I recently read an article that discussed the effectiveness of different adsense ad sizes. The three medium box shaped ads that adsense offers is:

250×250
300×250
336×280

The article mentioned that even though the 336×280 was the largest it wasn’t neccesarily the best performing advertisement since most online advertisers develop their image ads to fit in a 300×250 slot. Read more »

SSH is really not that secure by default on must Linux distributions in the default configuration. By default OpenSSH is configured to allow password based authentication (because its easier); however, script kiddies have developed scripts that can try thousands of passwords an hour. If you have a strong secure password this will usually not be an issue but if you or one of your users use a dictionary based or weak password your system can be compromised quite easily. Most of the time you have no control over the strength of your users passwords so I recommend giving them a password that is 1024 bits, also known as a private key. Since this key is stored in a text file on the users machine it is often times a good alternative way of authenticating for users that don’t want to remember passwords but still be very secure. Read more »

Well, over the past few days I have implemented new features and made many modifications to this blog. Below are the following changes and impovements that I thought may interest you. I also want to hear your thoughts on the current changes and future improvements to the blog. Read more »

Recently I accidently changed the permissions of one of my files and I didn’t know what the correct permissions were suppose to be. I did know that the other files in the same directory were the correct permission. Using the ls -l command. I was able to see that the permission was set as, -rw-r–r–. Great, I now know the correct permission; however, I usually use the binary syntax for chmod and I am not familiar with the other method. Read more »

Getting fetchmail to work in Linux or FreeBSD has always been difficult for me. The SSL certificates always seem to be a pain to configure. It has been particularly difficult to get fetchmail with Gmail working on FreeBSD since there are no complete guides written for FreeBSD. Read more »

By default FreeBSD does not come with a screen saver for console. It also does not come configured with a power saving mode. If you don’t use the console for some time I prefer to save energy and have my monitor turn off when it is not in use. Here is how you can install a screen saver for your FreeBSD 7.0 system. Read more »

If you are using a Linux system and want to schedule a task to run in the future you will probably need to know cron. Cron is much like Window’s Scheduled Tasks. The only difference is that cron is conifgured by a simple text file. Although, that text file to the untrained looks very complicated. Many people rely cron task generators to do the work but I hope that after this guide you will be able to make your own tasks without the use of a generator. Read more »

If you have heard about Linux or currently using it you are probably aware that it was derived from Unix. Linux is not the only variant derived from Unix. There has been a number of Unix variants one of which is, FreeBSD.

Since FreeBSD recently announced a new release I thought I would give it a try. When they released FreeBSD 7.0 they had claimed that it performed at least 15% faster than the latest Linux kernel. For such as substantial increase in performance I just had to give it a try. Here is how it went. Read more »