least federated) one.
- Erroneously, people try to solve “social sharing” on the web application level instead of on a lower level and as part of an open protocol and specification (an open social backbone) rather than as various incompatible and proprietary implementations.
- Giving users guarantees and full control about their online privacy and data is impossible with the current approaches. Users are required to care about their settings for every single social sharing tool out there instead of being able to specify a global policy (e.g. in the browser).
- So far, social sharing is de facto opt-out instead of opt-in, which is the wrong approach if you want to put the user in control and avoid being evil.
III) “tweet”, “like”, “+1” buttons clutter up and “slow down” web pages and make for an unenjoyable user experience, also in regard to accessibility. It doesn’t scale (a separate button for each social network, for each shareable entity on a page , though it’s basically all just about “sharing something”? Oh no!). It’s not even necessary, pure lazyness (feel free to share by copy-pasting URLs manually until there’s a true social backbone). It simply s*cks on so many levels. The “share” button-itis as common today will largely disappear and be replaced by a browser built-in, extensible, standardized social sharing facility in a matter of 5 years.
IV) Do you know the code that hides behind a share button (or a fake thereof)? If so, do you know what exactly is going to happen when you click on it while surfing the web? Neither do I. Security, transparency, reliability, usability and accessibility could be improved a lot by moving “social sharing” from web pages to the browser.
Further (of less importance for the general discussion):
- As a private person I don’t care much about popularity contests and popularity in general, neither that of my pages nor of myself (or my virtual alter ego).
- On this changelog, the “share” buttons were rarely used anyway. I’m confident people won’t miss them now that they’re gone.
Important note: This post reflects nothing but my own opinion as a private person (like everything else posted on this private blog). I can clearly distinguish between my own opinion as a private person and opinions and needs of other individuals, businesses (even my own business), organizations and customers and fully respect them.
Zimbra Collaboration Server: Best tested platform?
First: Of course, all listed supported ZCS platforms are tested platforms.
The interesting thing is that according to internal sources, most boxes in Zimbra’s test farm now run Ubuntu instead of Fedora/RH/Centos. Way to go, VMWare!
Skype 5.3.0.116 – a memory hog with memory leaks
Just take a look at the following screenshot I just took, showing two Skype 5.3.0.116 instances running on a current Windows 7 box with 4 GB of RAM:
That’s 330 MB of private memory for each instance at this very moment! Note that these numbers are steadily growing (at about 2 KB/s) for both processes – for no apparent reason. A hint, that there’s likely a memory leak somewhere in Skype.
Let’s hope Microsoft will rewrite Skype from scratch (The current code-base probably isn’t worth refactoring). I’m confident they don’t lack the human and financial resources to do it. It can only get better.
Zimbra Collaboration Server: Troubles after updating to ZCS 7.1.1 – here’s the solution.
Generally, Zimbra‘s update scripts for ZCS run smoothly. However, after updating ZCS from 7.0.1 to 7.1.1 on Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS a couple of days ago, I noticed that most of the server’s services crashed within 1-2 hours after starting the (virtual) server.
To make a long debugging story short, here’s a summary of the problem:
The update script doesn’t properly remove old entries in /etc/rsyslog.conf when creating a new dedicated rsyslog configuration file for zimbra (/etc/rsyslog.d/60-zimbra.conf). This makes rsyslog log its own logging due to double rule entries – making /var/log/zimbra-stats.log grow at 2 MB/s. Like this, zimbra effectively DOSes itself as the server runs out of free disk space in no time (my above-average 12 GB of free space were filled within about 1 hour 40 minutes).
And here’s the solution:
1. Stop rsyslog to stop it from filling up your disk with nonsense: ‘/etc/init.d/rsyslog stop’ or ‘service rsyslog stop’
2. If necessary (i.e. if the updated server has been running for several minutes already), reclaim your free disk space by deleting/emptying big log files in /var/log, e.g. zimbra-stats.log, zimbra.log, mail.info, mail.log, mail.err, mail.warn etc.
3. Edit /etc/rsyslog.conf and remove the entries (likely at the end of the file) that look similar to these:
local0.* @mail.yourserver.com
local1.* @mail.yourserver.com
auth.* @mail.yourserver.com
local0.* -/var/log/zimbra.log
local1.* -/var/log/zimbra-stats.log
auth.* -/var/log/zimbra.log
mail.* @mail.yourserver.com
mail.* -/var/log/zimbra.log
(these are now in /etc/rsyslog.d/60-zimbra.conf)
4. Restart rsyslog: ‘service rsyslog restart’
5. Restart ZCS if it doesn’t run properly anymore: /etc/init.d/zimbra restart (you may even have to reboot the whole box if that doesn’t work)
Log.io – Real-time log monitoring in your browser
Log.io, real-time log monitoring in your browser powered by node.js + socket.io looks like a pretty useful project. I couldn’t check yet though whether it supports encrypted inter-server communication (often a must-have).
Less is more: colordiff and more or less
In the Unix/Linux/Mac OS X world, less is more. Literally, in that ‘less‘ fully emulates ‘more‘, and figuratively, as it provides useful additional functionality like backwards scrolling. So, you really want to use ‘less’ instead of ‘more’ for paging another command’s output, e.g.
cat a_long_document.txt|less
When used to page the output of colordiff however, ‘less’ displays a mess instead of properly displaying colored output like ‘more’.
The trick is to use ‘less’ with either the -r or -R option (which both repaint the screen), i.e.
colordiff -u file_old.py file_new.py|less -r
or
colordiff -u file_old.py file_new.py|less -R
(try which one works better with your system and terminal)
Blog to be migrated to a new server
Just a quick update to let you know that this blog/changelog will soon be migrated to a new (faster) server.
I’ll keep (unavoidable, due to DNS changes [see comments below, ed.]) downtimes at the minimum and will inform you in advance about expected outages.
Thanks for your understanding.
Erase/wipe free space using Mac OS X
When deleting a file, most operating systems just delete the reference to this file, not its actual content. For illustration, that’s like removing a chapter from a book’s table of contents without actually removing (and shredding) the according pages in the book.
So, in order to really (securely) delete a file on a hard disk, there are basically two methods (simplified; from a technical point of view it’s both the same):
- Overwrite the file content (i.e. its clusters) with random data
- Delete the file as usual, empty the trash and overwrite the whole free space on the according hard disk with random data
For the second method, here’s how to do it using Mac OS X:
- Delete the file(s) and empty the trash
- Find out the device name of the according hard disk by opening a new ‘Terminal’ window and executing the “df” command. For example, for a RAID 1 disk, the path of the disk might be something like “/dev/disk2”
- In the opened ‘Terminal’ window, execute:
diskutil secureErase freespace 1 /dev/disk2
where “1” stands for “single-pass random-fill erase” and “/dev/disk2” is the disk device (adjust this to match your disk). When prompted, enter the admin’s credentials.
Note that overwriting free space like this takes quite some time depending on the amount of free space there is and how many passes you need (e.g. use “2” for a US DoD 7-pass secure erase or “3” for a Gutmann 35-pass secure erase). For more information about diskutil and its options, see “man diskutils”.
Windows: Move a window that is off the screen
- Make sure, the invisible (off-screen) window has the focus: Hold down ALT + Tab to select the (invisible) window you want to move
- Hold down Alt + Spacebar
- Press the M key
- Use the arrow keys to relocate the window until it becomes visible again
- Press the Enter key when you have the Window in the desired location.