Archive for February, 2007

Akismet has caught 10,128 spam for you since you first installed it.

After a barrage of 120 spam comments today, the counter has gone over 10,000. If that is an achievement?

SID Should Really Mean Static Identifier

I am talking about in the context of Win NT. SID is an acronym for Security Identifier. Today I needed to change the name of my main box, simple because the name, well, was crap. So thinking back to the last time I needed to change a SID, I used the newsid.exe tool from [what was then] SysInternals and I remember seeing an option for changing the name of the computer. Now I could of simply inputting my current SID, but no, I was in a rush and chose to generate a random key. Big mistake, all my EFS encrypted files (which were not that important anyway, since I don’t use EFS to secure anything important) were made usless, now I could recover them, but to save me the trouble I obtained the old SID from SAM file (C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\SAM), by viewing the security tab, which then showed me my SID. (You will need to truncate after the 7th dash, eg. S-1-5-21-xxxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx|-xxxx <– .The rest is just to do with the user name. The simple way to change the computer name is Control Panel>System>Computer Name>Change.

So there a lesson learn’t, do not change the SID!

Steven

Disable Num Lock and Caps Lock

I have search everywhere for something that disabled Num Lock and Caps Lock, yet I can only find one or the other, not both.

Why? Because you only accidentally press those keys, and they mess up your typing.

Solution: disable_numlock+capslock.reg

Notes: You might want to set Num Lock to be on at boot:

If you open up HKEY_USERS\Control Panel\.Default\Keyboard

You will find the key named InitialKeyboardIndicators

If you set it to 2 (String Value) then numlock will be on at boot. A value of 0 will turn it off at boot.

PHP Security Presentation at Sydney PHP Group

Yesterday I made a presentation at the Sydney PHP Group February Meeting.

For those who are interested my slides are in S5 format (xHTML + CSS + JScript).

Recent Comments

  • Josir Gomes: Hi Steve, the meta-package ubuntu-desktop is bloated with huge softwares like OpenOffice, Evolution,...
  • hannah: your that good! ha ha, but seriously.
  • Wiras Adi: Yeah, mathematic operation in text-based CAPTCHA is very easy to break. And I don't think that many sites...
  • Gary: Phew! You saved me lots of hassle :-) The only problem I had was that $_SERVER[’HTTP_AUTHORIZATION ’]...
  • Stephen: To touch on the issue Vinay raised, I had to use the -wholename option on the find command to delete files...

Else wheres