Warning: Invalid Card Data

Which seems a bit odd at first, considering the 48G model has no card slot (only the 48GX model has one). Luckily, there’s a simple solution: Execute the PINIT command by typing “PINIT” (without the double quotes) and pressing the ENTER key.

There’s a great, detailed explanation of this problem and the according fix in the “invalid card data at my hp48g” thread over at the independent HP calculator museum. If this warning message appears on a HP 48GX and the problem persists after applying this fix, take a look at step 3 described in the  article titled “Message, Invalid Card Data, is Displayed when the Calculator is Turned On” on HP’s support forum.

Wouldn’t it be a pity if a company with such a great history and so many great hardware products ceased to be a hardware company?

I) I have to use (and know about) these social sharing technologies as an IT professional. As a private person however, I disapprove of proprietary technologies that may unknowingly inflict people’s privacy online (for even more scary stuff, learn about browser fingerprinting and read this recent Wired story about undeletable cookies). I also recommend and support using plugins and tools like

• Brian Kennish’s Disconnect extension for Chromium based browsers
• SRWare’s Iron Browser (a better Chrome alternative, see Iron vs. Chrome)
• Tor Project

II) The way how social sharing (and “social” per se) is done today is just plain wrong:

• It’s proprietary instead of based on open standards.
• Data usually gets pulled into proprietary, closed, data silos instead of giving users full and exclusive control over their very own data.
• All the big existing social sharing architectures follow a vulnerable (in so many ways), centralized approach instead of a robust, distributed (or at least federated) one.
• Erroneously, people try to solve “social sharing” on the web application level instead of on a lower level and as part of an open protocol and specification (an open social backbone) rather than as various incompatible and proprietary implementations.
• Giving users guarantees and full control about their online privacy and data is impossible with the current approaches. Users are required to care about their settings for every single social sharing tool out there instead of being able to specify a global policy (e.g. in the browser).
• So far, social sharing is de facto opt-out instead of opt-in, which is the wrong approach if you want to put the user in control and avoid being evil.

III) “tweet”, “like”, “+1″ buttons clutter up and “slow down” web pages and make for an unenjoyable user experience, also in regard to accessibility. It doesn’t scale (a separate button for each social network, for each shareable entity on a page , though it’s basically all just about “sharing something”? Oh no!). It’s not even necessary, pure lazyness (feel free to share by copy-pasting URLs manually until there’s a true social backbone). It simply s*cks on so many levels. The “share” button-itis as common today will largely disappear and be replaced by a browser built-in, extensible, standardized social sharing facility in a matter of 5 years.

IV) Do you know the code that hides behind a share button (or a fake thereof)? If so, do you know what exactly is going to happen when you click on it while surfing the web? Neither do I. Security, transparency, reliability, usability and accessibility could be improved a lot by moving “social sharing” from web pages to the browser.

Further (of less importance for the general discussion):

• As a private person I  don’t care much about popularity contests and popularity in general, neither that of my pages nor of myself (or my virtual alter ego).
• On this changelog, the “share” buttons were rarely used anyway. I’m confident people won’t miss them now that they’re gone.

Important note: This post reflects nothing but my own opinion as a private person (like everything else posted on this private blog). I can clearly distinguish between my own opinion as a private person and opinions and needs of other individuals, businesses (even my own business), organizations and customers and fully respect them.

The interesting thing is that according to internal sources, most boxes in Zimbra’s test farm now run Ubuntu instead of Fedora/RH/Centos. Way to go, VMWare!

That’s 330 MB of private memory for each instance at this very moment! Note that these numbers are steadily growing (at about 2 KB/s) for both processes – for no apparent reason. A hint, that there’s likely a memory leak somewhere in Skype.

Let’s hope Microsoft will rewrite Skype from scratch (The current code-base probably isn’t worth refactoring). I’m confident they don’t lack the human and financial resources to do it. It can only get better.

To make a long debugging story short, here’s a summary of the problem:

The update script doesn’t properly remove old entries in /etc/rsyslog.conf when creating a new dedicated rsyslog configuration file for zimbra (/etc/rsyslog.d/60-zimbra.conf). This makes rsyslog log its own logging due to double rule entries – making /var/log/zimbra-stats.log grow at 2 MB/s. Like this, zimbra effectively DOSes itself as the server runs out of free disk space in no time (my above-average 12 GB of free space were filled within about 1 hour 40 minutes).

And here’s the solution:

1. Stop rsyslog to stop it from filling up your disk with nonsense: ‘/etc/init.d/rsyslog stop’ or ‘service rsyslog stop’
2. If necessary (i.e. if the updated server has been running for several minutes already), reclaim your free disk space by deleting/emptying big log files in /var/log, e.g. zimbra-stats.log, zimbra.log, mail.info, mail.log, mail.err, mail.warn etc.
3. Edit /etc/rsyslog.conf and remove the entries (likely at the end of the file) that look similar to these:
local0.* @mail.yourserver.com
local1.* @mail.yourserver.com
auth.* @mail.yourserver.com
local0.* -/var/log/zimbra.log
local1.* -/var/log/zimbra-stats.log
auth.* -/var/log/zimbra.log
mail.* @mail.yourserver.com
mail.* -/var/log/zimbra.log
(these are now in /etc/rsyslog.d/60-zimbra.conf)
4. Restart rsyslog: ‘service rsyslog restart’
5. Restart ZCS if it doesn’t run properly anymore: /etc/init.d/zimbra restart (you may even have to reboot the whole box if that doesn’t work)

via Log.io – Real-time log monitoring in your browser.

cat a_long_document.txt|less

When used to page the output of colordiff however, ‘less’ displays a mess instead of properly displaying colored output like ‘more’.
The trick is to use ‘less’ with either the -r or -R option (which both repaint the screen), i.e.

colordiff -u file_old.py file_new.py|less -r

or

colordiff -u file_old.py file_new.py|less -R

(try which one works better with your system and terminal)

So, in order to really (securely) delete a file on a hard disk, there are basically two methods (simplified; from a technical point of view it’s both the same):

• Overwrite the file content (i.e. its clusters) with random data
• Delete the file as usual, empty the trash and overwrite the whole free space on the according hard disk with random data

For the second method, here’s how to do it using Mac OS X:

1. Delete the file(s) and empty the trash
2. Find out the device name of the according hard disk by opening a new ‘Terminal’ window and executing the “df” command. For example, for a RAID 1 disk, the path of the disk might be something like “/dev/disk2″
3. In the opened ‘Terminal’ window, execute:
   diskutil secureErase freespace 1 /dev/disk2
   where “1″ stands for “single-pass random-fill erase” and “/dev/disk2″ is the disk device  (adjust this to match your disk). When prompted, enter the admin’s credentials.

Note that overwriting free space like this takes quite some time depending on the amount of free space there is and how many passes you need (e.g. use “2″ for a US DoD 7-pass secure erase or “3″ for a Gutmann 35-pass secure erase). For more information about diskutil and its options, see “man diskutils”.

via Move a window when its title bar is off the screen (Tips, Tricks, Tweaks, and Setting) – TACKtech Corp..