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... the Universe and Everything. So who cares about the rest (like the preferred size for DCP subtitles, which is apparently the same anyway)?

And the book appeared more than 11 years ago, so indeed, it's about time. Now I only have to wait for it to appear in Debian stable ...

For this new vulnerabilty, there are no toy-command-checks yet I believe. But in the meantime, try the "Fun Shellshock test with curl" on the NAS boxes in your neighborhood (or anywhere else this Google search points you to).

And note that as a bonus the web server on that NAS already runs as root, so there is no need for a "privilege escalation" vulnerability. Nothing to escalate, you start from the top already.

If you have a NAS accessible through the Internet, it will probably soon be part of a botnet. See Using curl to test Qnap NAS for Shellshock.

And note that, as a bonus for crackers, the NAS even runs it's web server as root.

If you already have a server with a static IP, it's pretty easy to configure bind to accept dynamic updates. See for example Set up your own Dynamic DNS.

I set it up like that, and have short scripts on my Linux and Mac notebooks to do the updates when the network comes up. On Linux, it's a short script in /etc/network/if-up.d/. On Mac, it's a script called by a LaunchDeaemon (a .plist file in /Library/LaunchDaemons).

Yes, there is only one, but that's for Perl 5. The new Perl 6 book is almost ready.

Is it this book which is included?

Even 4GB is too much for 32 bit WinXP. The OS will only let any app. use a maximum of 2 GB.

Unless you enable the /3GB switch in boot.ini, which leads to other problems: your registry system hive must now remain smaller than 12 MB.

I feel like I'm one of a couple dozen NX users

I don't know if many people use NX, but I sure do install it on all my servers now. And while I had trouble with FreeNX, the NoMachine version was really easy to setup.

(I use it with meld and sshfs to compare /etc trees between similar servers.)

With RAID mirroring, if you overwrite or delete an important file, it's copy on the mirror is immediately overwritten/deleted too, and the file is lost. Wouldn't you rather need a good regular backup?

And as someone pointed out already, FAT is really not a reliable file system. If you are on Windows, use NTFS. It is still portable, having read/write drivers for both Linux and Mac (see this guide).

Since the files you want to keep safe appear to be regular files, not system files, any simple file copy mechanism could do. For an easy and simple system, you can use the Windows robocopy.exe tool in a batch file. For a more sophisticated system which can keep older file versions, and can easily be adapted for use over the network, you could try a Windows version of rsync like cwrsync. There are also a few rsync GUI frontends for Windows.

If you decide you really want RAID mirroring and go with the hardware solution, my understanding is that you need a replacement controller in case yours breaks. Since your controller seems to be embedded in the motherboard, you would need a replacement motherboard.

With the Windows software RAID, you are dependent on that software, and have portability only between machines with this Windows 7 software RAID (possibly even only this particular version).

I'm surprised that /. geeks actually use specific tools to manage their passwords, when it's so much simpler and quicker with a couple of shell micro-scripts.

I have my passwords in a file on a TrueCrypt volume.

In Windows, I have

p.bat:
    @FIND /N /I "%1"

and padd.bat:
    @ECHO %* >> T:\p

In bash it's almost the same:

p:
    #!/bin/sh
    grep -in "$1" /mnt/tc/p

and padd.bat:
    #!/bin/sh
    echo "$@" >> /mnt/tc/p

All I have to do to find all my gmail accounts and passwords is to type "p gmail" at a command prompt.

In Windows (maybe in Linux as well?), you can also play with "Alternate Data Streams"

there seems to be no other major technical programmers' magazines left standing.

There is: The Perl Review. (And like The Perl Journal before it, is has nice cover pictures too).

Strange enough, I now remember that my first memory of Dr.Dobbs is an interview of Larry Wall, which I read there in the nineties...

Here is another rant about this problem: The Firefox 3 SSL scam. This one takes the angle: how much money did the Mozilla Foundation get from big business (Verisign et al.) to kill self-signed certificates?

Note that in FF2, the dialog was perfectly clear, safe and simple. Nothing needed to be changed.

Apparently, the user has to manually select the addresses that will be spammed ("invited"), and click a button.

This is by far not as bad as what wayn.com does (or at least used to do). They were just sending out their spam through your account without your knowledge. See "WAYN - Where Are You Now? Warning" or Wayn.com : phishing alert, ne vous faites pas couillonner ! (the last one in French). (found these at the end of a French blog post about other deceptive practices of Wayn.com)

And here is the draft cover of the Perl 6 book

The only Norton product I like is Ghost.

Give ntfsclone a try. Here's a good tutorial on using it.

It's easily scriptable, and is great in conjuction with ms-sys. If you spend a few minutes customizing something like RIP you can have the restore completely automated.

As a plus, everything's GPL'd. No licesence fees.

IMHO, Unattended + WPKG is still the best option, though...

What you want is a bootable Linux CD such as Knoppix, and to clone the windows on and off the harddisk to the USB, ntfsclone (which is already in Knoppix).

http://alma.ch/blogs/bahut/2005/04/cloning-xp-with -linux-and-ntfsclone.html

If you have piracy in mind, note that Windows own protections will mess things up when you reboot on the new hardware -- this is a good way to backup windows after you have just spent a day installing software, however.

You're not alone

dd is slow, since it copies even unused disk space. I have had good luck with Knoppix and ntfsclone over the network, using this method.

However, all the machines were identical, so I didn't even use sysprep.

And BTW, I even dropped the pipe through gzip which was suggested in the examples, since it didn't make things any faster. The Gigabit network helped, I guess. Maybe with 100Base-T, gzip is good.

Why are people still using IE

Because their network admin doesn't have the time to figure out how to roll out a working install of Firefox (fully configured, and with all the desired plugins and extensions).

I know. I did install FF on around 20 machines, and it wasn't easy to find a semi-automatic way to install. And it got worse when the 1.5 upgrade came: I eventually did go to all the 20 machines, and did the upgrade manually.

Firefox is great for individual users (and even then, some find the stupid "browse for folder" dialog at install time annoying).

But to install on a network with custom bookmarks, default languages, proxy settings, plugins for Acrobat, Quicktime, Real, Flash, and a few extensions, is no fun.

For identical hardware, the best solution is disk imaging. This will also get you all the software installs and configurations, which is much more work than the basic Windows install + updates.

If you don't have Norton Ghost and/or don't want to pay for it, you can use a Linux Live CD and ntfsclone. I use a script on a USB drive based on these disk imaging instructions.

For different hardware, the slipstreamed install disks suggested in previous comments seem to be a good starting point.

I found this little online Email address syntax checker which is useful in comparing the results of various classical Perl modules. It is very slow (maybe on purpose to avoid abuse?).

Indeed, most Perl code which can check email addresses finds it syntactically valid, even though I also think it really should be @[127.0.0.1] instead.