New Years Resolution

My new years resolution is to get more of my media consolidated and get rid of most of my CD cases. To do this, I'm using EAC + mareo to extract to FLAC and MP3s using lame.

EAC was a bit frustrating because they have installed some ebay spyware in the bundle which Forefront dutifully is blocking. I went back to an older beta off CNET and they don't include that silliness anymore. FLAC still seems to be the right choice of lossless. I wish Apple and Microsoft would just adopt it.

I also am going to adopt GTD-style apps and find a system that works for me. Remember the Milk doesn't work well for me because I have to maintain too many lists to get what I can't work on out of my sight. If I have to scrub 12+ lists, I don't get the benefits of focus. Hiveminder is the next one on my todo but I don't like the braindump notation that much. Perhaps the command line tools will win me over.

My other goal is to finally get with the HD generation on TV watching. Currently, juggling the best mix of TV to get Tivo HD (p1), DVD (p1), Hulu (p1), NetFlix (p1), BluRay (p2-3) passed up the TV with a few devices.

Windows 7: Active Directory Users & Computers

I upgraded to Windows 7 and needed to find out how to manage my AD groups & computers again. I recalled it was something simple like adding the snap in to Windows XP but it had been 2+ years since I had performed the console setup.

1. Get RSAT for Windows 7. For whatever reason, Google does a poor job and Bing wants to give you the Vista versions. It's a hefty quarter-gig download
2. Run the installer.
3. Go to Control Panel -> Programs/Features -> Windows Features and turn on the parts of Remote Server administration tools you need (I had to ask people that did this for a living and read the documentation)
   
4. Go into the mmc console and enable the newly enabled snap-ins
   

Now, my OU administrator can create a new group again!

runas /env /profile /user:domain\!ouadmin "C:\windows\syswow64\mmc.exe c:\ad\AD-Tools.msc"

Annoyance: Windows Media

As part of Windows 7, I played with importing a CD. Midway though, I remembered "Yuck!, I remember they import as WMA by default" and swtiched the preferences. Now, in album mode, if you sort by Album name, the WMA criteria is used as a sorting criteria rather than the album name. I guess this works if you've accidentally imported things twice in two different formats but not what I wanted.

Upgrade Notes to OS X 10.6

Upgrading to OS X 10.6 was one of the more difficult upgrades I've done on the mac. I have a macbook air so it was time to dig out my portable DVD player that is nearly useless since it consumes the sole port on the device. Pull it out from my laptop back and realize that the USB connector has been twisted to death and will only power up but not read the drive. Go to borrow one from the office next door and the shielding on that one is nearly toast as well. Fortunately, it works so the DVD finally gets recognized.

Here are my upgrade Notes:

1. Decrypted Internal HD from PGP Disk
2. Ran Mac PGP Uninstall
3. Clicked Install of OS X 10.6 DVD; was told cannot install OS X to Macintosh HD because it was not a bootable partition.
4. Saw Resize hint on macrumors [link]; Tried resizing and failed.
5. Tried Disk Utility in 10.5 and did repair permissions; no real errors.
6. Booted off 10.6 DVD and ran Disk Utility. Found errors and corrected. I probably should have clean booted off disk to start with.
7. Booted into 10.5 off HD; Ran 10.6 Upgrade DVD again; Still Failed
8. Resized Partition down 5G
9. Ran installer again. Success!
10. Resized Drive back in 10.6
11. Encrypted using FileVault while waiting for new PGP release.
    

Net Result: 7G more on my disk! On my MacBook Air, that's 100% more free space.

find . | grep name for Windows

So, I have a lot of files today and found an option in Windows dir I never knew.

dir /s /b | find "pat"

Nothing revolutionary but this saved me a lot of GUI pecking today.

Security and Processes

Back about 15 years, I remember doing my first Linux installation. I remember I had been fairly paranoid about it because I'd always seen friends hacking each others systems with the basic exploits on those "enable everything with no firewall" installs of the day. I had enlisted a friend to help secure the system and monitored everything he did to the system to lock it down, removing suid bits, commenting out services in inetd.conf, etc. I thought at the time the end game for security was anticipating everything you friends could do and issue some command to prevent it. Generally, the systems were pretty closed off single user systems save for the friends you'd give a shell account to that would be your trouble makers.

As a career, security is almost the exact same. The big difference is that there are more attackers and a lot more users in between. That's where all the complexity comes in. The attackers can (and are), just go after your trusted users and the users just want to focus on their non-security concerns. The hard part of organization security a balancing act where you want to find what the users can tolerate and compensate as much as possible. Much different to make security decisions and policies than the days where you could just say "who the heck uses discard/comment it out".

Djangoism

I don't do as much Django as I'd like any more so going through Form Validation today was a bit of a pain when dealing with a DateTime field. My application places a single entry where data is entered as a ugly DateString 2009-07-22 11:11.

I wanted the form to handle excess whitespace gracefully so:

def clean_when(self):
    """ The when field is included by default in the current time zone """
    when = self.cleaned_data.get('when')
    when = when.strip()
    return when

Unfortunately, field validation happens first (at least in this instance), and DateTime was throwing invalid date format errors. Fixing it up I end up with:

class WhiteSpaceDateTimeField(forms.fields.DateTimeField):
    """ Work around for is_valid calling clean on the field then the form """
    def clean(self, value):
        value = value.strip()
        value = super(WhiteSpaceDateTimeField, self).clean(value)
        return value