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Six months ago Bruce Schneier posted an article on "Choosing Secure Passwords". Some of the key points are (mostly copied verbatim from mentioned post): The best way to explain how to choose a good password is to explain how they are broken. Password crackers do not brute force all 8…
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This blog was viewed more than ten-thousand times. As in this post, here are the numbers: The averages per day are: US and Germany are leading the visit-count. The development of visits is as below:
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I turned 50 this year. So what was up this half century of life? Half of my life I was educated in school and university. I traveled through a couple of western European countries, like Spain, Portugal, Austria, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, either privately or sent by my employer. I…
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I own a single-core laptop with 1 GB of memory. Google Chrome version 34 for Linux 64 bit (ArchLinux) is completely unusable on this machine. I own another single-core laptop with 512 MB of memory. Google Chrome version 12 for 32 bit (Ubuntu 10.04) works just fine on this machine. Both machines are…
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Day 2 of the conference had below talks. Prof. Dr. Bernd Brügmann gave a short introduction. He pointed out that Jena is number 10 in Physics in Germany, has ca. 100.000 inhabitants, and 20.000 students. Dr. Karl Rupp, Vienna, Lessons Learned in Developing the Linear Algebra Library ViennaCL.…
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As announced in Workshop Programming of Heterogeneous Systems in Physics, July 2014, I attended this two-day conference in Jena, Germany. Below are speakers and pictures with my personal notes. Dipl.-Ing. Hans Pabst from Intel, Programming for the future: scaling forward with cores and vectors. …
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I struggled somewhat in getting audio via HDMI on Intel NUC. The following commands in .xsession solved the problem for me: /usr/bin/pulseaudio -D echo set-default-sink 0 | /usr/bin/pacmd exec /usr/bin/firefox The trick is to set the default sink in pulseaudio. I use Firefox on the NUC because…
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IBM no longer provides Perl for its mainframe machines, see Software withdrawal: Selected IBM System z platform products (a copy is here: IBM-Withdrawal-ENUS913-252). It looks like they have not heard that Perl is the duct tape that holds the internet together. Similarly IBM withdraw PHP from their…
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Assume you want to set-up a user-account which can only log-in to your machine if he sits in front of it and has to give no password. Let's name this user kiosk. Unfortunately there is apparently no single command-line switch to accomplish this with useradd. The task at hand is not be confused with…
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After finishing my ABAP programming course I wanted to upload the Netweaver-trial software to Telekom media-center. Telekom media-center allows you to store up to 25 GB of data in the cloud. That's more storage than offered by many USB sticks. Netweaver-trial software is about 3.5 GB, and…
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Microsoft brought down no-ip.org and many other domains with a court order. Here is the text from No-IP’s Formal Statement on Microsoft Takedown: We want to update all our loyal customers about the service outages that many of you are experiencing today. It is not a technical issue. This morning,…
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In the year 2010 I read Martin Varsavsky's blog entry on The 6 Day Week by Carlos Varsavsky. In this post Martin Varsavsky states his father, born in 1933, proposed the 6-day week, i.e., work 4 days and rest 2 days. To cope for the reduced productivity, it is proposed to interleave the 6-day week…
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Something you don't see that often: Facebook was down today, see start page below. Now Facebook is up again. It reminds me of the monkey web-page from Google/YouTube.
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The following commands are used to encrypt the whole USB hard-drive. This hard-drive is assumed to be on /dev/sdc. Create one partition. One can use gparted for this. Then cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdc1 luksFormat is only used once. To make this encrypted drive available as device on /dev/mapper…
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This is how I install Google Chrome, as I do not like Google to add automatic cron-jobs. I unpack the Debian package. mkdir T cd T dpkg -x ../google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb.140525 . Switch to root. mv ~User/Download/T/opt/google /opt chown -R bin:bin /opt/google mkdir…
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Some computer monitors either do not provide correct EDID, or no EDID at all. An example monitor is LG E2340T. In this case you can provide a hand-crafted EDID file in xorg.conf. For setting the correct screen resolution in the EDID file you can either use a hex-editor, or use below short C…
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I sometimes teach a C programming language course. I use the following simple exercises for the students to solve on their own. Most solutions are no longer than 10-20 lines of C code. Exercising simple loop and printf(): Print a table of square root values for arguments 1 to 30. Exercising…
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In three earlier posts I showed the development of this blog. Statistics of this Blog: 2.600 Views, 78 Countries, 20 Comments, February 2014 Statistics of this Blog: 1.000 Views, 60 Countries, 10 Likes, October 2013 My Blog Statistics by Country, September 2013 Today I can announce that I crossed…
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This workshop is planned for 14-15 July 2014 in Jena, Germany. The workshop is organized by Bernd Brügmann (University Jena), Xing Cai (Simula and University Oslo), Gundolf Haase (University Graz), and Gerhard Zumbusch (Chair, University Jena). The last workshop from 2011 had two high-profile…
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One simple way to get rid of the very short timeout in shell access to OpenShift is to unset the TMOUT environment variable: unset TMOUT Before I knew that I used an Expect script. Below Expect script defeats the annoying timeout by sending some text every 60 seconds. #!/usr/bin/expect # Defeat…