Blog Tags: 
security

CVE-2015-0235 GHOST: reboot or restart services

Liraz Siri - Sat, 2015/01/31 - 15:34 - 10 comments

A remotely exploitable, 14 year old bug in glibc has reared its ugly head: CVE-2015-0235

Security updates have been pushed out automatically, courtesy of Debian (security tracker) to TurnKey 13 installations. TurnKey 12 installations that have enabled Squeeze LTS support have also received an update.

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Blog Tags: 
reflections
workflow

Phone vs email vs text chats on IM (instant messaging)

Liraz Siri - Mon, 2015/01/26 - 08:00

Phone vs e-mail

Alon and I usually shy away from handling things over the phone because it requires coordination (especially when you have different time zones), breaks up our work-flow, and isn't self documenting.

In fact, when I'm working I usually put my phone on silent and as far from reach as possible because nothing breaks up my concentration like a phone call. E-mail I can send and reply to in my own sweet time. A phone demands your attention this very instance. Drop everything and talk to me right now!

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Blog Tags: 
nootropics

Nootropics: meta-research summary

Liraz Siri - Mon, 2015/01/19 - 07:40 - 4 comments

For a while now I've been interested in experimenting with stuff that can improve mental functioning so I've spent some time researching nootropics (a broad class of psycho-active supplements) in depth.

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Blog Tags: 
development
tips

Three strikes - time to automate!

Liraz Siri - Mon, 2015/01/12 - 07:45

I caught myself today repeating a few basic operations by hand what seemed like a zillion times. Over and over again. I didn't really notice it at the time but it was really slowing me down.

For example, after committing to tklbam I would create a tklbam testing package, copy the package to one of my test machines, install it and remove the archive.

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Blog Tags: 
free software
ai

The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn

Liraz Siri - Mon, 2015/01/05 - 09:42 - 1 comments

Watch this. It's a TED talk on Deep Learning AI algorithms:

I think the presenter is overhyping the implications of the technology in the short term. But in the longer term, he's right. Software is eating the world, AI is disrupting the value of human labor (starting with unskilled labor and gradually moving upstream) and those jobs are never coming back.

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Blog Tags: 
debug
tips
unix
cron

How to debug a broken cron job

Liraz Siri - Mon, 2015/01/05 - 07:45

I just fixed a broken cron job. It turned out it was a PATH issue. By default cron doesn't have /usr/local stuff in the PATH.

Tips on how to debug cron:

  • change the schedule for the cron job so it runs every minute. It's harder to debug something that happens infrequently.

  • Make sure syslog sends cron logs to /var/log/cron.log. On one of our servers this line was commented out for some reason:

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