Dissociated Press

Got my first-ever PDF spam today… that is, email with a PDF attached with the content of the spam in the PDF rather than the mail. Well, it may not have been the first, but it was the first that didn’t go straight to the spam folder.

Sigh. If only spammers would use their power for good instead of evil. Let’s face it, they’re an inventive, if scummy, bunch.

Every once in a while when I’m using Firefox, if I type a URL into the location bar, hitting Enter to go to the location does nothing. If I restart Firefox, it works again, but it seems to happen at least once a day.

Anyone else seeing this? This is on Linux (Ubuntu) x86. I’ve seen the same behavior on OS X, as well.

Short version: PR folks need to learn different work habits to survive in a vastly more connected world. Long version here.

Unfortunately, the biz is not evolving quickly enough. Many in PR seem to be treating Web 2.0 as simply an extension of the traditional media - another venue for buzz. They are pumping thousands of email pitches into the community every day. I know because I receive hundreds of these emails every day, as do many other bloggers I have spoken to over the last several weeks. Some are good, most are not. And many are getting fed up.

I’ve been fed up for years…

Today has not been my day for computers. This afternoon while plugging away at some editing, I accidentally kicked the power cord for my external USB drive and it briefly cycled off and back on. When it came back on, my computer had frozen up.

That was weird, but after it became obvious it wasn’t going to un-freeze, I went ahead and rebooted it… and it never came back up. Long story short, after fussing with it for more than an hour, I’m about 98% sure that the motherboard shorted or something along those lines. It doesn’t POST or anything when powered on. Ugh.

I have more than one computer, though, so I disconnected the poor thing pending a new motherboard, and tried to install Ubuntu on the fastest of my spare computers. It booted, but I ran into what may be a bug in the kernel shipped with Ubuntu Feisty and handling of an older SATA chipset. Not sure, but it wouldn’t get past a ton of errors… I managed to boot Damn Small Linux on the machine just to make sure it wasn’t also dead, but Ubuntu and this machine’s controllers seemed to not like one another. Double ugh.

OK, fine, this is why I keep lots of computers around the house. Picked up an old, old machine (AMD Athlon XP 2600+ with 1GB of RAM) and managed to install Ubuntu on it just fine.

Now I just need to get a new motherboard ordered, and/or an external SATA case to get my data off the former desktop.

When people wonder “why the hell do you have so many computers?” I can point to this as an example. Always have a spare. Or two. Maybe three…

If the ZDNet Australia folks have this right, this is an insane legal decision:

A federal judge in Los Angeles last week ruled (PDF) that a computer server’s RAM, or random-access memory, is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in a lawsuit.

Say what? Uh, huh. Here your honor, here’s my RAM — good luck getting the information off of it…

An article on The Blog Herald discusses common problems with user-generated passwords, specifically that they’re too easy to guess. According to the article, users often choose passwords with combinations of their middle name, phone numbers, birthdays, combinations of dictionary words, and (yes) the word “password.”

That’s probably OK for registering for online newspapers or any other Web registration that doesn’t expose any personal data like your credit card or social security number. I don’t think anyone’s working too hard to crack my password for Slashdot or Fark, but I’m not taking any chances with my online banking information.

But, your password for banks, computer logins, etc. should be much harder to guess: Something like Tie5aesh or aiFah4po.

The key is to get something that’s hard to guess, but relatively easy to remember. For that, I use a small application called pwgen. You should be able to find packages for most Linux distros, though it’s rarely installed by default. All you need to do is run pwgen and it will spit out dozens of random passwords. Scan the list and see if there’s one with a mnemonic that will let you remember it easily. The program is designed to produce passwords that are random, yet pronounceable. For example, you could pronounce Tie5aesh as “Tie Five A eesh” — it’s nonsensical, but if you can remember the way it’s pronounced, you should be able to memorize it.

How do you generate your passwords, and are they secure?

L. forwarded this on to me. F—ing awesome!