The No Starch Press Blog

I bit the bullet and bought a Mac Mini for the office. What a piece of cake to set up. (Not that I didn’t expect it to be easy.) Just about $380 at Microcenter for the 1.83 machine with 1GB RAM and a small hard drive. But who cares.

Take it out of the box, plug in a DVI cable, attach keyboard and mouse (whatever I had sitting around), plug in network cable, and turn it on. The music plays, the screen shows some silly movie (which I’ll call “Ta Da!), and it sets itself up.

Type a couple of keys on the keyboard so that OSX can figure out which driver to load, run a bunch of updates, install iLife ‘09, and you’re pretty much done. And unlike a Windows install, not one error message!

I’m always impressed by the Apple packaging — even down to the rounded edges on the sytrofoam and the plastic wrap on each piece of electronics. Someone is thinking through the entire experience and they do a fantastic job.

I know I’m about the 10 millionth person to discover the beauty of the Mac, but I think further praise is due here. I still prefer Ubuntu and that’s what I plan to keep running on my machines, but I just ordered another Mini for home.

Now to tackle the Ram Upgrade. Maybe the hard drive, too.

Microsoft’s Bing is interesting and I’d wager that it will give Google a run for the money over the longterm.

I’m not saying that Bing is distinctly better than Google’s search or that I like the design better. In fact, I prefer Google’s approach to search, but maybe that’s because I’ve been using Google for so many years. (Before Google, Altavista was my favorite.)

I’ve found a couple of interesting sites that compare the search engines from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. One that’s particularly interesting is BlindSearch which has you do a blind comparison.

I searched BlindSearch three times and chose the Google results each time. But again, this may be more a matter of habit than anything. I’m used to reading Google’s search results and parsing them for what I want. Perhaps more telling, the differences between the three sets of results was not clear to me, which is saying something in and of itself: most users won’t be able to tell much of a difference. Based on this very limited study, the winner in search may be the one to launch a stronger marketing campaign — and we know that Microsoft will come out swinging.

I found another site as well that does a direct comparison between search results from Google and Bing. Enter your search terms into The “Google /Bing Comparison Tool” and you’ll be presented with side-by-side results.

Try searching Bing for “google” then Google for “bing.” Bing returns only one result with a link to show more. Google is more impartial. Eh, what did you expect?

After our brush with spam attacks, it’s time to harden WordPress.

I found the post titled “10 Tips To Make WordPress Hack-Proof. The Ultimate Guide” to be very useful, in that step-by-step sort of way. I don’t want to become an expert on hardening a blog; I just want to be sure that our blog is locked down better than most so that we’re not an easy target.

The Secure WordPress plugin is a nice and easy way to fill some security holes (after updating WordPress itself and any plugins). I also found WP-Security Scan worth running. (It pointed out some obvious holes.)

Finally, take a look at the WordPress-Password-Cracker, which is designed to set the security of user passwords against brute force attacks. (Warning: this can take a long time to run and it hasn’t been tested with 2.8. I’m testing it now.)

Update: Either this plugin is broken or it just takes forever to run. I’ve deactivated it for now.

Seems to me, that should lock the door reasonably well, but we always keep backups. Just in case.

I thought you could only convert something like a .daa (direct access archive) file to an ISO image under Windows.

Lo and behold, the kind folks at PowerISO offer a free version of PowerISO for Linux. It’s command line only but it works.

Download a copy here: http://poweriso.com/download.htm

Conversion is pretty simple.

./poweriso -?

for help.

One of the best ways to learn about an operating system is to break it, and I’ve gotten very good at breaking operating systems over the years.

After a bunch of random tweaks to Ubuntu, I succeeded in breaking it, too. Well, not as badly as I’ve broken Windows. For example — everything was running, just really slowly. (Really slowly was the Windows-like behavior.) And I’d sometimes get weird errors that I couldn’t trace.

The best thing to have done prior to this problem would have been to place /Home in a separate partition, which I’ll be doing soon enough. Had /Home been in its own partition I could have just wiped out the OS, reinstalled, then pointed it to /Home. Anyway, everything was (and still is) in one place so I didn’t want to play that game.

The fix was easy. I used Simple Backup to backup everything in the /Home directory then simply wiped out Ubuntu (using a Live CD), repartitioned the drives (to give Vista even less space), and reinstalled.

Unlike the nightmare that can attend this sort of thing under Windows, I had a working installation in about an hour. After choosing a few programs from the Add/Remove menu, everything was pretty much there. Selective restores from the Simple Backup backups have worked without a hitch.

Ubuntu is running beautifully, all of my files are where I want them, I have no DLLs to worry about, and it’s smooth sailing. And it looks as good as ever, too.

Aren’t these new phones — like the Palm Pre — fascinating?

The invention embodied in the UIs on these phones is just stunning. Who thinks of this stuff? Creative people, that’s for sure.

It’s not easy to turn common metaphors on their heads. It’s a lot harder to step back and create; think about how things work and how they can be different.

When we choose books to publish we always take a step back to think about what’s already been done and what can be done differently. Our goal is to push the envelope, whenever possible, with titles like our “Manga Guides.” Or even beginner books like our “My New” series. And let’s not forget titles like Forbidden LEGO or even Cult of Mac.

So yes, No Starch Press is like a smartphone. Except that our medium is just a little bit anachronistic, except when it’s digital. And it’s really hard to change the UI on a printed book. Well, maybe you could cut the binding off and rearrange the pages. You know, make it into an art piece.

File this in the “who knew” section.

I’ve used Thunderbird for years and Google Calendar for at least the last year or so. Who knew you could integrate the two so easily?

I found the Lightning Thunderbird extension in the Ubuntu packages when I did a reinstall, so I installed it. It integrates a nice calendar into Thunderbird.

And, thank you open source community (and Phillipp Kewisch in particular), there’s a plug in that offers bidirectional integration between Google Calendar and Lightning! (Or at least I think it’s bidirectional.) It doesn’t have the most exciting name (Provider for Google Calendar), but it works. At least in one direction.

Anyway, I’ll settle for one direction.

Why do I find this so exciting? Because I’m a dork?

Update: Bidirectionality works!

Just got the message below from the har-announce list. This is going to be a great event which I’ll have to miss, unfortunately. I’m knee-deep in the remodel of our new building. Bleh.

Learn more about Hacking at Random here: https://har2009.org/. You should go.

   Wikileaks will speak about their position in a society where
   governments are increasingly secretive
   about their own policies, and discuss the hazards and complications of
   publishing leaked documents. We'll talk about the policies of search
   engines, the dangers of data breaches, and EFF will explain their
   strategy for civilians to defend themselves against the ubiquitous
   surveillance society. Anonymous will talk about social media as a
   political tool, and they'll explain why fun is important when you start
   an argument with Scientology. We'll talk about copyright and
   distribution rights.

   There's plenty of hardcore tech as well. How Mifare was broken and what
   to do next; reverse engineering chips; side channel analysis (reading
   votes cast on a voting machines from a distance), and how to use the
   debug port of your devices to do hardware hacking.

   We'll have scientific talks on crypto - can we use quantum mechanics to
   provide secure identification in an insecure environment? - and we'll
   talk about the relation between the need for open source and the
   progress of science. Or to put it the other way around: how science
   suffers through proprietary formats, patens and non-disclosure.

Those of you reading our RSS feed may have caught a post by me (since deleted) about typos and such in resumes. I couldn’t have posted this at a worse time because we’re actually in the process of hiring and it was an obnoxious post. Factual but snarky.

Anyway, I wrote this for internal distribution probably about one year ago and saved it as a draft. I was showing a couple of kids the Wordpress backend this past weekend and I must have pressed Publish instead of save as draft.

Apologies to anyone who was offended by the post. It’s been vaporized.

Using an existing VPN should be relatively trivial but setting up a VPN server is another thing entirely. This tutorial http://snipurl.com/ju6nh [www_geek-pages_com] about using OpenVPN with DD-WRT looks promising though I can’t flash our office router with DD-WRT. (I’d need to ditch the router or bridge it.)

Of course, my first thought as a book publisher is: “is there a book in this?” Here’s a brief analysis.

There have been several VPN books over the years but nothing recent seems to have sold very well through the trade. The best-selling title on the topic was published in 2000, from Pearson. It probably sold around 10,000 copies. It’s a stand-out though. More recent titles are selling in the hundreds of copies.

My brief analysis tells me that there may have been a good opportunity in this market years ago, but when I can find a clear, step-by-step tutorial like the one that I link to above in about five minutes on Google, who needs a book?

Granted, some people might buy a book regardless and there’s no doubt that this is a topic that will mystify many, but in this case, Google wins.

Unless, of course, we were to publish a Manga Guide to VPN. We won’t.