The auth.log on one of my servers (really, on all of the servers I have access to) is full of stuff like this:

Dec  8 03:19:33 localhost sshd[4718]: User root from 10.1.2.3 not allowed [...]
Dec  8 03:19:35 localhost sshd[4721]: Invalid ...

A long, long time ago, I talked about a poor user interface. This is the follow-up "good user interface" post that I promised.

I'd like to talk about Anki, which is a flashcard program. The user interface is well done for several reasons:

• It is uncluttered: in the main ...

I'm taking MIT's 6.831: User Interface Design and Implementation through their free OpenCourseWare website. One of the homework assignments is to find two examples each for the "UI Hall of Shame" and the "UI Hall of Fame". This post is for shame -- and since the nominee has ...

The ctypes module makes loading and calling into a dynamic library incredibly easy:

>>> from ctypes import CDLL
>>> libc = CDLL('libc.so.6')
>>> print libc.strlen('abcde')
5

As with everything else in python, it gets even better when you scratch the surface. In the example above, CDLL returns an object ...

My ISP has apparently made no progress whatsoever with IPv6, but I've got an IPv6 enabled VPS.

SSH makes it trivial to use that VPS as a SOCKS5 proxy. Just do:

ssh -D 8080 myvps.example.com

Then set your browser's SOCKS proxy to localhost:8080. In Firefox ...