Yesterday I helped my father to install his new computer with Windows 7. For several reasons I shall not mention, it was in the best interest to take the hard drive of the old (broken) computer and copy all the data from it to the new. What he (and me) wanted was to keep all the settings and other stuff and just reinstall his programs. That meant copying the entire AppData folder under his user account in addition to his normal files.
During this process obviously all files had kept the old SIDs, and as they weren't matching his new SID (on the new computer) I was having problems accessing the files. Lots of stuff didn't work. I was getting "No access" messages left and right when I tried to change the permissions of those copied files. That is when it dawned on me that even though his user account was registered as an administrator, it wasn't able to change the permission bits on those files. more »
After I wrote that big 5-part article on WWW::LastFM / XML::Rabbit I noticed several things that could be improved. One of them was the fact that loading configuration information from a file in the home directory was a pretty generic thing to do. I decided to factor that code out and release it as a separate CPAN module that can be used by any Moose class. more »
Have you ever noticed that the sshd on your publicly facing machines gets bombarded with dictionary attacks several times per day? This problem is mostly an annoyance, as it fills up the logs with lots of "User authentication failed, wrong password for " messages. There are of course several ways to work around this problem, and the most common one is to run sshd on another port than 22. I find that approach cumbersome, because it means you'll always have to configure your client software to connect to a non-standard port, and in lots of cases a firewall at your location might be blocking the traffic as well. Isn't there a way to block these bothersome users instead? more »
In the previous article we started implementing the geo.getEvents Last.FM API call. In this article we will complete the implementation of the Event class and create a small application to display events for a specific location in a compact format. more »
In the previous article we finished implementing the geo.getMetros Last.FM API call with XML::Rabbit. That particular API call doesn't include a lot of interesting information, but it is useful to know which worldwide locations the Last.FM service knows about now that we're going to implement the geo.getEvents API call. more »