Like with everything, I am sure there are 101 ones to create a GUID value from within a Bash script. My method is maybe a bit of a cheat but it is quite and easy and possibly doesn’t have the overhead of calling a perl script which in turn is calling a CPAN module. Instead, I am using the UUID() function from within mysql!
GUID=`./mysql -u username -B –silent -e ’select uuid()’`
The overhead of calling and connecting to a mysql server is maybe something to think about if it was going to be used over and over.
I wonder, does anyone else know a native way to create a GUID from within a shell script?
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Ages ago I noticed a bit of a “feature” on Skype and initially thought how cool it was. It was when I was using skype for work both in the office on my office laptop and at home on my Apple Powerbook. I would have conversations at home with other people and when I got into work the next day and looked at chat history I noticed all the previous night’s chat saved there. Cool feature maybe, it makes your chat history available where ever you are (erm… just where does it save that history though?).
Then, I had both laptops at home (I had to do some PC only work) and once again I was chatting via Skype to collegues. This time however, I had both laptops logged in and running Skype and I noticed that my conversation I was having on Skype on one laptop was being fully replicated on the other. Neat idea I thought, although from then on I made sure I logged out of Skype at work at the end of each day; there would be nothing worse than chatting away at home while half the office is watching!
Infact, I then made it a point to log out and to make sure that Skype didn’t automatically log in me on start up on any machine. Just picture the moment when you are busy moaning about work while at home only to find out everything you said has been duplicated and viewed by your collegues at work at the same time, in real time in fact! So while I thought it was possibly more “quirky” than “neat”, I also saw it as a bit of a security risk too.
I then noticed the other day that other people have highlighted this too. One bloke setup Skype on a friends PC, used this login details to show them how it worked, shutdown the computer, and off he went. It was only six months later that both parties relised that each time that person turned on his computer it was automatically logging his friend into Skype and so now had a good six months worth of chat history that the other person had had unknown to him that everything was being duplicated.
So lesson to learn, log out of Skype when finished and untick the auto login. Lession to learn for Skype, try and warn users if it detects you are logged in on multiple machines if they feel this feature is worth having.
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A fantastic site, graphJam.com that someone pointed me to - here is just a sample but if you need to waste a minutes on a friday afternoon then this is a great site to do it with!
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On the server here I perform a number of offsite backups to gmail, they get triggered once a month. However, I am not comfortable with submitting my private data to a third party especially when the third party in question makes its money from collection and making searchable data. So to get over that I encrypted it using standard PGP principles using the open source alternative GPG.
All was going well until one month I woke up to a whole number of failed offsite backups all telling me that my trust database was corrupt. No problem as this seems to happen now and then and by simply deleting the trust database held at ~/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg should sort it out.
It did, but now it was stalling while it was “waiting for lock”:
gpg: waiting for lock (hold by 1407 - probably dead) ...
After a bit of playing about I soon worked out that gpg had left lock file laying around in the ~/.gnugp/ directory. I deleted the lock file (the one with the extension .lock gave it away) and now all fine again.
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Citrix seems to have forgotton something here, where is the carriage return! I wonder if this wins an awards for the longest alert box?
(the picture is very wide, too wide for me - to see it in full you will need to click on the snapshot below. A wide screen monitor helps too).
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Security guards at the Museum of Anthropology within the University of British Columbia certainly learnt a lesson that maybe the “computer is always right”sometimes.
Imagine the scene where a burgler phones you up and tells you not to worry if you hear the sound of your windows smashing, there is nothing to worry about. Then minutes later you hear your windows smashing but think and do nothing about it, meantime the burgler is busy removing all your vaulables. This is just what happened at the Museum where security guards got a phone call appearently from the CCTV camera company telling them not to worry if some alarms go off as the camera system is faulty. Indeed, later that day alarms did go off but they were ignored…. while burglers got away with everything.
The full story is here. A great example of social engineering.
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Noted in a recent edition of the Risks Digest, a bloke who lives in Needlepoint Lane and cannot use Amtrak’s automated parcel tracking as the website beleives he is entering a PO Box address instead of a real one. It seems, according to Amtrak who know about this bug, that the data entry detects the ‘po’ within Needlepoint and treats it as if it is referring to a PO Box.
A simple and silly mistake, I thought bugs like this and indeed prgramming mistakes like this, would not be made these days anymore.
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I used to be an Atari computer fan, having many Atari ST computers and writing articles for various magazines (remember ST Applications from the ST Club, and the S.T.E.N “magazine on a disk”!). However, I never really got into computer games and games consoles. By the time I got my first Atari ST, Atari had really said goodby to the games console market and it was hard to beleive that just in the 10 years previous Atari was the name in computer consoles. Come over my house and play on the Atari, instead of come over my house and play on the Wii!
There is a great write up about the rise and fall of Atari in the games console market and like all computer stories from the 70s to 80s it reads with so many “what ifs” that it is fantastic. I didn’t know, for instance, that Steve Jobs worked at Atari as a games programmer (creating Breakout with some bloke called Steve Wozniak) - I wonder if at the time he ever beleived in later life he would be taking Atari to court for appearently ripping off the Mac OS.
It is a fantastic read, every computer scientist musts read it - one of the forgotten companies that make up so much of today.
http://www.neatorama.com/2008/05/05/the-rise-and-fall-of-atari/
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Open Source Testing website, OpenSourceTesting.org have published details of their Spring 2008 survey and is wanting testing professionals to add their votes to choose the top 10 ‘Most Popular Open Source Testing Tools’. Results to be published next month. It will be interesting to see the results. Details on how to cast your votes can be found here.
This follows on from a similar survey held on the Software Testing Club website the other week in that it was asking for votes on your favorite automation tool QuickTestPro coming out on top for the named contenders, and the ‘Other’ item getting a great deal of open source hits and home grown automation.
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