This is a list I came up with originally as an email to a friend about things to watch out for and practices to use to help protect your personal information. Being a geek I think I take an understanding of some of these systems for granted. What is common sense to me is not common sense to some one less technically savy.

Anything you put on or transmit over (email gets transferred in the wide open) the web, whether you think it is private or not, you should treat it as if it it public information. You always need to be sceptical about giving out even remotely personal information online, over the phone, over snail mail and in person.

Here are some tips I would recommend as common practice.

1. Don't be afraid to refuse information in a situation where you don't feel they need it (i.e. when the people ask you for your zip or phone when you check out at a store).

2. Keep an alias. Get a free email account from GMail or something and make up information that provides no hints to your real information. So when a place asks you for your email address or something you can just give the alias instead of you real one. I also keep a fake phone number in my head so if I don't want to give my real one I have one ready.

3. Never trust anyone you meet online (in chat rooms and stuff) or in person for that matter.

4. If someone calls you claiming they are from an organization that you work with (i.e. your insurance, electric, etc), tell them that you will call them back with the number you have and know is good. Caller id can be easily faked and should not be trusted.

5. Never put or give any information online that you wouldn't give to strangers. For me that is basically anything I would put on a resume.

6. Keep track of what other people are putting about you online. All of these social websites allow your friends to post information about you whether or not you have an account yourself.

7. Don't trust the sender of an email, this can be easily faked.

8. Never send personal information over email. Any organization that asks you to do this is either security defunct or trying to scam you.

9. If you do manage important accounts online (like bank accounts), make sure you have a good password scheme. Crackers guess passwords in two ways: figure it out by learning your kids name, your nickname, your hobbies, etc or just guess every possibility (i.e. a, aa, aaa, aab, etc) and when computers can do millions of things a second, it doesn't take that long to figure out a 4-10 digit password. And also change these passwords regularly.

10. Also when managing online accounts be sure you are very familiar with how the website looks and works. One thing crackers try to do is trick you into putting your username and password into a site that looks like your bank. So make sure you know and verify what the url is of the login page (the https://mybank.com thing a the top). Also know what happens when you put in a bad password and try it every once in a while to verify that it acts as it should. These fake websites usually are very basic and if you take a minute to click around a little before you login you can usually tell it is not your real bank (although these fake website copies are getting more and more sophisticated).

I am sure I could come up with more, but this is a healthy start.

I decided to officially license all the stuff (content, code snippets, etc) on this website under a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is an organization that provides free copyright licenses for people to use in order to release their works such that others can share and use the works for other purposes within a proper legal framework. All the stuff that I have ever put on this site (of my creation) has always been placed under the assumption that it is free for use by anyone for any purpose; I am just making it legally official now.

The licenses they provide come in several versions and the version that I decided to go with allows anyone to use any of the content on this site for any purpose as long as they attribute credit back to me. So for example, if you use one of the code snippets I commonly post here all you have to do is note in the code that you got it from me. However this doesn't apply to stuff that I did not create; so things that I link to or credit others for is not a work of my own creation and if you wanted to use it for something you need to follow the link and check with the original content creator.

Also most of the tools I have posted on the projects page are under a different license (mostly the GPL). They are explicitly marked.

They have a very handy tool for producing the Creative Commons copyrighting text. Made it very easy to choose the features of the license you want and produce both logos and text.

http://www.creativecommons.org/license/

Here is a sample of the licensing icon and text I decided to go with.

This work by Jordon Mears is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

These are my links for 2009-02-20 from 10:43 to 10:58:

• TrapCall - Unmask Blocked Calls - Tool to unmask blocked caller id calls.
• shindig-dnd - Google Code - Gadget container built on shindig.
• gog.is simple google slapper - Shortcut Google search URL service.
• TinyChat.com - Create a free chatroom - Quick, disposable web based chatrooms.
• Elisa, the free media player: play all your files - AVI, mp3, MKV, DivX ... - Cross platform media center software.
• Welcome - Medpedia - Medial focused Wiki.

Removing the .svn folders from a codebase effectively removes the codes attachment to the repository. This can be useful for when you are trying to distribute the code to others or if you are trying to bring two different repositories together.

Anyway the proper way to do it is to use svn export. However this requires you to specify an export path and you end up with two copies of the codebase. Also the export method doesn't also export any changes you have made to the codebase that have not been committed. See the following link for more details on svn export.

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/re10.html

The easy way to do this is to use the following command.

find ./ -name ".svn" | xargs rm -rf

This will take the current directory and strip the .svn folder out. Be warned though this will also remove files named .svn, normally this should not be a problem.

I got most of this information from the link below.

http://cephas.net/blog/2007/04/06/command-line-script-to-delete-svn-files-folders/

These are my links for 2009-02-06 through 2009-02-18:

• UPS Tracking - FedEx Tracking - USPS Tracking - DHL Tracking - Turn package tracking numbers into RSS feeds.
• WikiDashboard - Providing social transparency to Wikipedia - Allows you to see who has been making the most edits to articles on Wikipedia.
• reconstructor - home - Allows you to customize your own Ubuntu live CD
• APTonCD - Tool to take your installed applications from apt-get to CD for offline installation.
• PolitiFact | The Obameter: Tracking Barack Obama's Campaign Promises - Track promises made by the president.
• M-Lab | Welcome to Measurement Lab - Internet metrics tools.

I finished this book a little while ago and it is a must read for any open source enthusiast. It is a collection of essays from a number of well know names in the open source software movement. I found all of the essays very interesting to read and they fit together nicely as a cohesive work.

The essays together were structured in a way that tells a good bit of history of the computer industry at large and open source's influence throughout. Several the essays discuss open source as a successful business model, which I found particularly interesting. Leaders from companies like Red Hat discussed how they got started and managed to become profitable.

I also got a good perspective on the foundations of open source ideals and what events in history led up to the creation of things like the GNU project and the GPL.

The thing I found most interesting was that most of the authors made predictions for the future of open source in their writing and I got to see what the mentality for the movement was at the time. With me reading it nine years or so later I could gauge how these predictions were panning out and what common threads there are in today's open source mentality. It was about half and half on the predictions I thought. Half had been (or were well on there way to being) realized and the other half had yet to come.

There is a follow up book to this and I am looking forward to getting into it as soon as my reading list lightens up a little.

DiBona, C., Ockman, S., & Stone, M. (1999). Open sources: voices from the open source revolution. Beijing: O'Reilly.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/40889566

I have have been developing on a MySQL database where a small amount of test data is still over a half a million rows or more. So exporting the schema to pass it along to others takes forever. Fortunately you can export just the structure of the database and nothing else (which is much faster).

mysqldump -h hostname -u user database -RQdp > structure.sql

The option d is the key here. It stands for "no data". The option R will make it include your stored procedures and functions. And the option Q puts backticks (`) around your table names, column names, etc to prevent keyword errors on import.

Alternatively you can also export just the data.

mysqldump -h hostname -u user database -Qtp > data.sql

The option t means "no create info". Which means it wont put any CREATE TABLE statements in your export.