Today at work I spoke with one of my colleagues about my desire to develop something to run this weblog on myself, and the reasons that were stopping me from doing it (originally written in this post). His response was incredibly clever: “Why don’t you develop your own blogging tool at your own pace, while blogging about it on something existing now?”. It’s good advice that I have decided to take! Read the rest of this entry »
Smoking around your Apple hardware can void it’s warranty according to this Slashdot article: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/09/11/21/147253/Apple-Voiding-Smokers-Warranties. If this is actually true (and the original article to which the Slashdot one refers seems legitimate to me) it goes right up with the other unpleasant experiences that I have had with Apple’s customer care (unfortunately I have had a few, which lead me to the decision to never buy Apple computers again). Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Apple, Consumer rights
After reading about the topic of my previous post (your browser history not being secure), I decided to take a look at the various security plugins that you can get for Firefox (my browser of choice). I came across the plugin BetterPrivacy that referenced Local Shared Objects (or LSO).
LSO are basically Flash cookies (some people call them super-cookies), and from what I have read any Flash app that gets loaded (including those annoying adds you get everywhere, or perhaps a hidden app that you don’t even see) can store a set amount of data on your hard drive (the default is 100k). Read the rest of this entry »
So you think your browser history is yours right? And that no visiting website can see that… think again! Go to http://startpanic.com, test your browser and sign the petition!
After a few days upheaval the Fedora team came around and changed the default policy in Fedora 12 back to requiring root privileges for installing packages again: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/11/20/1241231/Fedora-12-Package-Installation-Policy-Tightened. In my opinion that is a good thing 
I don’t intend to install Fedora again though, as I’m very pleased with Ubuntu
When developing software I sometimes like to use Eclipse (I recently did some work involving Drools, and there is an excellent Eclipse workbench available for working with Drools). Instead of using a package manager (such as yum or apt) to install Eclipse, I prefer to use the release that is available from eclipse.org and install that in my home directory. That way I can install whatever plugins I want without risking issues when running updates in the package manager. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the past few years I have mainly ran Ubuntu as my Linux of choice on desktops and laptops. I have run 9.04 on my EEE PC 900 for some time, and I have always been very pleased with it. My desktop has ran Windows XP for ages though, and I have been wanting to install a Linux distro on it for some time. Read the rest of this entry »
After a long time without-brains.net has a website up and running again!
For some time I had thought of developing something myself, but I didn’t get around to it because I had so many other things that I wanted to do (and still want to do) with my time. Besides that there are loads of decent content management systems and frameworks out there, so rolling my own would really just be reinventing the wheel (which is not very motivating). It’s still a hobby project that I might want to pursue some time in the future, but for now I’ve parked that idea 
Read the rest of this entry »