Pablo Averbuj

Google Desktop < Spotlight

When I migrated to the Mac I reflexively installed Google Desktop Search, because it just works so nicely on Windows. After literally months of moaning and suffering and people reminding me gently that this feature is built in, I tried Spotlight. It works just as nicely as GDS did on the PC. Google: GDS on my Mac crashes constantly. Not impressed.

How Linux on the desktop could possibly win

Previuosly I wrote about how Linux on the desktop doesn’t get much respect because it doesn’t deserve much respect. However, as I was writing the post something occurred to me. The only way Linux on the desktop would become viable is if enough mainstream applications move to the web. I was reminded of this the other day when I saw this Slashdot story about Adobe putting all of their applications online.

For example, Photoshop will never come to Linux, almost guaranteed. However, Adobe is porting Photoshop as a web application. GNUCash will never rival Quicken or Microsoft Money. Ever. However, Wesabe could be a very viable alternative for users. It’s not worth companies investing money into Linux applications when there are no Linux users (chicken and egg). However, if enough web applications become the de-facto standard for their vertical, you reduce the friction of moving from one OS to another, and this may lead to some slow growth of Linux desktops for certain segments, but that’s a big if and a big maybe.

Turning cursor visible in Terminal.app

This is a quick tip. Since switching to Mac, one of the minor annoyances was that when my ssh sessions were terminated when I was running an application that disabled the cusors (usually mutt), I would be stuck without a cursor. I expiremented with stty and tset for a while until I ended up with old trusty escape codes. I created a shell function called ‘ssh‘ that looks like this:

function ssh { /usr/bin/ssh $*; echo -n '^[[?25h'; }

The trick is to make sure the “^[” is an escape character. Put vim into insert-mode, hit CTRL-V, escape where that character is supposed to be.

Writing Your Pin (kinda-securely)

The following is a description of a simple technique my parents taught me to encode a PIN directoy on a card and have it only be usable by you. The technique involves choosing a 10-letter key, for our example let’s say our key is “subverting”. Then you taken your pin and do a letter substituion based on position: if our pin is 4321, the encoded string is “vbus” and you can write that on your credit card. It’s probably easier to treat a 0 in your PIN as position 10 unless you’re a programmer. You can use the same key repeatedly with relative security. Of course if your secret is compromised all your PINs are compromised. If a PIN is compromised it would simplify discovering the key. I think this technique is fairly secure (i.e., secure enough), the biggest weakness I can think of is that you narrowing the keyspace down. In our case it’s reasonable to determine that there are no duplicates and thus reduce the keyspace from 10^4 to 10*9*8*7 which is about 50%. It gets worse if you have a duplicate number (e.g., 4232) the keyspace becomes 10*9*8*3 which is a 78% reduction in keyspace. Clearly: don’t repeat a number in your PIN.

The next problem is coming up with a key (it can’t have any letters more than once). It’s actually a kind of fun mental exercise. In the 10-15 minutes I was thinking of this article I only came up with a couple. However, given a dictionary it’s fairly easy to find 10-letter words that meet the criteria. Here’s the code I came up with:


perl -lne 'next unless(length == 10 and !/\W/); $a = join("", sort split(//, lc)); $a =~ tr/[a-z]//s; print if(length($_) == length($a))' /usr/share/dict/words


Where /usr/share/dict/words is your dictionary. My dictionary had 392 of such words, and you can also do 2-word combinations (e.g., “dutchovens”) but those are harder to come up with.

I should also add that it is possible to extend the cipher to be more complex/secure but the idea is to make it simple enough to translate from letters to numbers to liberate you from using the same PIN for everything. Also, here is a related to story on why banking PINs are 4 digits [via Bruce Schneier].

Anniversary Weekend

This weekend was our first wedding anniversary and we celebrated on the beach. Leigha’s mom volunteered to watch Anna for the weekend, so we accepted her offer to spend some time by ourselves. We explored the options, we considered New York City, but there was too much to do in too little time. Instead we decided to go to Virginia Beach. Ideally it would be quiet and uncrowded and low-key. Saturday morning we did some last minute packing, loaded up the convertible and hit the road around 9am. We were in no rush to get there so we stopped and had lunch along the way. We checked into the hotel around 2 or 3pm and went to explore the beach.

Continue reading Anniversary Weekend…