Folks,

Welcome to my first newsletter. I'll be covering tips and tricks and giving my opinions on stuff that seems relevant. Please feel free to email me back if you have something beyond what I'm talking about here.

Starting up a New Company

Geez, I'm finding out how true the old saying is, "it always takes longer and costs more." Step 1, get a new cell phone since I gave my old one back to Apple -- but comparing the plans from different companies is like three root canals and an amputation. Step 2, get a bank account -- but comparing the bank offerings is almost as bad as for a cell phone. Step 3, get insurance, which for a small business seems impossible. Most places seem to want to deal with big businesses only. OK, I have high hopes for myself and my new company but it's going to start off small. All this before I get around to marketing or doing any billable work! I think there's an application in here somewhere for software that lets you really compare various complex plans that have lots of provisions.

To sudo or not to sudo

There was a thread recently on Slashdot about the use of sudo. Specifically, whether or not it is worth using sudo, or just logging in as root or using sudo -s to get a root shell. I'll come down (as many of you probably suspect) very strongly on the side of using sudo. First, it logs what you have done, so that you can tell what went wrong. Second, it limits the amount of damage that a buggy or possibly malicious script can do. Third, it acts as a speedbump for the administrator -- it makes you think twice before executing a command. Lastly, remember that you can always clear the sudo privileges when you're done by giving the command 'sudo -k'. This clears the 5 minute sudo window, so that the next time you want to execute sudo you will be forced to enter your password, even if it's less than 5 minutes later. It's handy if you're about to leave your desk and don't want to give an attacker a potential window of opportunity. In fact, you can set this up as a logout hook and logout script, so that when you log out, someone can't pick up you credentials from another terminal window somewhere.

The new MacBook Pro 17" and FireWire 800

One of the gripes that I heard when the MacBook Pro 15" came out back in January was that the FireWire 800 port was missing. Well, it's back on the 17" model. OK, show of hands, how many of you have actually used the FW800 port on your PowerBooks? I didn't think so. I've used it a few times when copying files to and from my LaCie Bigger Disk, but that's all. I get the impression that FW800 is used more for people who have XServes or towers and are using external RAID arrays for moderate amounts of storage (around a terabyte or so, less than the amount that calls for an XServe RAID). What will be interesting to see is whether Apple sticks with FireWire 800 or goes to SATA for low-end external storage connections.


--Paul