This "Coding and Techy Stuff" category is here because peripatetically I make a living as a software engineer. This is where I put anything related to coding and technology, and sometimes just unrelated information such as you might find posted on ycombinator's always-intellectually-curious Hacker News.
Roundcube is great. Easy to get up and running, but it surprises me that I couldn't find the following solution online, so I'm making a post here. When you receive an email (say, from a public key generator) that is encrypted by your own PRIVATE key and you haven't fully configured encryption, it […]
This is a weblog post about what makes a hacker, and why there are "good" hackers and "bad" hackers (which is about quality, not whitehat vs blackhat), an insight I discovered while in a brief conversation with my 10-year-old daughter. My daughter has discovered the Rubik's cube, […]
I migrated to a new blog engine, DotClear instead of OctoberCMS. This resolves the issues I kept encountering with comments being broken. People can now leave comments again, and they won't get lost in the ether. However, in fixing one issue, I've turned up another, which is that some very old URLs […]
External Network Asset Discovery and Vulnerability Scans This is a list of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) tools which will quickly give you an awareness of your cybersecurity risk profile. I put this list together when someone said they were quoted $40,000 for security analysis, and wondered if […]
cedar@nowhere:/opt/bitnami$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart Restarting services.. Job for bitnami.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status bitnami.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details. cedar@nowhere:/opt/bitnami$ sudo […]
cedar@nowhere:~$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh status Cannot find any running daemon to contact. If it is running, make sure you are pointing to the right pid file (/var/run/gonit.pid) cedar@nowhere:~$ cd /opt/bitnami cedar@nowhere:/opt/bitnami$ ls apache bncert-tool bndiagnostic-tool […]
What worked for me to resolve this issue was to ensure that USB was set to 2.0. It all worked as expected as soon as I went in to Settings for the VirtualBox and selected the following (Use USB 2.0): […]
On Friday, I was at work participating in a demo before an audience of a half-dozen decision makers. It's such an important demo that this was the dry-run for the demo, where we're taking notes to prepare for the Big Demo next week. I participate in demos regularly, so I'm familiar with all the […]
Yes, I agree that Premature Optimization is the Root of All Evil, at least within the programming paradigm where this concept arises, and likely true in a much broader concept also. If you're a developer, and you think about it (just stumbled on this idea here, your search engine will give you more […]
It should be easier to change your scrollbar back from the ridiculous default, where it disappears into a tiny vertical slice that only reappears when you hover over the thin vertical slice (!) which is such bad UI design, it's probably intentional. Normal people have clamored for years to get rid […]
This came up while trying to load a disassembled project that was then reassembled with dnSpy, but you may find it for other reasons. If you encounter this error: C:\Users\Me\source\repos\MyRecompiledProject.Web\MyRecompiledProject.Web.csproj : error : A numeric comparison was attempted on […]
My computer just crashed itself, according to Microsoft policy, right while I was working on it. I'm up at 1:00 a.m. working on a project with a complex enough work environment that it takes an hour just to get the work environment fully functional. I have over two dozen tabs open in my browser, I'm […]
I was pleased to find this blog entry with a handy list of all the shortcut aliases you'd ever need for gandi's webmail approach. It also has a nice explanation of the issue, but as I will never use an email starting with a number, I was able to half the list. Here it is, 676 items, which is 26x26, […]
This seemingly-useful link on askubuntu did not work as I wanted, and neither did a few other similar sites. Trying to make it easy for the end user took longer than the 5 minutes I had available, so I'm posting the correct way to do it here for future use. The key missing ingredient was provided in […]
You tried to connect to your own Nukkit server running on Pteradactyl. However, it failed quickly and you got this message: "logged out due to Outdated server." You look in the logs for more information, and that's all the logs show, also: "logged out due to Outdated server." So […]
I found a fix for that here. I wrote about it here: Configuration for FreeBSD inside VirtualBox with Gnome3, sudo, nano, and bash, including avoiding the black screen Here's the TL;DR answer in a screenshot: […]
Coming into FreeBSD anew from the Linux world. I'm happy with it as a server, no changes needed. I like the much-more-secure ambiance. But now experimenting with it as a desktop, I've already decided I like sudo, bash, and nano better than su, sh, and ee. And I want Gnome. At this point, I've […]
(I sometimes craft my headlines to be search-engine-friendly, which is why they sometimes look odd in person). If you have multiple VirtualBox images running in Ubuntu or similar Debian-based flavors of Linux, you know it can be frustrating to switch between the different images using the favorites […]
On Debian flavors like Ubuntu, apt and dpkg default to starting a service as soon as it is installed. This is almost always a good idea, but I ran into the strange problem that the service was misconfigured. Starting it was not a good thing. Stopping and re-configuring it after it started was not […]
An out-of-the-box install of Ubuntu 18.04.5 at Digital Ocean will not work for a SecurityOnion installation, because of the way cloud-init is managing the network. Security Onion prefers NetworkManager to manage the network. Cloud-init is required by Digital Ocean for deployment of a custom image. […]