noel alanguilan

january 2008 is ending and i think its been a good month. granted that there has been glitches here and there and i’m late on some of my workload (with good reason) but no one under my care has been hacked and work-related stuff are moving forward although at a slower pace than i want them to.

still, its been a good month because i went riding more often, i got to meet new faces and made new friends. and mostly because i found a dear, dear friend that i lost many years ago.

its a good month.

i get a lot of forwarded mails from friends containing jokes, quotes, stories and whatever. when i open the mail i see this longish list of people which forwarded the mail to their friends who forwarded to their friends, etc. until the list of recipients is nine times longer than the actual message at which point it eventually arrives in my box.

this list of people usually includes names of the recipients and, of course, their e-mail addresses. this is a valuable resource for spammers. imagine that. someone else has gathered all the information they need for their spam bots and it just arrives in their mailbox. at no cost and all with very little work. they send their thanks, by the way.

please don’t just forward that joke. take a little time to “clean it” of the e-mail addresses of others. after all, it came from a friend and you’re sending it out to your friends. give them that little courtesy along with your joke, quotes, stories and whatever.

i suggest that you place your own e-mail address in the to: field and then put all rest of the e-mail addresses of the people you’re sending that joke to in the bcc — blind copy furnish. this way, no other eyes will see the addresses of your friends.

givens:
desktops are running windows with ms office; file server is running samba on linux

problem:
file ownership of a shared file gets messed up once a user opens, edits and saves the shared file.

what happens in the background is when user1 opens, for example, an excel spreadsheet with a file ownership of nobody.research, excel copies the file into a temporary file and offers the temporary file for the user to edit. this temporary file now has file ownership of user1.user1. once the user saves the file, excel deletes the original file and saves the temporary copy in place of the original. this now makes the ownership of the “original” file user1.user1 and not nobody.research and therefore no one else in the research group other than user1 will be able to edit the file.

limitations:
each group have their own subdirectory and no one else can view or edit them; only the owner and group members can create, edit/modify and delete files located within their respective subdirectories.

one solution:

• go to the top of the shared subdirectory
• set the ownership and file permissions using the commands below; ‘research/’ and ‘nobody.research’ are examples, change to what applies to your setup

$ find research/ -type d -exec chown 'nobody.research' {} \;
$ find research/ -type d -exec chmod 1770 {} \;
$ find research/ -type f -exec chmod 0770 {} \;
$ find research/ -type f -exec chown 'nobody.research' {} \;

• in smb.conf, in the [research] share add the following:

force create mode = 0770
force directory mode = 0770

links:
linux devcenter: find command
samba 3: official how-to

note: this is a copy of samba ownerships and permission from my old blog and was reposted here in its entirety for my convenience.

i had a visit from a friend of mine who works as a web designer. she was half way through her pint of ice cream when she came in. i was working on a website and she took one look at the page i was working on and she gave me that knowing smile.

“obssessive/compulsive.”

“what?!?”, i said.

“everything has to be visually aligned to almost everything else be it vertically or horizontally; consistency and readability are sacrificed for the sake of alignment; this paragraph’s font is smaller than the other paragraph because it has to fit in the confines of the length or width of the image beside, above or below it; even the consistency of the menu is compromised for the sake of aligning the top and bottom of the menu to the top and bottom of the content; there’s very little white space to rest the eyes; everything is filled. obssessive/compulsive.”

“and apparently, they’re not familiar with web politics.”

“huh?!?”, i asked.

“well, if they are familiar with it, they would know that even if you move this image or that paragraph by 4 or 5 or even 2 or 3 tiny pixels up or down it wouldn’t matter because each computer has its own video configuration quirks and will always show things a little differently; each user has her/his own browser preference which in themselves render a page differently; not all the chosen fonts — which are too many by the way — are installed in all of the computers in the world which means this or that may or may not be displayed or rendered properly.”

“if i were you, either i’d tell them about it and compromise or drop them like a hot potato.”

“why?”, i asked, indignantly impressed.

“because they don’t get it.”

she dives into her ice cream again.

“at the end of the day, its doesn’t really matter if this picture is higher by 2 millimeters from the top of text column beside it. what matters is that they saw the picture and was able to read what you have to say.”

“you don’t eat the container. you eat the ice cream”, raising her pint.

“its the content.”

note: this post has already been published previously and is re-posted here in its entirely. its always worth revisiting. photo courtesy of Häagen Dazs rum raisin. yum!

i’ve always thought that doing two (or three) things at the same time is cool. my mother on the other hand always told me not to. “it’s not good”, she would say. i would also receive the same advice from my father.

well, it appears that they’re right. i found this article (via /.) by walter kirn at the atlantic. multitasking makes you dumber and a little off-center. i thought it funny and true. so if you have time, give it a read.

leave the multitasking to the computers. they’re dumb to begin with anyway.

12km to moa (mall of asia) from the house. at the moment, the cyclocomputer is a distraction.

i have to maintain 25kph.
what?!? i’ve only ridden this long?!? this far?!?
wow. look at the time. i’m late.

its a small distraction but i’ll keep it on because i want to know how far i’ve gone after every ride. i know i will eventually get into that habit of ignoring it.

i have ridden for years without having the need for one until now. still, i just want to ride.

the other day i received an e-mail which looked a lot like spam but it didn’t get filtered. i took a closer look and i found out that the address of the sender was my e-mail address and it was sent to the same. i’m absolutely sure i didn’t send anything with a subject “january 74% off” let alone to myself. and with yahoo! doing my mail serving needs i’m sure i didn’t. they would only allow a limited number of e-mails per day.

this is interesting. curiosity gets the best of me and i opened it up. it just contained an image. i set my mail reader not to show me any images when i open an e-mail. i’m not about to start with this one.

the juicier part would be to look at the e-mail headers. its that part of the message that is not normally seen by the reader. in part, it is used as a troubleshooting aid to look for kinks in the mailing system. it has the data from what service provider it came from, which mail server received it, and where it was sent. all e-mail programs would have a way of letting you see the full headers of a particular e-mail. i use yahoo’s web interface and the headers is located on the right side of the open e-mail message.

click on the full header and you’ll get to some of the e-mail internals.

the first line in the screenshot above is suppose to be the sending address — who sent it. the second line with the return path is the e-mail address that will be put in the to: field when you click on reply. the fifth to seventh line (received) is interesting. it shows where the e-mail was supposedly sent from — a dsl subscriber in russia — and which server in yahoo! received it.

i got another spam with the same subject and opening the headers reveals something similar but the fifth line (received) is different. it says intel sent it but when i checked the ip address the sender is from poland. hmmm…

two similar mails from two different countries. this leads me to the conclusion that the spam mail wasn’t sent by me (or yahoo!) but by a botnet that is posing as me.

you may have received something similar so you can likely check it using the steps i took.

disclosure: i do not like spam and i do not and will not knowingly send any. i take great pains to make sure of that. my firewall here only allows sending via one particular yahoo! smtp server. and we don’t even use pop mail. all of us use yahoo!’s webmail interface.

i rode to moa (mall of asia) this morning for a little meet up at seattle’s best. there were a lot of cyclists along roxas boulevard as well as walkers and joggers as is usual for a sunday in manila. the drivers were happily accomodating. its only on sundays afterall.

unfortunately, also saw an accident at tm kalaw and roxas. a motorcyclist was on the ground. he was still moving. i didn’t see blood. people were milling around and trying to help. i saw the police assigned to the us embassy coming. i hope he’ll be okay.

seattle’s best opens at 8am and i arrived early so while waiting for people to come i got to see a lot of really nice bikes. i even saw that guy with the argon18 again. i even saw a group of four cyclists all of them sporting shaved heads on low riders. one of the most interesting things i saw was this recumbent. everybody thought it was pretty darn cool.

unfortunately only armanjr was able to come. but that’s ok. i got to ride, met a new face and made a new friend which is always a good thing.

lito and i rode in up diliman. he said there was a group ride that goes on from 2pm to 4pm. all in all there were six people riding around. lito forgets sometimes. i forgot my water bottle.

but it was a beautiful afternoon. cloudy and the acacias sheltered us from the sun. the ride was short but fun. i always enjoy my rides now.

i got a smile and a nod from a couple of riders. one was wearing last year’s tour of fireflies jersey — same as what i was wearing. its amazes me what an organized ride can do to strangers.

being known as the “computer guy”, a good number of people ask me for recommendations of what computer to get or what computer-related “toy” to buy. and i get asked these questions quite often warranting this post.

get a laptop.

honestly. laptops are cheaper these days. almost everything you need is there and you can fold it up and go. i don’t think you can do that with a desktop.

some specifics:
try not to get the ones with the uber speed cpus. leave that to the desktops. you just want to get something that can handle the type of work you will do on it plus some. you’ll save some money that can best be spent on more memory. do get one of those dual core cpus — either amd or intel would do although amd is usually cheaper. get the maximum memory that the laptop can handle. seriously. if its 2 gig, get that. if its 4 gig, buy it. you’ll thank me for it. the minimum should be 1 gig. 80 gigabytes is usually the standard capacity for the hard drive. if you have some extra, try to get a 160 gig drive instead. the optical drive should be at least a cd burner although dvd burners are common now. and lastly, if you can get an extra battery pack, why not?

operating system:
laptops usually come with windows pre-installed. i would not wish on my friends the trouble that is called vista so if you can get xp pro that would be better. being the geek that i am, i would recommend getting linux as an operating system. its not as fancy and polished as windows but its almost there. it gets the job done and its free. i’m using it now.

brand:
for the brand of laptop, well, there are a handful of good ones. stick with a manufacturer that is well known. hp comes to mind as well as asus and lenovo. fujitsu and sony has been around for some time as well. but if you prefer the mac then by all means. what ever brand you get just make sure that they can give you the technical support you need when the time comes.