Tips

CD overburning on Mac OS X

It seems that Toast 10 Titanium cd burning application doesn’t support overburning, so if you need to burn cd images that are larger than conventional 700MB, you can either use cdrtools from the command line with -overburn parameter (available in MacPorts), or use a nice cdrtools frontend called Firestarter FX, which is tested for Tiger and Leopard releases.

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Top 25 vulnerability RSS feeds

One way to receive up-to-date reports about vulnerability issues is subscribing to vulnerability RSS feeds: they update on demand, they don’t rely on your mail subsystem and they don’t fill up your mailbox. The only drawback is that you could miss alerts if you don’t sync your feeds for a long time, but if you’re a IT security manager, you don’t have a life, so how could it happen anyways? ;-)

Here’s the top feeds you should be subscribed to (CVE tags are reported in brackets):

  1. NIST Vulnerability Database.
  2. US Cert Technical Security Alerts [CERT].
  3. SecurityFocus Vulnerabilities [SF-INCIDENTS].
  4. Open Source Vulnerability Database [OSVDB].
  5. IBM Internet Security Systems Threats [ISS].
  6. Vupen Security Advisories [VUPEN].
  7. Secunia Latest Security Advisories (Unofficial) [SECUNIA].
  8. eEye Security Advisories [EEYE].

The above list is also available as OPML file you can import into your feed reader.

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Integrate Wordpress and Django

Last year Wordpress got an award as best Open Source CMS software and the reason is clear: it’s easy to setup, low on resources, very customizable and full of useful extensions. So unless you have very specific deployment requirements and if your blog is not part of your core technology, you may get the best of both worlds by using Wordpress for blogging and use a web framework for everything else. Not reinventing the wheel is very important in post-agile world, after all.

Being a Django monkey, I’d like to share some tips on how to make Wordpress and Django live together:
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Using screen as your login shell

GNU screen is a nice utility that allows running multiple interactive shells from the same terminal session and allows you to detach from your terminal while keeping those shells alive. Later on, you can re-attach to your background screen to get back to your shells. It has a lot more features like automatic session logging and terminal window splitting. You can discover them all in the manual.

How many times did you start a long-running task like gcc compilation on a remote server and then suddenly needed to disconnect from your shell? Maybe you just needed to move to some other place with your laptop, but if you disconnected from your LAN, your ssh connection would go down. How many times you thought “Damn, if I had launched screen before this…”?

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8 web design add-ons for Django

In the last year, I’ve defined a quite stable fundation for my django projects. In this post I’m enumerating template design components that saved my day by reducing development time while keeping code readable, concise and standard-compliant.

1. Blueprint CSS framework

While not a django-specific add-on, Blueprint CSS framework is a perfect companion for django template designers: it features cross-browser style reset, a 24-column grid layout, a nice looking typography and a print-friendly style.

2. django-uni-form

django-uni-form implements UniForm CSS framework in Django: you can render your forms as stylish xhtml-compliant divs using a simple template tag filter and add form layout information to your Form classes.

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Linux RAID disk wipeout

A common problem with Linux software RAID (aka md) happens when you try to use a disk that was previously part of some other disk array. Symptoms include: wrong volume size, unable to add device to raid, volume UUID mismatch. To fix the problem you need to use mdadm utility on the disk to cleanup:

# mdadm --zero-superblock devicepath

If you need to apply this fix on a system that doesn’t boot up (for instance when your root volume is on RAID), remember that mdadm and other disk administration utilities are available in Gentoo minimal installation disk.

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