I’ve been contemplating on getting a SSD for my desktop. At the same time, I’ve been meaning to once again get my entire system partition encrypted (for now, I’ve only encrypted a directory within my home directory). I used to run an entirely encrypted system from a traditional hard disk, but I know an SSD is a different beast.

According to Wikipedia, when software-based disk encryption (such as dm-crypt) is used, using the TRIM command reveals information about which blocks are in use. This means you either have to disable TRIM and risk performace degradation to gain security, or keep TRIM and risk exposing information about your data.

And at least according to one user on StackExchange, even enabling TRIM won’t help protect the drive’s performance due to how software encryption works.

So my best bet would be hardware-based encryption such as the one offered by the Kingston SSDNow V+ 100E Series. According to Kingston’s FAQ, the encryption on their disks utilizes the hard disk password feature of the BIOS. From what I gather, that password is used as the encryption key, which means unauthorized access cannot be gained by simply bypassing the disk’s locking mechanism, unlike in drives with no built-in encryption. (It also means once you lose the password, there’s no way to recover your data, as it should be in a truly secure system.)

Edit: My ASUS M4A78-EM doesn’t seem to support setting a HD password, so it looks like I’m out of luck until I upgrade my motherboard. :(

Edit: I flashed the mobo with ATA Security eXtension -enabled BIOS and now I can haz hdd passwords.

Darklock is a WordPress theme which began as a brach of pinklock.

The code is released under Creative Commons’ CC0 1.0 Universal license… Apart from the bits I stole from various other people. I’ve credited them sparsely with URL’s accompanying their code.

As always, this is a work in progress, so it might punch babies when launched.

Download: darklock-2011-09-19_15-03.zip (82 kB)

Note: This is an as of yet untested solution. I applied it remotely and haven’t had a chance to verify that it actually works. Also, these aren’t the exact steps I took but a sketch. Please try to understand what you’re doing with each command before executing it.

1. sudo checkgmail -update # answer yes to update
2. wget 'http://ur1.ca/5284y' -O /tmp/checkgmail.patch # [1]
3. sudo patch `which checkgmail` /tmp/checkgmail.patch

I based this on the thread with the patch over at SourceForge and some other thread on Ubuntu Forums (I think), which I don’t have the link to right now.

[1] The shortened url points to http://sourceforge.net/tracker/download.php?group_id=137480&atid=738663&file_id=423104&aid=3406322 (where the patch lies).

Pinklock is a WordPress theme which began as a brach of warlock.

The code is released under Creative Commons’ CC0 1.0 Universal license… Apart from the bits I stole from various other people. I’ve credited them sparsely with URL’s accompanying their code.

As always, this is a work in progress, so it might punch babies when launched.

Download: pinklock-2011-08-28_13-10.zip (70 kB)

warlock is a WordPress theme which began as a brach of nihil, but yet again with a different focus: to be an exercise in HTML5 and jQuery.

The code is released under Creative Commons’ CC0 1.0 Universal license… Apart from the bits I stole from various other people. I’ve credited them sparsely with URL’s accompanying their code.

As always, this is a work in progress, so it might punch babies when launched.

Download: warlock-2011-07-07_19-19.zip (74 kB)

Disclaimers:

1. I’m still learning my way with jQuery.
2. Code here is pseudocode carved from functioning code (and even then only partly so), so it’s untested in real world.

I was curious as to how jQuery does parameter expansion in event handlers with callbacks. Googling I could only come up with resources that would call their custom functions with parameters given as object literals, like so:

myFunc({
  parameter1 : 12345,
  parameter2 : "foo"
});

, which, when using a callback parameter, would go something like:

myFunc({
  parameter1 : 12345,
  callback : function() {
    return true;
  }
});

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that as such. What I wanted however, was to be able to call my custom functions in the elegant way jQuery does it, without the object literal brackets surrounding the parameters, like so:

myFunc(12345, function() {
    return true;
});

Here’s how I could achieve this:

jQuery.fn.myFunc = function() {
	var options = {
		parameter1 : (arguments[0] || 0),
		callback : (arguments[1] || function() { return false; })
	}

	do_stuff_with_param1(options.parameter1);
        return options.callback();
}

The 403 issue is fixed in a new release of Bitlbee, but those of us relying on third-party servers running older versions need to use a workaround. Comment #3 by wilmer on the tracker ticket says the workaround is to issue:

ac tw2 set base_url http://api.twitter.com/1

However, applying this to settings on my server running Debian Lenny took some effort, so I’m making a note of the working format here:

account set 2/base_url 'http://api.twitter.com/1'

(where ‘2’ is the number of my bitlbee account connected to twitter)

php -r 'echo strip_tags(file_get_contents($argv[1]));' file_to_strip

And as an alias:

alias strip_tags="php -r 'echo strip_tags(file_get_contents(\$argv[1]));'"