In my opinion, the biggest problem of the tar format (‘ustar‘) is that it does not store the checksums of the files it contains. So, in order to be able to verify the contents of the tar archive, you either need to keep the original data on the hard drive and compare the archive contents…
A few days ago, I had decided to revise my data backup methods, so to be able to easily recover as much data as possible after a partial corruption of the medium, a DVD that is, on which the data has been stored. I should clarify that by corruption I by no means include the…
A digital certificate[1]‘s purpose of existence is to sign or encrypt other material, either the latter is an online transaction, an email message or software code. Root Certificates, their respective private key actually[1], are used by Certificate Authorities to sign and add certain extensions to other certificates they issue, thus making the latter valid for…
There are several methods that can be used for text message exchanging between different non-privileged users. Usually, when the sender of such a message is a service and the recipient, who is supposed to see the message, is a human, that message is called a “notification“. The method used by many services that run within…
Moving the comments your readers have submitted under one of your blog posts to another one might sound like a horrible idea at first, but there are times, especially when the number of comments has increased too much, that such an action is required in order to reduce the page loading time. I am aware…
Although I do not intend to run VMWare directly on a physical partition containing Windows any time soon, a recent discussion on a greek linux users group about the implications of such an experiment made me write a post about an article I stumbled upon today. The article author notes: VMWare is an incredibly useful…
Today, I noticed that it is no longer required to escape the backslash (\), known as the “escape character” on *nix systems, inside the pre HTML tag in order not to be removed by WordPress’ HTML filters. This bug has lived long enough to be considered as a WordPress feature, but the devs have suddenly…
I finally made the decision to upgrade WordPress to the latest 2.3.1 version. I skipped the initial v2.3 release as I had read that there was a lengthy list of bugs about that release, which eventually have been fixed in 2.3.1. Everything seems to run smoothly. I intend to spend some time browsing around my…
After some months of inactivity, a new version of the Add-Meta-Tags plugin for WordPress has been released today. Version 1.5 contains the following additions/changes: The license under which the plugin is released has changed. The Add-Meta-Tags plugin is now released under the terms of an Apache License version 2. This change is directly related to…
I don’t know since when Adobe Reader 8 (8.1.1 actually) has become available for the Linux platform, but, as soon as I found out, I downloaded and installed it in the hope that it will improve the overall poor PDF reading experience. To my surprise, the 8th version of Adobe Reader not only looks and…