Adam Sherman » System

xkcd: Password Strength

adam — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:43:55 +0000

As always, xkcd makes a great point through a comic with “Password Strength”.

Password Strength

I do not know if the point he is making is actually valid, some research will be required.

Update: Ben Rockwood comments on the webcomic with “Password Myths”.

I believe that Mr. Rockwood is correct in his appraisal that we should all start using the term pass phrase.

Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” Seems to Have a Broken Python easy_install

adam — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 19:11:36 +0000

One of the first things I needed after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) was to make some Python scripts work. However easy_install seemed to be broken:

$ easy_install psycopg2
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/easy_install", line 5, in 
    from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/pkg_resources.py", line 2607, in 
    parse_requirements(requires), Environment()
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/pkg_resources.py", line 565, in resolve
    raise DistributionNotFound(req)  # XXX put more info here
pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: setuptools==0.6c12dev-r88795

I fixed this by installing Distribute and then the new Mac OS X Developer Tools.

RSA finally comes clean: SecurID is compromised

adam — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 10:53:00 +0000

Wow. This is a massive deal and a huge hurdle for RSA:

RSA finally comes clean: SecurID is compromised

New iPhone 3G S

adam — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:16:06 +0000

So I bought a new 32GB iPhone 3G S this morning at a Rogers Plus store. Was painless and, since I give them so much money each month, I received the $299 pricing.

Different from last time is that the staff activated the phone before handing it over.

I plugged it into iTunes which offered to restore my previous unit’s backup and I’m good to go. Smooth!

iPhone OS 3.0, Tethering and Rogers

adam — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:36:00 +0000

I thought I’d let everyone know that I upgraded my iPhone 3G to iPhone OS 3.0 yesterday and tethering Just Works™ over both Bluetooth PAN and USB. In fact, it’s much simpler to use than I expected.

I have an original 6G data plan with Rogers and according to their FAQ, this is a supported feature and I am not going to get a multi-thousand dollar bill next month.

Solaris Shared Library Troubleshooting Notes

adam — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:28:35 +0000

Recently I have been building a few packages under an OpenSolaris Zone hosted by Joyent. Ran into a few issues with shared libraries, so here are my notes:

Telling the Linker Where to Look

You will often get an error like ld.so.1: conftest: fatal: libreadline.so.5: open failed: No such file or directory. This simply means the linker can not find your library. The following command will tell the linker to append a new entry to the existing search path:

# crle -u /path/to/lib/dir

You can retrieve the current configuration by simply running crle on it’s own, output should be something like this:

$ crle
Configuration file [version 4]: /var/ld/ld.config
  Platform:     32-bit LSB 80386
  Default Library Path (ELF):   /opt/local/lib:/opt/csw/lib:/usr/lib:/lib
  Trusted Directories (ELF):    /lib/secure:/usr/lib/secure  (system default)
Command line:
  crle -c /var/ld/ld.config -l /opt/local/lib:/opt/csw/lib:/usr/lib:/lib

Getting Yourself Out of Trouble

You can easily get yourself into a situation where your system is a brick by having an incomplete search path for the linker. For example, if you run crle -l /foo/path/lib, you will no longer be able to run anything at all since the linker will not find basic libraries it needs. I found a great post on this topic which instructs you do use the LD_NOCONFIG environment variable to tell the linker to use a default configuration. You can then fix the issue:

$ sudo crle -l /opt/local/lib -l /opt/csw/lib -l /usr/lib -l /lib
ld.so.1: sudo: fatal: libpam.so.1: open failed: No such file or directory
Killed
$ LD_NOCONFIG=yes sudo crle -l /opt/local/lib -l /opt/csw/lib -l /usr/lib -l /lib

OpenID With Your Domain

adam — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:15:15 +0000

Since I will eventually be implementing OpenID in a commercial project, I thought I would go ahead and set myself up properly.

There are now a few free OpenID providers and I have setup my own account with VeriSign Labs Personal Identity Provider beta. Of course, I do not wish to expose the actual provider as my OpenID: what if I lose trust in them or they simply stop offering the service one day?

The solution to this is actually quite simple and allows you to use your own domain as your personal OpenID, exactly what I needed. The technical term is delegation and is fully documented. To implement this trick using WordPress, simply edit your themes header.php and add two meta tags. Of course you can do this with your software of choice, or even plain vanilla HTML. This is what I added to my blog:

The above indicates that my personal OpenID is being delegated to https://adam.sherman.pip.verisignlabs.com which is hosted by the server https://pip.verisignlabs.com/server. Since the page at http://sherman.ca/ contains the above tags, I can now go to any site supporting OpenID (look for the logo: ) and simply use sherman.ca as my identifier.

I believe that OpenID’s time has come and I look forward to implementing it for some of my clients in order to give their users the ability to consume services without a registration page.

openid

Unlimited Nothing

adam — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 04:20:19 +0000

So Rogers (and their other brand, Fido) have Unlimited Data plans. And guess what? The fine print is so bad I do not know whether to laugh or cry. The Fido page says

The Unlimited surfing on your Fido option includes unlimited mobile surfing on your handset only and is only available on selected handsets (non-Fido certified handsets, WindowsMobile devices and PC cards are not eligible). Data usage incurred on ineligible handsets and devices, incurred while tethering (using a handset or device as a wireless modem or laptop) or incurred using non-Fido (third party) applications downloaded to your handset will be subject to pay-per-use charge of 5¢ per KB. Option applies within Canada only. While roaming outside Canada, data transmission charge of 5¢ per KB apply, except in the U.S. where data transmission charges of 1¢ per KB apply.

The Rogers page has a few good ones too, have a look.

This means that I can have unlimited data, but only on devices where I would likely not use much, right?

The Torontoist has an article on this subject.

Flushing Leopard’s DNS Cache

adam — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 02:08:40 +0000

Since I have run into problems similar this fellow, I thought I would link to the original page and reproduce the instructions here:

# dscacheutil -flushcache

Very useful tip.

Fancy Auto-Launching in Leopard

adam — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 02:08:46 +0000

As mentioned in a previous post, Leopard uses launchd to automatically launch ssh-agent when needed. I just noticed that it does exactly the same thing for X11!

Try it: type xeyes in a Terminal window and watch X11.app magically launch itself. Very smooth. Relevant configuration is quite simple:

        Labelorg.x.X11        Program/usr/X11/X11.app/Contents/MacOS/X11        Sockets                                :0                SecureSocketWithKeyDISPLAY                ServiceIPC

For more information on launchd, see the following man pages: launchd(8), launchctl(1) and launchd.plist(5).

A nice feature I was not aware of is the ability to put user-specific agent definitions in ~/Library/LaunchAgents, very cool.

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