I highly recommend that all you Windows users install this free tool from Sophos to protect your machines against a shortcut exploit attack, until such a time as Microsoft choose to patch the vulnerability: clicky.
The vulnerability affects all versions of Windows back to 98 and essentially allows an attacker to execute code by embedding it within the image data of shortcut or “lnk” files.
Update: as of 4 August 2010 Microsoft has issued a patch for this here.
For the sake of posterity, the following commands will allow you to login to an otherwise unbootable Linux install and run commands from the install on the hard drive:
With thanks to this part of the Ubuntu wiki.
For those are are interested, I managed to break my 64 bit install of Karmic 10.04 on my brand new Asus laptop by activating the proprietary (Nvidia) drivers when the install offered. After Usplash I see now is a black screen, however the system is working. Installing the version from Nvidia’s website did not help. Deleting xorg.conf (and forcing the system to use the fall-back VESA driver) worked.
I often get asked “what laptop should I buy?”. This really comes down to your requirements. For me, they are:
I settled on the Asus PL30JT-RO025X, which can be had for just under $1500. For those who are interested my comparison of several similar contenders is below:
Just want to chronicle l some really neat, time saving tricks I’ve picked up today for handling files in bash.
The first, how to use the find command:
Easy enough, right?
Let’s use find and cp to back up a bunch of text files:
NOTE: the above assumes that there is only one text file in each directory, and will create a file in the same directory being a copy of whatever file it is that the find command returns.
Let’s string find to sed, and use sed to replace all instances of “.ogg” to “.mp3″ within a collection of text files:
Let’s also use find and LAME together to convert a batch of wav files to mp3 files (I recommend you run the following from within a screen session):
NOTE: The above will create mp3 files in the form of “somefile.wav.mp3″ in the same directory that “somefile.wav” is located.
Let’s use find to delete the remaining wave format files:
The above commands can save hours of messing around with a file manager.
I received this via the feed-back form a few days ago:
Do you want to grow your business ? Do you have serious , defined sales goals?
The funny part is, this is a non-commercial site. This is not about my work or what I do, nor am I trying to sell anything – there aren’t even any ads on display.
How disappointing that the first person trying to contact me since my redesign, a spammer non-the-less, doesn’t even bother to look at the site before spamming me.