kdmurray.com — ramblings of a tech nomad

11May 2017 by kdmurray

Getting Started with Hyper-V on Windows 10

Articles

I've recently moved to Windows 10 after about a decade swimming in the Apple Kool-aid. While I've not been away from Windows entirely (I use it at work) I haven't spent any time exploring some of the newer technologies introduced by the Redmond crew in the last few years. Something that comes as a feature for the Pro and Enterprise versions of Windows 10 is Microsoft's VM Hypervisor technology Hyper-V. If you're not familiar with it, this is comparable to something like Oracle's VirtualBox. One of the biggest reasons to use Hyper-V if you have a version of Windows that supports it is the fact that you will get a bit better performance of your VMs because the system has deep integration with the Windows OS. Another is the Hyper-V…

10May 2017 by kdmurray

Like a YoYo

Articles

I bought a ticket. The steam liner is in dry dock. Sometimes you have a good idea. An idea that will, in the long run at least, save you time. That idea makes so much sense you can explain it to other people and they shout "Yes! I get it! You should totally build a steam liner!" But you shouldn't. There are ways to get across the ocean. You can buy a boat. You can build a boat. You can even design your own boat from scratch, smelt all the metal for the hull and concoct a bespoke engine out of recycled lawn mower parts you got for cheap on Craigslist from some guy named Sal who said they fell off the back of a truck. Or you can buy…

13Apr 2017 by kdmurray

Book Report – Little Brother

Articles

Set in mid-2000s San Francisco, [Cory Doctorow][craphound]'s Little Brother brings a tale of what can go wrong when yuo have a society that values compliance over independence. A story of technology innovation, [hacker culture][wiki-hackerculture], information sharing and data freedom all set against the backdrop of a modern-day terrorism nightmare. Cory Doctorow highlights a number of different things in our everyday world that allow other people to learn more about you, to track you and build a profile about you. These are extended to the next level in Little Brother talking about some of the what-ifs and could-bes that today's technology could allow. You can get a copy of the book [online for free][book-download], that's how the author has always released his material. Doctorow has been a strong believer in the…

31Mar 2017 by kdmurray

Server Hardening Strategies

Articles

Staying secure is a full-time gig. It doesn't matter whether we're talking a datacentre or your smartphone, there are always steps to be taken to keep your machines and your data as safe as possible. With the increasing popularity of virtualization for applications and services and the ability for people to "roll your own" cloud comes the need to secure those machines. This becomes increasingly challenging when you consider the fact that by their very nature these machines are constantly exposed to the Internet. ### Minimize Your Attack Surface **Don't install it unless you need it** One of the best things you can do to harden a server environment is to take a minimalistic approach. Don't install components that you think you "might need" somewhere down the road, or things…

30Mar 2017 by kdmurray

Vivaldi – Chrome Reimagined

Articles

For several years I've been wanting to make the switch to Chrome from Firefox, but the lack of a couple of key plugins has held me back. One of these was the way that windowed plugins were handled initially (the popup for LastPass in Chrome was hideous, but that's no longer an issue.) The bigger issue for me was the lack of a good vertical tabs plugin for Chrome. I've tried several tabs but none of them seem to work the way I've gotten used to with the venerable Tree Style Tabs in Firefox. Enter, Vivaldi. This is a Chromium-based browser that offers a lot in terms of UI customization over the stock Chrome implementation. With tab handling in particular there's a lot to like about Vivaldi. The vertical tab…

26Feb 2017 by kdmurray

Think Different(ly)

Articles

In a recent conversation with [Knightwise][kw] we were musing that it doesn't seem that it's very long since we were both ragging on Dave to get off Windows and get a Mac. Today we're both seriously entertaining the possibility that our next primary computing device might be running an OS from Redmond. What changed? Has Windows gotten that much better? Yes. It's undeniably better. But we're also different. And Apple is different. I think when we switched to the Mac we saw it as the Valhalla of everything we were looking for. A better system with a unix terminal which would give us the best of both worlds: open source, and a first-class GUI driven OS. In a lot of ways the Mac hasn't progressed since the Intel transition. Sure…

14Feb 2017 by kdmurray

Book Report – Hamlet’s Blackberry

Articles

**Title**: Hamlet's Blackberry **Author**: William Powers I've been trying to get this book read for about the last 18 months. It had come highly recommended by a friend who found the book to be a good look into the technological overload of our modern times, and the inherent constant connectivity to the crowds provided by the Internet. It took me quite a while to get into this book. Powers' continual assertion that the technology that we have come to rely on is disconnecting us from ourselves, and our reality. The same technology that we use to keep us connected and allow us to collaborate and communicate with people all around the globe was, in turn, not allowing us to actually experience and enjoy that connection because it's giving us the…

18Dec 2016 by kdmurray

Creating Spaces in MacOS

Articles

[Virtual desktops][1] are an extremely useful feature of modern operating systems. It's a feature that provides some of the benefits of multiple monitors without the extra space or expense of adding more displays to your computer. Generally speaking the feature allows you to group together windows on one or more additional logical desktops without the need for multiple monitors. ![Preference pane for Mission Control][preference-pane]On the Mac this feature is known as "Spaces" and was [originally introduced][2] way back in OS X 10.5 "Leopard", and was integrated into the [Mission Control][3] preference pane a couple of years later. This merge into Mission Control works very well, as long as you know where to look — because the preference pane doesn't really tell you where it is or how to find it.…

20Oct 2016 by kdmurray

Hash-based Diff for Directories

Projects

Recently I was working on a project where I needed to quickly and reliably detect changes to the contents of a directory, and when a change was detected run a series of commands. There are any number of file differential tools, the venerable [diff][1] chief among them, and I think they would certainly do the job. They would certainly do a very complete job allowing for a comparison of every line of every file and be able to show exactly what changed where. But for what I needed to do, this seemed overkill. Ultimately what I needed to know was ***if*** something had changed, not specifically ***what*** had changed. To that end, I realized what I needed was a view of the directory, not a view of the files themselves.…

31Oct 2015 by kdmurray

Grand Plans

Articles

I have a habit of coming up with (grandiose) ideas for things I want to do. Be they small things or large things, or amorphous life goals, I talk a lot and tend to be rather stingy on the follow through. Sometimes these goals are stopped by other projects, sometimes they're stopped by my "better judgement" when I talk myself out of them, sometimes is exhaustion, sometimes it's pure laziness. Whatever the reason or excuse I don't do nearly as much doing as I feel that I should, or that I want to. Tonight I was mulling these things over as I proceeded about my cleaning and folding of laundry and had a minor brainwave about a couple of the projects that seem, on the surface, to be complementary but…