IT firm pulls 50% paid healthcare benefits for its employees
Over at Jeff Cutler's blog, Jeff writes about a company named Aspiant based in Cambridge, MA, who pulled their company-paid healthcare and travel reimbursement (?!) benefits for all employees just hours after the November 4th elections.
I'm merely posting it here to do my small part in exposing Mirko Geffken (the CEO).
Dropbox & KeePass: The perfect cross-platform password management system
Tell me if this sounds like you: you have a few standard passwords that you routinely use for every site you visit. One of them you use for sites that don't contain too much personal or sensitive information, and maybe you use one or two for sites that do. If you want to be REALLY secure you have another password that you only use for bank or credit card sites that contain your most sensitive information.
This is what I used to do (for many years in fact). Then I got to thinking: what happens if someone discovers one of those passwords? If it were one of the more sensitive ones, I'd be in deep trouble. So, I set out looking for a better way to manage my passwords.
What I'm going to describe in this article is a system I've implemented to manage my passwords in a secure, cross-platform way. It's by no means the best way to do things for everyone, but it's worked out extremely well for me thus far.
KeePass
Password Generator
KeePass is an app that was originally written for Windows, but also has a port that runs on Linux and Mac OS X. It allows you to manage all of your various passwords and saves them in a secure, AES-encrypted file protected by a passphrase. This file readable by both the Windows version and the Mac/Linux port. Keepass also has some nice features for generating random passwords: you can select which sets of characters to use (for example, letters, numbers, and punctuation) and it will generate a password for you of whatever length you select using those characters.
KeePass on Linux and Windows also has a universal hotkey that you can setup to automatically fill in usernames and passwords in your web browser (for whatever reason, this feature is not yet available in the Mac OS X version). So, when I go to check my Gmail email account, I just make sure the cursor is in the username field and then press ctrl-alt-A and my username and password is filled in automatically for me.
The fact that KeePass remembers all my passwords has allowed me to change all of my various accounts to each have their own unique, random password. That way, for example, if someone manages to somehow get a password to my checking account they won't also have the password to my savings account or my brokerage account.
Dropbox
Dropbox on Mac
Dropbox is a relatively new service that allows you to store your files in the cloud. You install a small utility on your computer (Dropbox also has ports for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X) and Dropbox takes care of the rest: your files show up your OS's standard file manager as another drive, and you can copy files to and from it just as you would with an external hard drive or USB flash drive. Your files are encrypted and securely stored on Amazon's S3 file storage service. Dropbox is free for up to 2GB of storage, or you can pay $99 per year and get 50GB of storage. In my opinion it's a very good deal; the Dropbox software is well written on all three platforms and does a great job of making things "just work."
Putting everything together
As you can probably guess by now, I keep my KeePass data file on my Dropbox drive, which allows me to access it from any computer and on any platform. This allows me the security of unique random passwords for every website I visit without any inconvenience. It works great and I've never had an issue loading and saving the file across multiple platforms simultaneously. Just in case the Dropbox service ever goes down or is otherwise unavailable, I also keep an up-to-date copy of my KeePass file on a USB flash drive that's on my keychain. I've never had to use it though -- my Dropbox has been available every time I've needed to use it.
I hope this article has been helpful. Please leave a comment if you decide to try this and let me know how it works for you!
Dell Studio 15 laptop sale, plus an Inspiron Mini 9 for $99
Dell has a nice deal going right now: you can get $300ish off the price of a Studio 15 laptop, and you can add a Mini 9 netbook for only $99 more. Click here and choose "Customize" on the Studio 15, then choose the rightmost configuration. It should say "Get a Mini 9 for $99" at the top.
Pretty good deal if you ask me!
My experiences with Ubuntu 8.10, part 2: Hangs, OpenOffice, Fonts, and more…
In the last article, I wrote about some of my experiences with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. I've continued to use it over the last couple of days and so I thought I'd post a follow-up article with some more notes that I've compiled about this latest Ubuntu release.
By the way...
I want to make clear that not everything has been roses so far. There seems to be a crash/hang that I've triggered twice now (once while trying to plug in an external USB hard drive, and once while trying to set up a network printer) where the entire GUI hangs. I can move the mouse around but I can't click on anything, and the standard X.org tricks of pressing ctrl-alt-F1 to drop to a terminal or ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X don't work. However, both times that this hang has occurred I was able to ssh into the machine from another computer and tell the computer to reboot from the command line ("sudo reboot now"). I haven't been able to reproduce these hangs thus far.
OpenOffice.org 2.4 vs. 3.0
OpenOffice.org 3.0
Ubuntu 8.10 ships by default with OpenOffice.org 2.4. Recently, version 3.0 was released. I wish they had shipped with this version, but it's not hard to upgrade. I followed the process outlined at Softpedia and upgraded to 3.0 without a hitch.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 seems to be a great release; I've thrown all sorts of Microsoft Office documents at it and it's been able to open and edit them without any issues. Creating documents from scratch in the OOo native file formats is easy as well. Anyone familiar with Microsoft Office should feel right at home here.
Gnome Do
In addition to Linux, I use Mac OS X and Windows for work and play from time to time. One of my favorite apps on the Mac is Quicksilver. It's essentially a program launcher that's operated entirely with your keyboard and makes it incredibly easy to launch any app installed on your system. After I got used to Quicksilver on the Mac, it was a pain when using Windows to have to go to Start -> Programs -> CompanyName -> AppName to launch a program. Luckily there's Launchy, which is a clone of Quicksilver for Windows.
The default Ubuntu software repositories have a similar app, Gnome Do, which seems to perform all of the functions that I use from Quicksilver and Launchy flawlessly. You simply press a hotkey to bring it up, start typing the name of the program you want to open, and press enter when it's displayed. You really have to try it to get the hang of how it works -- it's changed the way I use computers.
Gnome Do also comes with a bunch of plugins which add additional functionality. For example, there's a "Tweet" action which will post whatever you type to Twitter, and there's a Delicious plugin that'll index all of your Delicious bookmarks and let you search them.
Smooth Fonts
Font Appearance Prefs
I absolutely love the way fonts look using subpixel smoothing in Ubuntu 8.10. To enable subpixel rendering, go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance and click the Fonts tab. The difference between the default "Best Shapes" rendering and subpixel smoothing is like night and day to my eyes. Some people don't like lots of font antialiasing and therefore would probably prefer the default setting, but I highly recommend at least trying subpixel smoothing to see if it looks better to you.
Incidentally, as you can see in the screenshot to the left, I use a font called Inconsolata as my fixed width font. It's a great font for programming and console use and is available for free at Raph Levien's website.
More to come...
As of right now I'm running Intrepid full time on my main desktop computer, so I'm sure I'll have more notes to post in the near future. Thanks for reading and check back soon for more!