I may end up installing the entire Debian “testing” repository… along with significant portions of Xandros’ package repository as well. Jeez… I’ve been going gonzo with apt-iselect lately. Anyone else using a Xandros/testing hybrid? I’m wondering if there are any gotchas, packages that will b0rk the system when Xandros and Debian testing meet. No problems so far.
I’ve been playing with Straw quite a bit. It’s quite the slick RSS reader. Also enjoying the debian-goodies package quite a lot — check it out if you’re a Debian user. I’ll be writing that one up in my Tool of the Month column for June, no doubt.
Spending a little quality time re-configuring my (main) desktop. Decided yesterday that I’d switch from SUSE 9 to Debian on my desktop. I’ve been enjoying using Debian on my server so much that I decided it was time to start using it on the desktop as well.
I cheated a bit, though. While I have no problems with installing Debian on a server, getting everything just so on a desktop machine is a little more effort-intensive. I wasn’t really in the mood for twiddling bits just to get sound working, so I installed Xandros 2 (Business Edition) and then swapped in the Debian testing repositories.
So far, so good. Xandros is a fantastic distro for ex-Windows users. However, there are a number of packages that simply aren’t available through the Xandros repositories that I can’t live without. Case in point, I don’t believe that you can even get dig from Xandros…
On the suggestion of one of my co-workers, I installed Rhythmbox right away as well. Not sure if I’ll ever go back to XMMS. It’s quite the spiffy MP3 player. I tried to compile Rhythmbox on SUSE, there were so many broken and missing dependencies that I finally just decided it wasn’t worth the time that I was spending on it.
I think I might spend some time next week checking to see what man pages are missing for Debian and see if I can’t whip up five or ten to help out…
Banged my head against the desk for about ten minutes this morning when setting up a new server/blog on Debian testing because I had forgotten to install php4-mysql. Trying to set up a new version of WP just kept generating blank pages. Argh!
Lately I have noticed that I am utterly overwhelmed with usernames and passwords. I have several different logins and passwords at work — one to sign on to the corporate network, another to log into the Web-based helpdesk, another for a monitoring tool that we use, yet another for our contact-management system and so on. I easily have ten different username/password combinations just for work.
Then there’s the plethora of e-mail username/password combinations for my personal e-mail, my free Webmail accounts, my logins for my home computers, logins for various online services such as my online banking, student loan management, online bill paying interfaces for Qwest and other companies, other username/passwords for online shopping… various (annoying) required username/password combinations for things like the New York Times online, Washington Post, Salon.com, Slashdot, kuro5hin.org, Freshmeat, etc.
Bottom line: I’m drowning in passwords and usernames. I have about five different usernames I use with freebie services that I’ve picked because they’re easy to remember, and about ten different passwords that I rotate between those freebie services that would be no big deal if they were cracked.
Then I have to come up with unique passwords for things like online banking, billpaying and shopping — it would be a big problem for someone to be able to log into my online banking at will if they figured out my password.
My question is how one should keep track of these things securely. Assuming that one does not have a memory like a steel trap, how are you supposed to keep track of some fifty or more username/password combinations and the services they match up with? It’s definitely a security hazard to write them down or store them in some unencrypted form on your home computer. How can you keep a record of these things securely?