eggdrop.ch

Sometimes I have two versions of a directory stored on my computer. When cleaning up, it is handy to be able to see which files are in common and which files differ. To do that, I wrote a small Python script that compares two directories. The script also shows duplicate files in each of the directories. MD5 checksums are used to determine if files are equal – no file name comparison is used. Also, the script goes recursively into subdirectories.

Download script (compare.py)

The usage is simple:

Usage: compare.py [-d] dir1 dir2
Compares files in two directories, based on their MD5 checksum.
-d: Debug. Prints the MD5 checksum of every file to stderr.

Sample usage and output:

% python compare.py dir1 dir2
Duplicate files
============================================================

dir1/file 2.pdf
dir1/file.pdf

Common files
============================================================

dir1/image.png
dir2/image.png

dir1/test.pdf
dir2/subdir/foobar.pdf

Files only in dir1
============================================================

dir1/hello.jpg

Files only in dir2
============================================================

dir2/something.jpg
dir2/video.mov

Until now, if you had a private website which required a login or collected private data (for example a small online shop), you could create a self-signed certificate or a certificate signed by http://www.cacert.org/ for free. There would be a somewhat confusing error message in all browsers, but that wasn’t a big issue.

Now, let’s see what they did in Firefox 3 (Beta 1):

The website will not be displayed and there’s only a small link at the bottom (which most people won’t see). Clicking this unfriendly link requires you to confirm two additional questions and maybe do additional settings. In short, most people won’t be able to access your site at all.

So what are possible consequences of this change for private websites?

• They will stop using SSL. That’s the easiest way. Who cares about encryption? The user won’t notice anyway.
• They will use a certificate from http://cert.startcom.org/, which is the only certificate issuer I know which should not display this nasty error message. Unfortunately, if you want wildcards (i.e. make the certificate valid for all your subdomains), you still need to pay for a “Class 2″ certificate (http://www.startssl.com/), and most providers don’t give you enough IP addresses, but that’s another issue. So there’s no free solution for wildcard domains.

What could be done to avoid this problem?

• In my opinion, encryption and trust should be separated. It is more secure to visit a website which has encryption enabled than any other website without encryption. Ideally, every website would be transferred encrypted. If someone wants trust, i.e. allow people to see that your server is really your server, then he or she could buy a certificate. In the end, you can’t really trust any website (what, if the server has been compromised?), but encryption is always a good thing (your provider or your network administrator can’t read the data).
• CAcert should be included in mainstream browsers, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to be the case, not even in Firefox.
• There should be more free certificate issuers. You shouldn’t have to pay for encryption (or trust).

What’s your opinion about this topic?

Here’s a comparison of the “Mouse Precision Error Coefficient” (from Pfeiffer Consulting, lower is better):

You can really feel the difference when working with both systems.

Found via digg.

Django is a great framework for building web applications. Recently they started to create the newforms library that makes it easy to handle forms.

But the newforms library works only for static forms. Forms that have a fixed number of fields. What I wanted to do, is create a page that allows you to edit multiple instances of a model at once. It should be similar to edit_inline, but there should be a JavaScript link that allows you to add another instance of the object.

That’s why I have written classes that make it possible to handle this type of forms using Django. No AJAX is utilized to make this work.

(more…)

After seeing this picture (cool the user with PC coolers, found via MacOrama) I realized that I also had some unused PC coolers lying around.

Here is what I came up with:

The cooler is connected to the PC and is standing on the legs of a Netgear WLAN router.

My RSS-Reader Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X is now a Universal Binary and should run on Intel Macs. Because I don’t own an Intel Mac yet, contact me if it does not work correctly.

It also supports automatic reloading of the feed and scrolling using the mouse scroller and keyboard arrows (Thanks to Nicolas Weber or implementing scrolling).

Here are some pictures of disassembling my external “LaCie Porsche Hard Drive” which contained a broken Maxtor disk:

On http://www.cits.rub.de/MD5Collisions/ you can find two different postscript files with the same MD5 hash.

That’s why I wouldn’t use MD5 anymore. SHA-1 should be secure enough for now…

I’ve found a site which describes why you should boycott Blu-ray and HD-DVD: http://fuckbluray.com/boycott

I’m just having problems with my external Maxtor 6Y160P0 (160 GB) harddisk:

Mar 23 18:38:35 server kernel: sd 1:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x8000002
Mar 23 18:38:35 server kernel: sdb: Current: sense key=0x3
Mar 23 18:38:35 server kernel:     ASC=0x11 ASCQ=0x0
Mar 23 18:38:35 server kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 228134640
Mar 23 18:38:35 server kernel: loop7: loop_end_io_transfer err=-5 bi_rw=0x0
Mar 23 18:38:35 server kernel: EXT3-fs error (device loop7): ext3_get_inode_loc:
    unable to read inode block - inode=2044226, block=4096014

There are many files that aren’t readable anymore (Input/output error).

I noticed that this is not the first Maxtor harddisk I’m having problems with. I had also problems with my 40 GB Maxtor 6E040L0 and an older 6.8 GB Maxtor harddisk, which I already threw away. My other five harddisks (which are not from Maxtor) work without any problems.

My conclusion: Never buy a Maxtor harddisk!

Is there anyone with similar experiences?