http://blog.crowdway.com Snippets of madness with a dash of salt Sat, 17 Jul 2010 22:33:43 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en As a case study relating to my previous post on password input-boxes, I present eToro, a social foreign exchange trading service. Here's what you see if you want to sign up: [caption id="attachment_336" align="aligncenter" width="490" caption="Standard Sign Up Dialog"][/caption] As you can see, a standard sign-up screen. All is well in the ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2010/07/17/on-the-redundancy-of-the-password-inputbox-etoro/ If you're writing an app that accepts a path to a filename as user-input or in config-files, you'll have to be able to parse the famous leading tilde and expand it to the correct home directory of the correct user. For example, if I enter "~/.vimrc" it needs to be ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2009/09/16/expanding-a-leading-tilde-in-cc/ Today I'd like to introduce Gmail Carbon Copy, an application I've coded during the last couple of months. The latest version is stable and works, so I'm deeming it fit for public consumption. Gmail Carbon Copy, or Gmailcc simply creates a back-up of your Gmail. It differs from existing alternatives because ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2009/08/26/gmail-carbon-copy/ If you're using Munin to track statistics on your server and you're trying to use any of the Apache plugins, you might have some trouble getting it working. If Munin won't display any statistics on Apache, and the munin-node.log logfile is filled with lines like these: Can't locate object method "new" ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2009/07/08/munin-and-apache-cant-locate-object-method/ We all know and love the password inputbox. It hides all the characters you type with stars, and encrypts the contents stored in memory. It's about the only constant in the potpourri of user registration pages. It's the part no site ever gets wrong — use a password inputbox when ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2009/05/28/on-the-redundancy-of-the-password-inputbox/ This is part 3 in a series on how to hide your data. First of all, the methods explained in this series are not secure. Anyone with some low-level knowledge of filesystems can tell there’s hidden data when looking at a raw image of your disk. Always complement these methods using ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2009/04/22/hide-data-in-bad-blocks/ This is part 2 in a series on how to hide your data. First of all, the methods explained in this series are not secure. Anyone with some low-level knowledge of filesystems can tell there’s hidden data when looking at a raw image of your disk. Always complement these methods using ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2009/04/20/hide-data-in-invisible-partitions/ This is part 1 in a series on how to hide your data. Introduction First of all, the methods explained in this series are not secure. Anyone with some low-level knowledge of filesystems can tell there's hidden data when looking at a raw image of your disk. Always complement these methods using ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2009/04/15/hide-data-in-hidden-partitions/ Zeus WPI has an IRC channel which at any one time contains two dozen geeks discussing a myriad of topics ranging from the latest XKCD to the physics behind not being able to reach absolute zero. Such a cornucopia of madness wouldn't be complete without a bot for certain administrative tasks ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2009/03/06/irc-quote-2/ Zenity is a neat little tool to create simple GUI's for your shellscripts. One of its most useful features is the progress dialog, which allows one to show the progress of a command using the all-familiar GTK progress bar. Zenity uses pipes to send commands to the dialogs. Any number sent ... http://blog.crowdway.com/2008/12/24/zenity-rsync-and-awk/