Tuesday, 16 March 2010 at 11:00
Back in 2002, the desktop security company
Symantec bought out Securityfocus, which at the time was one of the biggest clearinghouses of information security related information. Everything from mailing lists to archives of whitepapers can be found there, and for many years it was pretty much the first place to go if you wanted to monitor vulnerability reports and software releases. After Symantec bought them out there was some concern that Securityfocus would decline in quality as time and energy might no longer be spent maintaining and updating the website. That didn't happen, thankfully, but last week
the other shoe fell. Beginning yesterday the archives of Securityfocus
started being folded into Symantec Connect, which is Symantec's community/portal/forum/archive site that more closely matches the Symantec brand. If you take a look around in there (which you don't need a subscription or login to get to, at least, not yet) there isn't a whole lot to work with yet. Of course, or at least for the moment, there is a lot of content which is Symantec and Windows specific; there appears to be a couple of blogs (like Securityresponse) which are showing some fairly recent information. It's going to take time to dig through their site and see what they have available and where it is. I expect that this will change as more and more old content is added to the Symantec Connect archives, and hopefully they'll set up redirects from the
Securityfocus website.
I just hope the mailing lists don't go away. A lot of good information gets posted to them.
Saturday, 13 March 2010 at 13:22
Earlier this week while the usual suspects were
at the Birchmere for Henry Rollins, I noticed that a couple of musicians that I wanted to hear, namely,
Jonathan Coulton with
Paul and Storm would be playing later this week. Unfortunately, inquiring at the theatre I found out that the show had been sold out for some time, but that I might have gotten lucky if someone would be selling their tickets. It was Lyssa and Mika who heard on the Net that someone locally was selling off his tickets to the show, and Mika jumped at the opportunity to pick them up. Long story short (for a change) we fumbled around a bit coordinating plans due to the rain (which means that people in DC suddenly develop temporary procedural amnesia), got stuck in traffic on the way there, and eventually met up outside of the Birchmere. Mika drove to the Birch right after work while Hasufin gave me a lift to the theatre because
I wasn't sure that I was able to make it.
Unfortunately, there were only two tickets, so it was just Mika and I last night. Dinner at the Birch isn't too bad - the food's a little expensive for a concert venue but you get what you pay for. Up first were Paul and Storm, half comedy duo, half geek folk singers, renowned for being one of the least sucky opening bands in existence (just ask them). They really are funny, I have to admit. In between their on stage banter and jokes about fictional cover bands that they've both started they regaled us with hilarious geek filk. They played such songs as
Frogger: the Musical,
Nun Fight (done as plainchant, of course),
The Captain's Wife's Lament, and
Opening Band (of course). It's safe to say that they kept us in stitches the whole time, from the moment that ten pairs of panties (and a pair of longjohns) arc'd onto the stage during their opening number to the back-and-forth that filled the spaces between songs (liminal comedy?)
After a short intermission spent in the restroom and admiring the autographed promo glossies hung in the hallways of the Birchmere (Steven Segal has a band? And they played there? Whoa.) the time came for the amusing and sometimes self-depricating Jonathan Coulton, whose claim to fame came from the
Thing A Week Project, in which he went for the gusto by quitting his job as a programmer and publishing one song a week on the Net under the
Creative Commons by-attribution/non-commercial/unported v3.0 license in an attempt to make it big. It seems that it worked, because Coulton is now making his living full-time as a geek troubadour. JoCo has a knack for hitting geeks squarely in between the eyes with songs like
Code Monkey,
Shop Vac,
Mister Fancy Pants (which is really an excuse to jam on a
Zendrum), and
The Future Soon (which hit kinda close to home, I have to admit). While Paul and Storm go for comedy, JoCo tends to focus on the gawky, nervous side of geekdom. It's always heartening to know that there are other misfits out there, but Coulton really knows how to get the point across about such things as being painfully shy. Paul and Storm came out to play and sing backup on a couple of songs, including
The First of May. Unfortunately,
the cake was a lie last night.
I don't think I've laughed so hard in a long while. If, by chance, any of you hear that JoCo will be playing a gig within, oh, thirty miles of where you live, drop everything and buy tickets. Sell a kidney if you have to. They all put on a good show and you they're well worth the time to see live.
Friday, 12 March 2010 at 21:08
Please be advised that a noticeable taste of blood is not part of any test protocol but is an unintended side effect of the Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grid, which may, in semi-rare cases, emancipate dental fillings, crowns, tooth enamel, and teeth.
--GLaDOS, Portal
Last week, I went to the dentist for my six month cleaning and was treated to an unexpected, and rather unpleasant surprise.
Remember that molar I broke a couple of years ago - you know, the one that I had filled, fractured, capped, had a root canal on and re-cappped? When I was getting checked out last week, I discovered that you could see a line of decay around, and actually through the gumline. As it turned out, the pulp cap underneath the prosthetic (which never quite went underneath the gumline the way it was supposed to) was leaking; it admitted bacteria, which promptly began munching away once more at the structure of that particular tooth. Because I'd had a root canal there are no nerves left to get inflamed, and thus let me know that anything was amiss. I'd made an appointment for today (yesterday, actually) to get it taken care of by my usual dentist.
Long story short, I was in the chair for about three hours on Friday afternoon. Dr. Hong cut away the old dental crown and drilled out the composite plastic post holding what is left of that molar together, a procedure which took a bit longer than expected. Once that was gone, he only had to vacuum out the nastiness that (in hindsight I'm glad) was hidden from view. I'm told that there was little more than a soupy mess of bacteria and organic waste in there, and that the drilling was merely a formality to polish away the exposed layer of affected material. What's worse, the cavity was now just above
the bifurcation, where the roots separate from the body of the tooth. It wasn't clear if there was enough tooth remaining for there to be any structural integrity or if it was going to split in half some time in the future. The question came down to whether or not he should extract the tooth and prep the site for
an implanted replacement or try to reconstruct what was left. All but out of energy and hope, I told him to remove it, thinking that I'd figure out a way to pay for the reconstruction later but Dr. Hong disagreed. More x-rays were taken.
Through some miracle, some moment of grace, or Someone Somewhere rolling a critical success on their attempt to hit a butterfly flapping its wings in the outskirts of Beijing, the x-rays showed that there is still a decent amount of structural mass left in that tooth not made up on polymer composite. I wound up back in the chair with my jaws jacked open while he patiently built the molar back up with successive layers of UV sensitive plastic. I now sport yet another nifty temporary crown until the replacement can be fabricated, sometime two weeks hence. At least installing the replacement will be the work of ten minutes and the surgical steel implements won't be required. After today, that's practically a walk in the park.
Of course, I've left out a lot of stuff to make this post flow better, such as the half hour it took to pry the old crown off after bisecting it. It seems that it was a bit too well attached for its own good and required significant elbow grease to dislodge. It would also seem that in the process of removing the old tooth the surrounding gum was pretty badly torn up because stopping the bleeding became an hour-long project. I'm pretty sure that was the reason for the considerable delay between pumping the gunk out and beginning the restoration process, as well as the multiple casts that had to be made. And the persistent taste of blood that's been distracting me all day (or maybe that's the epinephrine mixed into the lidocaine wearing off).
Wednesday, 10 March 2010 at 17:01
I don't remember exactly who it was that got me into
Henry Rollins' spoken word stuff. It might have been Mika, who gave me a two disc set for a long drive a couple of years ago. It might have been Lyssa, who tends to follow literature of all kinds. It might have been a couple of episodes of
his television show on IFC that I caught online once. Hell, for all I know I've had those CDs since undergrad and I completely forgot about them. It's happened before. What I do know is that when Mika told us that Rollins would be in town on his (300+ location) world tour, we jumped at the opportunity and kept last night open on our calendar come hell or high water.
After a few missteps after I got home from work, Lyssa and I hit up Whole Paycheque for a quick dinner which we'd unfortunately mistimed. Normally their hotbar's pretty good but if you get there just after everyone else in the city stops in on their way home from work some of the fare is... a bit dodgy, to be honest. From there we headed over to to Hasufin and Mika's place, where we parked the TARDIS on a side road, piled into their SUV, and hit the road for the
Birchmere Music Hall in Alexandria, which is something of a fixture in NOVA.
You know, I really don't understand why they have a "no photography" policy at the Birchmere. Amanda Palmer spoke about that before her last show in DC, and she's got a point. There isn't a whole lot to see there, it isn't as if the background of the stage is a big artistic endeavour that people pay through the sinuses to look at. People pay to go to shows of some kind, and often you don't even know about the background. Their backdrop looks pretty much like the generic backdrop you see on standup comedy shows on cable television: a painting of what looks like the rear of a restaurant or club, with some stairs going down, a few windows looking into nothing, and a lamppost. There isn't a whole lot to it.
There. Now you know. Moving on...
More under the cut...
Monday, 08 March 2010 at 19:33
The saga of Dr. Peter Watts continues. He's crossed the US border a couple of times for hearings since his arrest in December of 2009, ostensibly for attacking a US border guard while trying to return to Canada. It's a given that he's going to go up on trial for real. However,
it appears that he is now considered a fugitive from the law because he failed to show up in court on Friday, 5 March 2009. It is standard operating procedure that the defense and counsel are informed of their court dates in advance, but this time it seems they were not. Regardless of the origin of this fuckup, he's now considered to be on the run, arrest on sight, do not pass go, do not offer bail again. Dr. Watts' attorney is not available at this time because he's still on vacation.. after informing the court that he would be unavailable during their last appearance before the bench. Either somebody's trying to make an example of Dr. Watts or (more likely) somebody somewhere in the bureaucracy really screwed things up, but rarely is anyone called to account at times like these. Too messy and telling, you see.
The really sad thing is that he'd barely found out that he had been left out of a pretty important loop before a couple of bloggers who've been watching the court dockets like a hawk found out about it. Maybe they've got timers rigged to follow updates to the page, who knows?
It's really not looking good, now.
Monday, 08 March 2010 at 19:16
I've been following the
surreptitious webcam surveillance saga of Lower Merion School District since the story first broke in February, and some interesting news has come out of the Philadelphia area. It seems that two people on the school's IT staff
have quietly been placed on paid leave as a result of the investigation. The school district is still clinging to their story that the webcams were remotely operated to aid in recovering stolen laptops, nevermind the fact that the camera can't actually see anything if the lid is closed. Plus, it's remotely possible at best to identify the location of a stolen laptop unless you can see a couple of landmarks out of a window that just happens to be there and not just someone's wall. The district has stated on the record that they'd activated webcams remotely forty-two times in the past year and a half whenever laptops were reported missing or stolen.
Nevermind the fact that the parents of the student in question were sent copies of the pictures taken by his Macbook.
Time will tell. It'll be interesting to keep an eye on what happens when this case goes before a judge.
Thursday, 04 March 2010 at 15:58
After badly breaking a load-bearing part of your body it's not uncommon for an orthopedic surgeon to install a couple of after-market bits of hardware to hold the bones together while they knit. This usually takes the form of a couple of
titanium alloy screws, though plates, rods, and tubes are not unknown. The downside of using something made out of metal to put things back together is that the screw holes left behind after the implants are removed require additional time to heal. Plus, the holes further compromise the structural integrity of the bone until they fill in. In the future this may be less of an issue - scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute of Bremen, Germany have figured out
how to make surgical screws out of a biodegradable composite called hydroxylapatite. Hydroxylapatite, incidentally, comprises approximately one half of the composition of bone. Anyway, the idea is that the screws are installed during surgery and left in place rather than removed later. As the bone regenerates it grows around the bioactive components and incorporates them into its structure, thus hopefully reducing the risk that the bone will be stronger than it otherwise would be after healing.
About a month ago I wrote an article about
newborn children being tested for genetic diseases at birth and the possibility that the data might wind up in the hands of someone unexpected. It should come as no surprise that this has happened. The Texas Tribune discovered during the course of an investigation that
approximately 800 samples were given to a military research program without anybody knowing about it. It turns out that the project is called AFDIL (Armed Forces DNA Identification Library) and was part of an effort to bootstrap a
mitochondrial DNA database. There are a couple of things about mtDNA that should be kept in mind - it has only around 16,500 base pairs, which codes for 37 genes. There isn't a whole lot of room for variation there. Then again,
there can be a lot of variation of mtDNA between tissues of the same person, let alone a group of people, so its use as an identification technique is questionable at best. The really worrisome thing is
how far the powers that be went to keep this quiet, from settling out of court before the discovery phase of the lawsuit to various and sundry dodges and excuses to keep from having to get consent.
Thursday, 04 March 2010 at 15:18
There is a lot of
breathlessly sensationalistic reporting about the arrest of Senator Roy Ashburn of California. Now, while my black little hearts oh so dearly want to leap up and down for joy at this turn of events, that's not the right thing to do. Let's face facts, here: he's been humiliated. He was thrown in jail but got out on $1400us bond (wow, that's cheap for DUI). His family and especially his children are probably taking this about as well as they would a pregnancy test that says they're about to have puppies. Chances are this could be the deciding factor over
whether or not he gets recalled, which people have been trying to do in California for a while.
Let's break it down: Senator Ashburn has
a record of voting against
LGBT-related bills that hit the Senate. He's divorced with four kids. The CHP
arrested him around 0200 PST8PDT last night because he was swerving on the road after leaving a gay nightclub in Sacramento called
Faces. A passenger in his car, who was male was not detained (and remains unidentified). Maybe his passenger fronted the cash to get him out; maybe not.
The statement he issued to the press is... okay. I'm trying not to act like an asshole here, but his statement is really not that different from other congressfolk, senators, and lawmakers who were anti-LGBT but later were outed as being gay, or at least bisexual over the years.
Another one bites the dust.
Wednesday, 03 March 2010 at 18:45
Things have been a bit dodgy over the past couple of days. I haven't written much because of stuff going on at home. Somehow, Leandra's systemware got horked along the way (I'm pretty sure that I messed up an upgrade somewhere along the line and it cascaded out of control) and I spent most of the weekend trying to fix it. While I think that I made some progress getting things put back together there is no guarantee that things aren't going to go seriously pear-shaped in the near future. Plus, I really don't have the bandwidth at home anymore to really host anything; one of the things I like least about my neighborhood is the generally crappy state of the telecom infrastructure here with no plans to run fibre out here for another couple of years, or so Verizon's schedule tells me. So, I got a
Dreamhost contract and spent much of the night pushing everything out to their network and re-jiggering my DNS configuration.
And so, here we are.
It might take me a couple of days to finish shaking the bugs out things, so I'm keeping an eye on everything, or when I have a chance to do so, anyway.
Now, to figure out what to do next.
Tuesday, 02 March 2010 at 16:34
Well, I think everything's up and running once again.
More to post later - this is just a test message.
Tuesday, 23 February 2010 at 22:06
A couple of days ago word hit the newswires that
a high school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania had been using the laptops issued to its students to spy on them. Word's gotten around (no surprise there), and the BBC
was the first to throw the 'potentially undressed minors' flag (and rightly so, in this case). The district has claimed that the spycam feature of the monitoring software
was only for the purpose of recovering lost or stolen laptops and says that they deactivated the software remotely. If you've been paying attention to this story I don't have to tell you that this is an outright lie, because the district contacted the parents of student Blake Robbins to send them a disciplinary report and included a copy of the photograph of
Blake holding what was later determined to be a piece of candy. Unless the
Jedi Mind Trick is employed, that doesn't sound like laptop recovery to me. Plus, even if the parents sign off on it,
it's still unconstitutional for a government entity (like a school) to engage in surveillance.
More under the cut...
Tuesday, 23 February 2010 at 20:41
Word has come down from the state of New Jersey that
Saloncon, the first known neo-victorian convention in the United States, is no more. Following the tribulations of 2009, including the economy floating upside down in its fishbowl, the organizers are not able to set the wheels in motion for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the organizers have branched out in new directions in their personal lives and do not have the time or energy right now to put on a convention as a result.
saloncon will certainly be missed; I know I shall miss the yearly trek to New Jersey with my finest clothing carefully packed in the trunk of the TARDIS. However, there are other conventions out there to satisfy our convention addictions, such as
the Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition and
Steamcon in Seattle.
Next, RPG advocates
The Escapist have announced
Read An RPG Book In Public Week. Three of them, actually, to coincide with the weeks that creators of Dungeons and Dragons (Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson) were born and died, respectively (wow, that's awkward grammar...) For fifteen years, the Escapist has been fighting the crazy and ultimately senseless fight to get the hobby of gaming to stop being considered a dangerous, subversive, suicide-inducing pastime. I wish I were kidding when I write that, but there are many people who still consider co-telling a story and occasionally rolling polyhedral dice while so doing a threat to life, limb, sanity, and religion. At any rate, celebrating these weeks is simple: just sit in a public place and read a gaming book. It could be a core book, it could be an expansion, it could be the module you're planning to run soon. If people come up to you and ask about it, answer their questions politely and truthfully. Please try to be tasteful in the book you choose - the
D20 Book of Erotic Fantasy
is probably not going to reassure a parent concerned about their son or daughter's interest in
fourth edition Dungeons and Dragons
. The point is to help us stop looking like scary deviants (just interesting ones). You don't have to take part in all three weeks if you don't want to, and you're not obligated to. Think of it as having extra chances if you get too busy one week.
Last and certainly not least, the Department of Justice is being buffeted by civil liberties advocates port and starboard over the fact that
people have been tracked by their cellphones without the issue of a warrant. Many people know that the location of a particular cellular phone can be ascertained if it has an on-board GPS receiver and the phone transmits its current co-ordinates, but it's less known that you can do the same thing by querying cell towers for a particular
ESN, and then you look in the region of space wherever the zones covered by two or more towers overlap. Of course, the cell companies don't give just any that information, which means that you have to have pull with them... the thing is, for the past few years law enforcement has been getting this information without showing probable cause or even getting a warrant from a judge requiring the companies to give them this information. Oh, and this ability is being abused from time to time for unethical purposes: a sheriff in Alabama browbeat a local cell company into monitoring the movements of his daughter, claiming that a kidnapping had taken place.
Thursday, 18 February 2010 at 21:30
It seems like everything is being steadily reduced to one of three
categories these days: terrorism, child pornography, or piracy. Mention of any of them will stop intelligent discourse with the rapidity of a falling watermelon striking the ground, and within the halls of government will derail legislation as surely as 1+1=2. When the categories begin to blur, however, is when the trouble really starts. In the past week that I know of (and probably a bit before, because this sort of shitstorm takes a while to ramp up)
blogger.com was forced to
delete six music blogs due to allegations of copyright infringement. The DMCA takedown notices stated that music piracy was taking place and Blogger dutifully closed those accounts
even though the bloggers had received written permission from the copyright holders to post the recordings in question. Once again, the
IFPI is up to its old tricks and acting like a bull in a china shop.
Frankly, I'm worried. If the permission of the copyright holder isn't enough to keep your site intact and the IFPI off your back, what is? Only time and money for legal fees (plus hopefully keeping a backup of your site stashed away someplace) will help if the hammer comes down. Plus, what if the software they use to scan the Net can't tell the difference between a pirated song and something from the
Podsafe Music Network? Or
music licensed under the Creative Commons? Or even free samples put up by artists so you can try before you buy?
It's only a matter of time before things go too far.
Thursday, 18 February 2010 at 21:03
Thirty-two years ago (plus a day or two - real life happens) two computer hobbyists stuck at home in a blizzard not unlike
snowpocalypse named Randy Suess and Ward Christenson created something wholly new, which geek history remembers as
the bulletin board system. At the time, the idea was revolutionary - with a computer, an auto-answer modem, and some disk space you could set up forums for people to leave public and private messages to one another. As disk space became less expensive, file archives were often added for people to trade files. By the mid-1980's boards were all over the place and there were even magazines devoted to hanging out on and running BBSes. There were picnics, bowling parties, bar crawls, and wing wars where users met offline, and discourse and flamewars alike raged online. By the time I got into BBSing in the early 90's, what wound up being the last generation of callers was just getting into the swing of things (!'s Land, Data's Exchange, Triumvirate, Lady Di's Place, Slacker BBS, Screaming In Digital... all requisat en pace). By late '95, the Net had taken over and that was pretty much all she wrote for dialup BBS culture though
there are a few folks keeping the spirit alive (hey, Diamond Dave!).
I think I'm going to toast the
Renegade and
EBBS softwares this weekend.
Thursday, 18 February 2010 at 20:19
I've only been to Philadelphia a couple of times, all of them by driving to and from there. After reading about
some of the stuff going on there not only do I not particularly want to visit that city, but I'm not entirely certain that I really want to fly again.
This particular news story leaped out at me for its sheer WTF factor even though the incident seems to have taken place in March of 2009. Bob Thomas, a 53 year old Camden police officer, his wife Leona, and their four year old son Ryan were flying down to Orlando, Florida to celebrate Ryan's fourth birthday. It should be noted that Ryan was born three months premature and is developmentally delayed as a result (he's almost five as I write this). His lower legs are not properly formed, nor is the musculature of his legs. The family dutifully doffed all of their outerwear, broke down the stroller, and loaded everything onto the conveyor belt to be scanned. Ryan's leg braces set off the metal detector, but rather than follow
established TSA procedure the screeners forced him to remove his braces and attempt to walk through the metal detector unassisted. The TSA
extended an official apology to the family for the screener's actions, but that's beside the point. Why aren't some of the screeners working at PHY using their heads, or at least following the playbook the way they're trained?
On top of that the TSA
has begun a program in which people will be swabbed at random to test for traces of explosives. They've been doing this to baggage on a more or less random basis for about a decade now; I got screened that way the first time I flew back in 2000. How accurate these measures will be remains to be seen. Depending on the particular test used, the number of
type I errors could be high due to the prevalence of cosmetic products used today or it could actually be reasonable. Only time will tell. Nevermind the fact that someone trying to get a bomb onto a plane will just have someone else wire them up so they won't have explosive residue on their hands. Or maybe They'll stop going for planes and decide to detonate an antipersonnel device while standing in line at the security checkpoint while we're all crammed in there like sardines in a can. Or maybe
common sense will be declared a sign of terrorist activity.
I don't need to tell you what a crock all of this is,
someone far more intelligent than I has already put it better than I ever could.
Thursday, 18 February 2010 at 19:53
An article hit Boing Boing today that raised the hackles on the back of my neck as I read it. The Lower Merion School District just outside of Philadelphia received a grant a couple of years back for laptop computers to issue to its students to use as part of their coursework. In November of last year, the parents of student Blake Robbins received a disciplinary notice pertaining to something unspecified (referred to as "improper behavior") in
the affidavit. The disciplinary notice was accompanied by a photograph of Blake
while he was at home. The laptops issued by Lower Merion are all equipped with built-in webcams mounted just above the displays, which isn't uncommon for portable computers these days. As it turns out, the issued laptops contain software that phones home to the school district and makes it possible for any teacher to remotely turn on the webcam and record anything that happens to be going on in front of the computer. Neither parents nor students were informed of this capability; no one knows how often it was or is made use of at this time.
Blake's parents have filed a class action complaint against the school district, the district's board of directors, and the district's superintendent, claiming that a whole laundry list of federal and Pennsylvania state laws have been violated. Among them are the
Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (amended in 1994, 1996, and 2001), and the
Fourth Amendment (whether or not the Blake family
will be suspected of terrorism remains to be seen). Nobody knows how often students were spied upon in this way, exactly who was watching, or what was seen. Evidence will be trivial to get: Blake's laptop undergoes forensic analysis, the malware is detected (I doubt anything as sophisticated as a rootkit was used to conceal it), and the configuration of the malware is analyzed to determine where it reports to.
Monday, 15 February 2010 at 16:31
The first time I read through this article it threw me for a loop: a patient at a hospital in Geneva, Switzerland referred to by the initials 'TN' suffered two strokes a couple of weeks apart. Each
CVA damaged one half of his visual cortex, thus rendering him completely blind for all intents and purposes. While he was recovering, physicians discovered that TN still had the ability to read the facial expressions of people around him and correctly interpret their emotional states. Some tests showed that his
amygdala was still operational, which lead neurologists to wonder what else he was capable of without being consciously aware of it. Just to see what would happen, a group of visiting researchers set up a simple obstacle course in a hallway and convinced TN to walk through it even though he required a cane to navigate under normal circumstances.
He was able to do it even though he is clinically blind.
As it turns out, TN's eyes are still fully operational even though his
visual cortex is dead, for all intents and purposes. This means that information is still being transmitted to his brain by the optic nerves and the
other parts of his brain involved in
processing certain aspects of visual information are still functioning normally. Thus, while there is no conscious concept of what is around him the unconscious aspects of vision are still available to TN and
are usable to a certain degree. Blindsight, defined as the ability to respond in the appropriate manner to visual input without the feeling of having perceived it is a rare condition but it is known and has been documented by the medical field.
Download the video recording from the article I linked to; give it a watch, it's wild.
Friday, 12 February 2010 at 11:54
Something that
VMware quietly changed with the release of
VMware Server v2.0 was that they deprecated the use of their stand-alone management console application - if you try to use it to connect to a v2.0 server it just won't work. What you need to do is plug the URL
http://vmware-server-host:8222 or
https://vmware-server-host:8333 into your web browser and log in with a user account that has admin privileges (which basically means that the account is part of the vmware group). If you're using
Mozilla Firefox v3.5.x, the web interface will ask you to install an add-on to the browser which lets you interact with the virtual console. This is all fine and dandy until you upgrade past v3.5, like I did a couple of days ago. The add-on conks out and the VMware web console will
quietly throw error messages in its logs. However, there is a fix for this: you can
unpack the add-on's .xpi file and run the console app manually. I'm doing this right now on Windbringer and it seems to work pretty well - I can even run
X sessions with it without any trouble. Just follow the directions given in the post on the VMware.com forums (in the post, option number two) and everything should be hunky-dory,
One thing I'd like to point out if you do this is that you should specify the box you're connecting to on the command line to be sure you get it right. I did this on Windbringer like so:
/home/drwho/vmware-web-console/vmware-vmrc -h 127.0.0.1:8333
Once you're sure it works you can put it into a shortcut on your desktop and be done with it, or at least until VMware gets around to fixing their add-on.
Thursday, 11 February 2010 at 12:47
Regular users of
Gmail have no doubt noticed the new entry just below their Inbox tag called
Buzz - if you haven't yet, chances are you will soon. From what I can tell it seems to work a lot like
Twitter and
Facebook status updates do: there's just enough room to post two or three sentences, links to other pages, comments on Buzz posts, and other stuff like that. It also hooks links to other sides listed in your
Google Profile (if you've set one up) so that if you update one of them, it automatically posts a link in your feed. Conversely, responses and comments to your Buzz postings get routed to your Gmail account so you don't have to keep clicking on one more tab in your browser. In other words, it's pretty nifty, albeit a little scary if you think about the privacy implications of this.
While we're on the subject of privacy, it seems that
Google Buzz shows the names and/or e-mail addresses of the people you correspond with most often. When you enable Buzz (or just click 'cancel', like I did (that's right, it ignored my request to not set up Buzz)) it goes through your Gmail and Gchat contact lists, figures out whom you communicate with most often, and populates your list of followed accounts automatically. The downside of this is that someone can go to your profile page and click the 'Foo has
x followers' and 'Foo is following
x' links on the right-hand side and see everyone on those lists along with their e-mail addresses, thus revealing everyone you talk to with any regularity. In fact, if you read the Buzz announcement they tell you this up front. A little experimentation has shown that the person poking around also has to be logged into their Gmail account to see this, but that's hardly a hurdle. You can't make these lists private, so the only thing you can really do is unfollow them, which presents problems if you actually plan on using Buzz for anything.
obCommon Sense: If you don't want people to know about it,
don't put it online.
Thursday, 11 February 2010 at 02:04
Around 0700 EST5EDT today, one of the warehouses maintained by the
Smithsonian Institution sustained damage when
its roof collapsed under the weight of all the snow. Technically referred to as the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland, the warehouse is used to store artifacts not currently on display at any of the Smithsonian-related facilities. Some of the
photographs taken today show that the walls of the warehouse buckled as the roof gave way. It is said that the artifacts stored therein are packed in protective containers but
a full report is unavailable at this time because the building itself is considered unstable. For what it's worth, many of the artifacts stored there are in the process of being transferred to the
Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.
Looking at those pictures, I can't help but wonder: those walls look like tin siding and not much else. Does the Smith have other, better constructed warehouses? Is the reason this one's being phased out because, from appearances, it looks like a tin shack? Are they all like this? What's the status of its contents? How badly damaged is it?
