Coredump

I just got home from an all-nighter at the office. There's still no electricity here, as in most parts of the metro. (Thank goodness for generators and redundant power backups at work.) When I got out of the office building this morning and while riding a cab back home, I got a clear picture of the onslaught typhoon Milenyo had caused: shards of thick signage plastics, broken glass, leaves, branches (and tree trunks!) littered the main street. The steel scaffolding of a huge billboard fronting Club 650 fell over the steak restaurant there. Even the large Chikka billboard that towered over the Ortigas-C5 flyover was humbled by the typhoon. In my place here in Pasig, trees were uprooted and roofs flew off houses. The tarpaulin billboards that served as backdrops to the countless factories in the area were shred to pieces. Too bad I don't have a phone-camera (camera phone?) like Migs does -- all these would have made good web copy. But I'm glad I didn't get to receive Mil...

Found this through the Full Disclosure list: A clever exploit in a little-known Google service could be used to launch phishing attacks, by imitating Google services -- hosted on Google's own servers. Google has taken down the service.

I was rummaging through my backup CDs -- yes, I keep those, despite the fact that there's always FTP. (Torvalds) A bit of a backgrounder: I used to be an editor for the school publication back in college. In fact, I was with the national secretariat of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines from 1996 to 1998. During my stint with the CEGP, we give journalism training to other student writers. This was a part of my notes on editorial writing. I've had notes on other topics: editorial analysis, publication design and features writing. Only, those aren't in my known backups. But they're in there somewhere. I borrowed copiously from Vergel Santos, my dad's former editor in the now-defunct Today , who gave a particularly refreshing and unconventional talk on writing way back in 1997. Some notes on news writing Definition . "History in a hurry." (Nick Joaquin) Derived, presumably, from the cardinal directions, hence, coming from all sides, everywhere. ...

In Pinoy Tech Blog, I've written about my experiences so far with Google Hosting . My new email/IM address, im[spam_me_at]iandexter.net , is hosted by Google. I get to have the same coolness of GMail, among other things. Google is becoming so pervasive in my computing life. I've installed Google Desktop on Mathilda , which runs on Windows XP. The Desktop app is something similar to Mac's widgets (but, of course, Mac's are better ;)). It's got gazillions of "gadgets" you can add. Right now, I have a to-do list, a scratch pad, a nifty lookup console for Google Talk and GMail, photo slide shows from Mathilda's storage and from web feeds, a system monitor, a WiFi signal monitor, a battery meter, and a slick digital clock. Using Google's patented search technology, I can look for content on Mathilda and from the web with just a couple of presses of the Ctrl key. The search bar is pretty slick, too, dynamically listing search results as you type in the ...

I haven't gotten around to uninstalling Windows XP Media Center on Mathilda . In fact, I may not want to. See, I've come to -- gasp! -- like Mathilda's utterly backward (Windows? Shame on me!) but totally slick Media Center UI. But I'm still a Linux guy, so there has to be a compromise. So... Mathilda, meet Evey. Evey runs on Ubuntu Breezy. She's a VMWare Server instance, of course -- a clone, actually, of a readily available image from the VMWare Community site. I'm doing things on her that will give her a personality all her own. For one, she's now my staging server for testing Drupal themes. A quick sudo apt-get install whatever will morph her into a full-blown Linux sys-ad platform. Mathilda and Evey work well together. I've alloted half of Mathilda's RAM to Evey, and they're sharing it very well. I haven't installed an SMP kernel on Evey yet, but I've prepped her up to recognize the Core Duo, too. (If the anthropomorphism is getting...

I'm coaching a new engineer on Linux- and systems administration-related tasks. Here's a set of exercises I did for DNS. Install BIND. By default, what packages does Red Hat (RH) install? How would you find out? Hint: `man rpm` . View the configuration file in /etc/named.conf . Describe what each section is for: options { } controls { } key "rndc_key" { } zone "." { } zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" { } What is the /var/named/named.ca file? How do you update this file? Hint: `dig` it up. Describe the function of each record in /var/named/named.local : SOA NS PTR Notice the ' . ' at the end of the domain name? What is it for? What will happen if you take it out? Configure your box to use your recently installed DNS server. Edit /etc/resolv.conf . Add your nameserver. (Don't forget to restart the networking service.) Start BIND. How? What would you check to see if BIND starts at boot? Test your nameserver. Hint: `man dig` . Do a DNS lookup...