Where Obfuscurity Meets Negligence

2009-10-21 19:24:42 by jdixon

There are people out there who would argue that Security through Obscurity is better than no security at all. They advocate port knocking or running applications on "random" ports. Certainly, I'm not one to go around broadcasting my attack vectors to random visitors (oops!), but that doesn't mean it's a rational means of protection (honest, I'll pull out this time).

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Pressing Needs

2009-10-21 14:12:39 by jdixon

Love fonts? Check out the work by Jessica Hische over at the Daily Drop Cap. I stumbled across her work thanks to an interview linked by @shiflett. Believe it or not, I was an art geek before I went full-bore UNIX geek. I still have an appreciation for the analog arts even though I'm a left-brainer now.

Jessica's work is very impressive. It almost makes me want to try my hand at letterpress. And then I saw Pictorial Webster's and became afraid. Very afraid. Just kidding, it's unbelievably cool no matter which half of your brain dominates. Check it out now!

Let Your Mutt Growl

2009-10-18 00:30:45 by jdixon

Like any self-respecting UNIX user, I consume most of my email through the console. Mutt has been my client of choice for a few years now. I used to be a die-hard Mail.app fan on my Apple systems, but the performance was abysmal. As time went on, I evolved from running Mutt on my laptop to running it in screen on a home server. Combined with imapfilter's client-side "push filtering", this allowed me to keep my existing mailserver architecture intact (outside the scope of this post) while gaining all the functionality I missed from a traditional fat mail client.

Recently my Facebook and Twitter Attention Span Syndrome (FaTASS) has peaked, motivating me to find creative solutions for managing the extra load. Growl is a very popular notification system that Mac OS X users have enjoyed for years. I've haven't found myself wanting for it before, mainly because I don't use an abundance of GUI apps for my daily tasks. And yet, Growl's unobtrusive nature and support for network events seemed the perfect fit.

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