NMP Blog

After looking for a way to dynamically allocate memory in Virtualbox, I discovered it’s not technically possible. With that being said, there is a method that Virtualbox calls memory ballooning, due to the way memory is handled, that can serve basically the same purpose. In the documentation, there is a section just for Memory Ballooning.

With all of the news about the the privacy changes at Facebook, the Untangle team has create SaveFace to help you get your privacy set back to more restrictive settings, so that all your information is not available to everyone.  It will set your privacy settings so that only your friends can access your information.  It is easy to run and keeping your settings private is generally a good idea.

When setting up a office/corporate network environment, users may complain that it is frustrating to have to change their password every so often, or have to come up with difficult passwords. Despise the user’s arguments, although valid, remember the security risk that it poses. If you have simple passwords, maybe something common that all users share, it’s easy for unauthorized access into the system. If someone guesses or gets hold of one user’s password, it may be possible to guess the rest. Protect your data and files – enforce a password policy on your network, with an expiration on passwords. Use requirements such as at least one capital letter, and a number or special character to increase security. Your data is YOUR data – so make sure it’s safe from prying eyes!

This may seem like a no brainer, but it is often done wrong.

Set your parameters once and once only.  In other words, if you have ANY value that will be used more than once in your program, set a variable to that value and use the variable in the body of the program.

In other words:

variable1 = 40

width=variable1

rows=variable1

NOT

width=40

rows=40

Sure it’s one extra step now.  But if you ever change that value (and you probably will!), you’ll be able to change it in one place rather than hunting and searching for the fifty different places where you hard coded the value into your program.  It also means that you only have to worry about typos the first time through the program, not after each value change.

And of course, it goes without saying that you should keep all your parameters in one, easy-to-find place.  Your future self will thank you.