I'm not familiar with Ruby, Rails, Puma, or anything else in the Ruby environment, although I'm well familiar with other programming environments which are similar. Still, it took me longer to install Dradis than it should have, and I finally gave up on the Docker version entirely. I had to cobble […]
Coding and Techy Stuff
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.
How to remove advertising for ESM (i.e. Ubuntu Pro) by fixing MOTD update notifier
Wondered what the heck ESM was, after years of seeing references to it whenever logging in to an Ubuntu session. Turns out it's part of the Pro edition for Ubuntu, so this is an advertisement. ESM is a security improvement if you need it and pay for it, but it's an annoying nag screen if you don't. […]
Eramba System Health Check fails immediately after installation due to cron error but really it's an .env file issue
The .env file for an eramba installation cannot have #comments. If you have comments, it will silently fail, and you'll see this error message: "System Health Warning: This installation of eramba has a few issues in order to work properly. Check on the settings page under health monitor what […]
How to open files in vscodium using link in a browser to vscode: add a registry key
To open up a file within a browser having a vscode://file/ URL like this: vscode://file/C:\xampp\htdocs\mycoolapp\app\Models\Membership.php So it looks like this: Then save the following as a registry file named vscode.reg: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 […]
How to fix the multiple monitor resize after lock screen issue in PopOS and Ubuntu Linux with GNOME
TL;DR Quick Fix is at the END for people who want to get to the deets w/o prolegomenon. I put as many keywords as I could into the headline so this post is easy for others to find. Although I'm not a gamer, I have a super duper Lenovo Legion gamer laptop with all kinds of nVidia power for my daily […]
What to do when Roundcube says: Decryption failed: Key password required, and: Could not decrypt this message
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 […]
"I want to break this apart and put it back together again" -- while trying to solve the Rubik's cube
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, […]
Migrated to a better blog engine; alas, some URLS might break
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 […]
A few OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) tools to quickly check your network vulnerabilities
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 $40,000 for security analysis, and wondered if […]
Fix Error: "Job for bitnami.service failed because the control process exited with error code."
cedar@nowhere:/opt/bitnami$ 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 […]
Fix Error: "If it is running, make sure you are pointing to the right pid file (/var/run/gonit.pid)"
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 […]
On VirtualBox HP MFP printer installer fails at 99% complete
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): […]
What happens when anti-robot becomes anti-human?
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 […]
Premature Optimization is The Root of All Evil -- and Why This Is
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 […]
Good old fashioned thick scroll bars in PopOS and probably also Ubuntu
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 […]
How to fix: A numeric comparison was attempted on "$(_TargetFrameworkVersionWithoutV)" that evaluates to "" instead of a number, in condition "('$(TargetFrameworkIdentifier)' != '.NETCoreApp'
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 […]
Why I personally loathe working with Microsoft Windows
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 […]
Gandi catchall email addresses, only 676 items this time
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, […]
Chroot sftp-only SSH user into home folder safely in Ubuntu
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 […]
Pterodactyl "logged out due to Outdated server" with Nukkit
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 […]