Dominik’s Journey ;-)

When it comes to internet security, good passwords and “easy to remember” have always been at odds. As soon as you need to write down your password on a cheat sheet, it’s not really a good password (anymore).

So, how can you create unique passwords for the different websites, easy to remember and still secure enough so that standard dictionary attacks can’t break them ?

Tada, enter your individual “smart password generator” !

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Having a catch-all email address can be a mixed blessing, especially if the someone uses spoofed “sent from” email addresses. Invalid recipients will result in bounced back emails your catch-all.

I created the following SpamAssassin rule to filter out those “fake bounce” emails.

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A very interesting new book hit the shelves: Tim Ferriss’ “Four Hour Work Week”.

It takes a fresh look at inefficiencies and ineffectivenesses in your daily work routine and offers quite unorthodox solutions.

Just the tips on managing emails and cutting down wasted time dealing with Outlook (or other email clients for that matter) make that book worth the purchase.

Definitely worthwhile is a visit of Tim’s blog.

David Joel Hamilton’s Master Thesis “I Commend To You Our Sister” is now available as a free PDF download online.

Download

This is probably the most exhaustive study on Women in Leadership in the Bible that has ever been conducted. The thesis itself is about 300 pages, the appendices of word studies and background information is another 500 pages. David Hamilton also published a short version under the title “Why not Women - a fresh look at scripture on women in missions, ministry and leadership.”

If it wasn’t for a post in a blog that’s now offline, I would have never found it.

Well, so I haven’t posted here for a while. Too busy with other stuff, I guess.

But to give this post at least some original content, I want to give you some piece of advice. This comes straight from the higher ranks of the company I work for, so it’s gotta be true ;-)

“You have to manage it, or get out of the kitchen !”

LOL, and I thought I was confused.

Wanna know where you come from ? Ha, good luck. This won’t tell you. But it will tell you where the 20 guys come from that I paid off to visit my site.

I finally decided to give WordPress 2.0 a chance. So while I’m switching and testing, some things might be a little "out-of-order". Just check back a little later. Cheers.

Update: Everything seems to be working now.

I started fooling around with Apple iWeb, which is a nice WYSIWYG web page creator tool. Unfortunately, some features are NOT available unless you get Apple’s paid service .Mac. But there is help. Slideshow

Apple’s own AJAX / Javascript slideshow is replaced by a boring HTML-only slideshow when exporting to folder and uploading to your own webpage via FTP or WebDAV. Much ebetter: replace Apples HTML slideshow with a javascript slideshow from www.couloir.org. MacOSXHints.com has links on how to implement it.

Automatic export to FTP / WebDAV

I tried WebDAV, which is supported by Apple since the 1.1 release. But it seems to be unstable. I had to manually delete the whole content of my WebDAV folder before I could upload changes. Did not like it. The other option is export to folder, and then upload manually via a FTP program to your website of choice. Too much manual work, did not like it either.

My solution: using rsync command in the terminal to upload only the changed files (determined by checksum), and leave the new javascript slideshow data untouched. This is what needs to be done

• In iWeb go to menu "File - Publish to a Folder…", select a folder, like in your home directory ("~/"), ~/Sites/iWeb/Data/
• The run the following command in the terminal (type all in one line!):

rsync -rca --delete -c --progress --stats --exclude "Name_of_Site/SlideShow_assets/" ~/Sites/iWeb/Data/ user@yourdomain.com:/iweb

("Name_of_Site" is the name that you give your site in iWeb. It’s the name next to the big red dot. You also need the FTP login information for your website.) Now, to make things even easier, I defined a terminal-shell alias in the terminal so I only have to type "iweb", and the terminal does the rest.

Type "pico .tcshrc"

Type "alias iweb ‘rsync -rca –delete -c –progress –stats –exclude "Name_of_Site/SlideShow_assets/" ~/Sites/iWeb/Data/ user@yourdomain.com:/iweb’" (all in one line)

Type "control-x" (to exit pico text editor) Type "y" (to save changes)

If you are NOT using the TSCH shell, you’d need to enter the alias in your shell’s alias file. So, in the future, all you have to do is

• iWeb: Export to folder
• Terminal: type iweb (enter) and then enter your FTP password

I learned about a plugin that creates a nice eye-candy effects for pictures. It’s called Wetfloor. Here some examples of what it does:

The effect is based on the javascript reflections.js. :-)

In case you are (like me) always looking for a bargain online, check out the following websites. They list daily specials, mainly for electronics, but also for other useful household stuff.

Classic one-deal-per-day site: http://www.woot.com/

Good mixed deals, not only electronics: http://www.passwird.com/

Another good site: http://www.spoofee.com/

An one more: http://www.dealnews.com/

In case you still have money left: http://www.bensbargains.net/