This is my first blog post in quite a number of years. I had to rescue my website from some unknown corruption that prevent it from being visible a few weeks ago, so I figured I should at least do something with it again. Not sure how regular I’ll be at posting, but I wanted to get this down so that I don’t forget how to do it again in a few years. Maybe it will be helpful to others as well.

Background on the NSLU2

The original use of the NSLU2 (or slugs people started calling them since the name is a few letters off and NSLU doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue) was to act as a very basic home NAS device before they became semi-mainstream (at least to tech people) and inexpensive compared to multi-drive raid configurations with full enclosures. It has two USB 2.0 slots on the back, a 10/100 Ethernet port, and had a basic linux build with SAMBA to share the drives and a simple web GUI to configure the shares and permissions. I’ve owned a pair of slug’s for a while; I picked up my first one at Bookmans, a cool, local used books and entertainment store and another as a good deal off of an online auction site in case I bricked the first one.  I just dusted both off after they sat around for a doing not much after we packed up everything to move into our house a year and a half ago to try to put them to good use. Side Note: I don’t purport to having been the original source any of this software or directions, I’m just stringing together the works of many other people into a useful platform for myself to play with in the little spare time that I have now that we have a lil one to help take care of at home.
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I recently gave away one of my old computers and decided that I’d make sure that all of my information was really removed from the disk above and beyond a disk format. A quick Google search, plus a few recommendations (quite a while ago) from friends, and I found DBAN or Darik’s Boot and Nuke.

The DBAN software download is a disk image that can be used to create a bootable CD or USB disk (based on a minimal build of LINUX for intel or ppc processors) that will securely shred the contents of a hard disk. DBAN uses a pseudo-random number generator to write over every location on a disk with multiple passes to statistically guarantee that no data on the drive can be recovered without quite a bit of time, effort, and expense if it’s even possible.

A few hours running 5 sets (quite excessive) of 7-passes or writing various patterns to the drive, and I had a “totally” clean disk.

Here’s a great link that sums up all of the differences of egos and personalities that each of the main programming languages and their followers take on:

Follow the link to read the rest of them…

I’d say just about all of them are spot-on, though they leave out Assembly (which I would consider to be one of the pagan-inspired religions that require human sacrifices to make things work properly.)

[originally seen on Slashdot]

Sweet!!! The only draw back is that I had to install a Microsoft product (Silverlight).

[via lifehacker]

I’m looking for a subversion client (I don’t really need a full-blown server/client bundle on the new laptop) for some development, does anyone know of a good one? Are they all pay-for?