I use CrashPlan for continuous backup on all my main home computers (that's five currently). I'm also a cryptography freak in that I'll encrypt anything I can! I wanted to use the backup encryption in CrashPlan and seeing a possible security hole with allowing CrashPlan to generate its own keys, I decided to do it the hard way (like most things I do).

These are the steps I took to generate my own hardened CrashPlan encryption keys. I have a different one for every machine CrashPlan is installed on...

This is all done, of course, on a Mac (why do it anywhere else?)

1. Create a password of 56 8-bit characters in any way you want.
Using "Password Assistant," create two "Random" strings of 28 characters.

2. Paste the two 28 character strings as one line into a text file called 'password.key' Make sure there are no line breaks in the file.

3. Base64 encode the file using the terminal.

To decode the file you can use the following:


4. On the "Settings" pane of CrashPlan, select the "Security" tab.
In the "Archive Encryption" section, choose "Replace with your own data key (Advanced)," then paste the contents of the file "password.base64" you created in step 3.

5. Make sure you save the original password (and maybe the Base64 encoded version as well) somewhere safe (an encrypted disk image maybe?). You might need them later and if you forget the password, your backup archive will be unaccessible.

* If you really want to be ultra-super-mega-mondo secure, you can make a really "dirty" password with the following command (by dirty, I mean there is a good chance you won't be able to type the bare password. Just try to base64 decode the output of this command to a file to see for yourself).


** If you're adventurous, you can try to weed out some of the "dirtier" characters with 'tr'


Good luck! I hope this satisfies your craving for hard-core encrypted CrashPlan backups.

"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength."
-Eric Hoffer

Let's take stock of police in 2011:

They have three "things with a button" that can make you stop doing whatever you were doing when they approached you.

1. pepper spray - used if the thing you want to stop can't hurt you, but might touch or otherwise annoy you, used on the handicapped, but great for squirrels too, as it turns out!
2. stun gun - used on college students and drunkards because it's fun to watch them squirm - can be used on the elderly especially if they are in bed
3. firearm - used mostly on family pets and the elderly. The gun is used less and less these days because it gets cops in too much trouble. The other 'point-and-clicks' don't. All police do have guns however, just to remind you that you will be killed if you don't respond properly to pepper spray and stun guns.

BTW... It took me 5 minutes to write this post - including the Google searches (police pepper spray, police taser, police shoot)... That's sad.

Today I mixed up a batch of BMW window cleaner for my wife's 328i. Of course I used the official BMW concentrate and mixed it with distilled water. Yeah - I said distilled. I went to the drug store to buy it specifically for the purpose. I wouldn't want my wife looking through hard water spots, now do? You gotta treat your wife and your Bimmers right.

It seems to me that the concept of 'daylight saving time' causes more problems than it solves. Consider that, when driving in rush hour traffic, people tend to be more aggressive and less obligatory toward other drivers when they can't see their faces!

This only stands to reason. As more people clog up the roadways during rush hour, tempers flare and patience shortens. When the "thing" causing your problems doesn't have a face, it's the perfect recipe for angry, uncompassionate driving.

Being a person who drives to work daily, I for one would be happy not to have to drive home in the dark in Winter. It's a battlefield out there.

Girl Talk is mix artist Greg Gillis and he's a bad ass.

Check out All Day...

I know alot of people want to know how to do this. The solution is usually creating a shell script and naming it with the '.command' extension so it'll launch the Terminal.

The cleaner way is through a simple launchd plist placed in your ~/Library/LaunchAgents folder.

Here's my example:

To Rockstar Games,

At the time of this writing I am 4 hours, 23 minutes, and 40 seconds into Red Dead Redemption, having finished 8.3% of the game thus far. I struggled to find the proper words to precisely present my point in a poignant and punctuated manner. Although my intent was to be excessively eloquent in this enunciation of my enjoyment of Red Dead Redemption, the emergence of said eloquence seems to have evaded me. It is then with a sad sigh I must make my endorsement of your so expertly crafted work of art in the only way I feel fully captures the essence of my feeling.

Red Dead Redemption is a fucking awesome game. Well done! From the bottom of my heart, well fucking done!

I saw this the other day... Marketing people scare me.

In the little over seven years that I've been employed at my present job, I've had a total of 14 managers. That's nearly one every six months. Each time I got a review from a manager, I was told how exceptionally well I performed and how it would be impossible to do what we do without me (or something to that effect). Typically, this was true.

During my tenure, some managers gave me good bonuses or a raise here and there. Other managers didn't. Some managers were complete assholes or total bitches and others were great people just trying to do right and not lose a limb (or their head) in the process (though a few still did).

Usually, it took about a month or two to train a new manager on where I was, where I'd been, where I was going, and how fast I'd get there. Generally, most managers were only able to deal with one or two of those variables. The more important thing, in their minds, was making sure they looked good to their managers. Somehow they forgot (or never knew) that well cared for, productive employees can make any manager look good to their boss!

In the next month or two, my manager would learn how many little, behind the scenes things I was doing to keep the automated orchestra playing flawlessly. Slowly, they'd understand the necessity of a good SCM engineer and start to put well placed trust in me. Anytime I thought it might be nice to venture out into something different (like development, or project management, or marketing), I'd bring it up with my manager and usually be give "20%" of my time to work on new tasks.

Inevitably, releases come, then patches, coupled with constant tech support to my group of developers, and of course, myriad regular SCM duties. The "20%" of my time dwindles down to an effective 0%!

So, after all this time. I've left my company for another. As I embark on solving a new set of challenges, I'll try to remember the lesson learned from my last seven years of work:

Don't be irreplaceable, if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.

I'd always thought it would assure the consistent availability of my position were I to make myself irreplacable. Indeed, I spent a considerable amount of energy to ensure it took me to deliver our prodcts. Well, there is no doubt my efforts certainly ensured my position, but the side-effects were so restrictive as to be stunting. I've glad I've broken free of that suffocating situation.

I'll apply what I've learned to my future endeavors.

Just Released:

Lexikon - Konfabulator Widget for Macintosh! (version 1.0)
by Latcarf and NeurolithicTechnology();

Lexikon offers a tiny interface to search for definitions and synonyms using public dictionary and thesaurus websites. Over 10 different websites are currently supported so you can choose your favorite one. Lexikon searches can be initiated by the keyboard or the mouse and the interface is unobtrusive so as not to interfere with your daily activities. As an added bonus, Lexikon offers special features to allow searching Google.com or the iTunes Music Store! Use Lexikon to define unknown words and add to your own mental lexicon.

You must have Konfabulator installed to use this widget.

Thanks alot to NeurolithicTechnology(); for handling packaging and release distribution for me!

Download Lexikon.
UDIF-CRC32 Checksum: $FEA92523

Enjoy!

I work as a Software Configuration Management (SCM) Engineer at a fairly large company who just happens to make a couple of widely used applications for Macintosh. As the person who is responsible for the source code repository (among many other things), I am burdened with providing the developers tools to increase their productivity and efficiency.

To that end, we have decided that we might want to make the move from CVS to Subversion. In other blog entries, I will chronicle the pilot and eventual move and detail what I experienced during the process.

I am using Making the Jump to Subversion as the "jumping off" point to switch to Subversion.

The following is a short synopsis of that article:

Making the Jump to Subversion by Adam Swift -- Subversion can run standalone or on a network as a repository server with multiple clients. The preferred client/server configuration uses Apache and WebDAV for network communication. It's a powerful alternative to CVS, and Adam Swift shows you the ins and outs in this tutorial.

We'll see how it goes!

It's become time again for me to revisit my organization's desire to move from CVS to Subversion. I've gotten out a few releases of our products recently and with that work out of the way, I'm getting back to swimming around in Subversion.

This is the third installment in my ongoing detail of the move to Subversion. In the first installment of this series, I spoke about my organization's interest in using Subversion instead of CVS. In the second installment, I detailed how I installed Subversion on Mac OS X (Panther) and how I initiated the process of converting some of our CVS repositories. In this installment, I will go into further detail about interacting with the "mock" Subversion server and the pilot project repositories.


Continue reading "Moving from CVS to SVN - Swimming Around"

I started the process to convert our organization's CVS repository to Subversion. I decided to do a mock implementation as my "pilot". I took the CVS repository and made a copy to another machine (Mac OS X 10.3.7) which serves as the "mock" Subversion server.

Our current CVS repository consists of two "major" projects and 26 small projects (support pieces, tools, scripts, etc). I decided to try to convert one of the major projects to start with.


Continue reading "Moving from CVS to SVN - Diving In"

I don't know how to best use the gifts I've been given...