The rules make the game. You take out the rules, the game goes up in smoke. I think it’s still fine if someone takes advantage of any inconsistencies between the rules to win the game, but cheating is completely unacceptable.

I can still recall the excitement of the first time I tried to access and administer a remote system using SSH. Accessing my shell at a remote machine securely, being able to do local and remote port forwarding in order to access remote services through encrypted tunnels, X forwarding, secure file transfers using scp or [...]

Mozilla has announced the general availability of version 3 of its popular open source email & newsgroup client, Thunderbird. Thunderbird has been my desktop email client of choice since its early stable releases, both in Linux and Windows. Actually, the only programs I’ve ever used for email and newsgroup management are Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird [...]

I thought it would be nice to share with you that I received a comment from Pádraig Brady, member of the GNU Core Utilities (coreutils) maintainers team, on yesterday’s post about effective data wiping saying that he has decreased shred‘s default number of passes from 25 to 3, as shown in this git commit. The [...]

delayed-shutdown is an initscript that delays the shutdown (runlevel 0) or reboot (runlevel 6) procedure as long as a pre-defined lock file exists. The goal is to create a mechanism, which can be used by programs that perform critical operations that must not be interrupted, in order to delay system shutdown until these programs have [...]

Syndicated content has almost become the standard way of distributing web content nowadays. WordPress can deliver its content in various different feed formats -RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0, RDF, RSS 0.92- and can generate feeds for both the published posts -grouped by time, category, tag, author etc- and the comments that have been submitted by readers. [...]

Yesterday, I noticed that the template tag, which existed inside the default WordPress theme and added the Generator meta tag to the HTML head area, has been replaced by an internal action. This change makes the removal of that specific meta tag a bit harder for users. I can understand that the project may use [...]

Since WordPress v2.5, it is no longer possible to use the <!–more–> tag within a post in order to define an excerpt which will be used on both the web and feeds. Now, WordPress uses this tag to split a post for the web only, while the feeds can contain either the full-text or an [...]

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 [...]

mod_gnutls is an experimental Apache module. As long as I had compiled it for the sake of the secure name-based vhosts with SNI test and since I was asked to release the compiled library in this forum post, here it goes. The following is an archived mod_gnutls installation. One word of warning: It also contains [...]