Friday, August 28, 2009

Windows Command-line Tool: SubInACL

One of Windows' strengths in the ability to apply very granular, detailed permissions to your file system and shares.  However, this makes for some fairly complex permissions settings.  One of Windows' weaknesses is its command line (which had been more than remedied with PowerShell, I think).  But I found a tool today that enables me to take ownership of files and folders from the command prompt.  It's called SubInACL.  It looks like the ultimate Windows command-line ACL tool.  (CACLS.exe is just a joke.  It can only do the simplest of things.  And the /T option doesn't descend down more than one directory deep.)

 

Here's the command I used to take ownership of everything in the current directory:

subinacl /file * /setowner=me

Friday, August 14, 2009

Meet Our Newest Addition, "Nibbles"

Almost four years ago for my birthday, my family got me a betta fish I named "Herman Schnauzer."  He was a good fish, but this last week he took his last breath, and went to the happy swimming pool in the sky.  He almost made it four years with us.

This week at work, I've caught two mice!  One with the amazing, humane, "Mice Cube," which I highly recommend.  No one I've ever talked to has ever failed to make a catch with this trap.  This was my second with one.  But yesterday, we found the little toddler mouse whose mother we did away with the day before.  We found him wandering around under the desks in the daytime, the poor little guy.  I put a Cheeto out on the floor and he came out and grabbed it and ran back under the desk.  So I named him "Cheeto."  He came right out in to the open again, apparently not that afraid of all of us in the office who were watching, and I caught him with a cardboard box.  He was such a tiny, adorable, little mouse, I brought him home and was going to keep him; but the internet convinced me that it's not exactly safe to take a wild or house mouse as a pet.

So today I stopped by the pet store.  We still had Cheeto in his box, and I was thinking I would buy him a friend, and they had these cute little dwarf hamsters at the pet store.  So I bought one and brought it home.  The dwarf hamster is small but still over twice as large as Cheeto.  I ended up setting Cheeto free in our backyard.  And the hamster we named "Nibbles."  The pet store people agreed she is a girl.


Nibbles

This is her sleeping in the bottom tier of the Critter Universe Great Wall.  She can't jump at all, so she can't even make it up to the higher levels.  Cheeto would've done it no problem.

As I get older I think I'm realizing that I like animals, smaller ones generally, more than I realized.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Strong Passwords and Online Safety

This article is a must-read for everyone who wants to work safely on the internet.

Personally, I use Keepass to keep all my passwords saved on my computer in an encrypted format.  And I use LastPass together with my browser to automatically fill in passwords on websites that I regularly surf to - however, I do not allow LastPass to save any passwords or login information for any of my financial sites.  I enter that using Keepass's autotype feature.


I know it's convenient to have your browser store "cookies" so that websites remember your information from visit to visit, but this is the setting I use in Firefox right now so that cookies are not saved after I close Firefox:



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