It's sonic! It's totally sonic!

Thursday 24 April 2008 at 11:55 pm
The sonic screwdriver: One bottle of blue Gatorade. Two fingers of vodka. Shake. Serve ice cold. Drink responsibly.

Gods, I'm a geek.

I see now how the Vorlons infiltrated Earth: Perfume!

Thursday 24 April 2008 at 11:50 pm There's a new perfume for women on the market called Alien, as photographed a few weeks ago at Tyson's Corner Mall. Fan of the science fiction series Babylon-5 will notice the spray bottle's resemblance to a certain ambassador aboard the station (note: the Wikipedia page has spoilers for the series).

As for the scent, I'm not much of a fan. It's a bit too musky for my tastes.

Memory log archives now online.

Thursday 24 April 2008 at 11:39 pm After much deliberation, I've decided to put the archives of my old memory logs online. There's a lot of text in there, dating all the way back to the year 2002 - from my final year at Pitt to my last few years in Pittsburgh to just after moving to Washington, DC. I've fixed all of the screwy filenames that accumulated over the years and deleted the intra-page archive references that used to be at the end of each file. I haven't fixed any broken links inside of each page, however - the ones outside of my site are gone, probably for good; the ones inside I'll eventually get around to fixing.

• 15 April 1002 - 29 June 2002


• 1 July 2002 - 2 August 2002


• 4 August 2002 - 13 September 2002


• 14 September 2002 - 7 November 2002


• 8 November 2002 - 30 December 2002


• 1 January 2003 - 14 March 2003


• 15 March 2003 - 10 May 2003


• 11 May 2003 - 25 June 2003


• 26 June 2003 - 11 August 2003


• 12 August 2003 - 14 October 2003


• 19 October 2003 - 2 December 2003


• 3 December 2003 - 21 January 2004


• 22 January 2004 - 5 March 2004


• 7 March 2004 - 16 May 2004


• 17 May 2004 - 24 August 2004


• 25 August 2004 - 19 November 2004


• 21 November 2004 - 17 January 2005


• 18 January 2005 - 9 March 2005


• 10 March 2005 - 18 April 2005


• 19 April 2005 - 11 July 2005


• 12 July 2005 - 1 September 2005


• 2 September 2005 - 11 October 2005


• 12 October 2005 - 16 December 2005


• 17 December 2005 - 1 March 2006


• 2 March 2006 - 10 May 2006


• 11 May 2006 - 19 July 2006


• 20 July 2006 - 26 September 2006


• 27 September 2006 - 18 December 2006


• 19 December 2006 - 2 February 2007

You know, going through some of those entries makes me wonder, as I suppose that everyone does after a few years of having a job, paying bills, not hanging out with friends or going out in the evenings because of work, what exactly happened to me? At what time did I start slowing down, get tired, call it what you will? Have I hit my peak? Is it really all downhill from here? Can I finally say "Old age and treachery beats youth and skill" and have the street cred to pull it off? When did I stop using the word 'deck' to refer to my computer? Hell, when did I stop anthropomorphizing my computers...?

Why did I stop writing about my personal life, and everything that I do with Lyssa, or my friends?

I think it's time to shake things up a bit. Time for some wacky adventures.

Soon, I'll do some work on the frontpage of my site and re-organize things a little. There are a couple of things that I was never quite satisfied with that I've been meaning to alter.

Wordpress security vulnerability and mitigating strategies.

Thursday 24 April 2008 at 10:03 pm For the past couple of weeks the information security community has been noticing someone exploiting a new vulnerability in the Wordpress blogging software that lets the attacker inject arbitrary HTML code into the content from outside. So far, what has been seen is an <div>..</div> HTML entity containing multiple hyperlinks to other sites, presumably for the purpose of artificially bumping up someone's search engine rankings. Both the height and width of the injected HTML code are usually set to zero pixels each, but I've seen a couple of instances of one-by-one <div>..</div> entities as well. It stands to reason that pretty much any single-digit sizes could be used because they'd be too small to be seen by the average human reader, but they're perfectly detectable by web spiders indexing the afflicted sites.

I feel that I should point out that whomever is doing this is just injecting links into other people's blogs, at least right now. They could just as easily be injecting malicious Javascript, object references to malicious Flash animations that can compromise the user's system, or possibly variants of the IFRAME exploit that are spreading like wildfire across the web.

Peter Hosey has noticed that Wordpress' xmlrpc.php file, which is used by personal blogging clients (as opposed to using your web browser to log into the back-end) is implicated in these shenanigans. I'm not a Wordpress user, but renaming that file to something else (like squid-bacon-and-tomato.php) might slow the attackers down, depending on your sense of humor.

After hearing word of this exploit in the wild, the Prometheus Group developed a mod_security rule that filters out the injected HTML. You can download the virtual patch here and load it into your server's mod_security configuration. As more information is uncovered, the rule will probably be updated or others will be released to the public.

(obDisclaimer: I work for the Prometheus Group. I'm trying to be a good Samaritan by spreading this around.)

Indian in Chantilly: Dishes of India

Wednesday 23 April 2008 at 9:50 pm This evening while going walkabout after work, Lyssa and I happened upon a new Indian restaurant in Chantilly, Virginia that chanced to have opened just last week called Dishes of India (13949 Metrotech Drive; Chantilly, Virginia; 20151; telephone number 703-961-1004), which can be found in the big shopping plaza. It's a fairly unassuming place, sandwiched between a Catholic Store (no, that's really what it's called) and a small pizzaria, but the service was enthusiastic, attentive, and most of all, helpful. We sat down to try a selection of the fare and were pleasantly surprised at how excellent it was. The malai kofta was tender and the sauce thick and tasty; the lamb saag was cooked to perfection and not overspiced; onion kulcha made a perfect side dish for the two entree's. Their masala tea is definitely not out of a bag, and I highly recommend trying it without cream the first time you have it, you won't be sorry. For dessert we split a pair of dishes, an Indian rice pudding called kheer pista and fried milk balls in syrup called gulab jamun. Both were extremely tasty and just enough to polish off the meal without leaving us overfull.

It's always a pleasure to try a new place to eat in our neck of the woods, and I recommend that anyone who happens to find themselves in Chantilly along the main drag stop in at the same shopping mall that you'll find Lowe's and the Games Parlor. It's near the back, sort of. If you drive around the perimeter, you're sure to find it sooner or later. One flare gun out of four - highly recommended.

The end of an era: Telerama goes dark, but another light shines.

Wednesday 23 April 2008 at 5:04 pm Telerama, one of the first Internet Service Providers in the world has finally jacked the big black, but somehow managed to pull off a miracle as it flatlined. Telerama (referred to as Teletrauma by ex-employees) has dropped offline a couple of times in the past because they couldn't pay their bills, management vanishing, and suchlike. In the net.community they're notorious for some of their business practices (such as outsourcing IT to the country of Brasil and running their tech support entirely off of IRC), which has probably contributed to the ISP's decline in the past nine years or so. However, it was announced earlier today that Nidhog, Inc had purchased Telerama's assets and moved everything over to their own network. It is said that they're going to set about turning everyone's service back on as soon as they can.

Spooks, dirty tricks, and creative linguistics.

Wednesday 23 April 2008 at 4:20 pm It seems that the US federal government has been busy lately - a pair of news articles released last week show the lengths they're going to so that they can get their way while seeming to be on the up and up. As you'll recall, back in July of 2005 the city of London, England was rocked by a number of explosions which were placed by suicide bombers to maximally disrupt the public transportation system of the city. The British government probably asked the FBI to assist in the investigation (as suggested by a number of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act), which brings us right along to the investigation of a former graduate student of chemistry at North Carolina State University. The local FBI field office filed a subpoena to acquire some of the student's records as part of their investigatory effort, which the school complied with. Then something very unusual happened: FBI HQ in Washington made the field agent return the records, then turn right around and demand them again under the USA PATRIOT Act, which at the time did not allow such a thing. The school scratched its head for a moment and refused to release the newly returned records. The local field office then went to get a grand jury subpoena for the records, which the school once again complied with. About two calendar weeks after that Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, testified before Congress that the PATRIOT Act didn't go far enough and demanded that the 'act be amended to include such powers.

In case you're curious, you can go to the EFF's website and read the analysis of the documents as well as the originals to see how Mueller stacked the deck.

Also, word that No Such Agency has been wiretapping US citizens inside CONUS since shortly before 9/11 has already made its rounds in the news media, though little has been done about it. No wonder this administration is called the "We know; we're doing it anyway" regeime. Anyway, it was recently discovered that federal investigators for the US Justice Department had seized telephone records to determine who the leaks were that contacted James Risen, who originally broke the story in the New York Times in 2005. As they are wont to be these days, they were amazingly quiet in doing so, either through gag order or national security letters. Either way, heads are going to roll once they figure out who the leaks were.

Funny how everything talked about started in 2005, isn't it?

Nanofibres used to assist in nerve regeneration.

Monday 21 April 2008 at 4:42 pm Neurologists at Northwestern University have made a minor breakthrough in the field of nerve regeneration: They've developed a form of self-assembling nanofibre that can be used by damaged nerve cells to stitch themselves back together. The process involves a solution of molecules (the names of the compounds involved were not included in this article) that, under the correct circumstances, will arrange themselves into molecular-sized tubes that act as repair scaffolds for injured nerve cells in the spinal cords of mice. Ordinarily, when nerves are damaged, scar tissue develops at the injury sites and precludes rejoining the ends in any fashion that permits signal transfer. The nanofibres thus produced prevent scarring and by hooking the calcium and sodium channels of the cell membranes, give the cells something to rebuild on top of. Interestingly, rather than using an implanted substance of some kind (as in previous nerve regeneration trials), the solution in question is instead injected, which makes it far less invasive. The experimental solution has proven effective to some degree when introduced to the site of injury up to 24 hours after initial insult to tissue. While the treatment is not yet out of the prototyping stage, the experimental mice were able to support themselves on formerly-paralyzed limbs and navigate their cages.

This is definitely a technology to keep an eye on.

Chris and boys' weekend out.

Monday 21 April 2008 at 3:48 pm Friday as a whole wound up being something of a comedy of errors - the first half of the day was supposed to be spent at the dentist's office having stage two of my emergency root canal performed (building up the plastic post, taking the cast for the permanant crown, and placing the temporary), but per usual things started going south. While out running an emergency errand on Friday morning I got a call from my boss - not only had I been re-assigned to another project at the last minute but there was apparantly a pressing need to show up at the site immediately.

Can we say 'uh-oh', kids? Sure. I knew you could.

Thankfully, the second part of the procedure went as smoothly as one could expect: My new crown should be finished sometime next week, and I have an appointment to have it installed next Friday. Unfortunately, the two teeth on the lower right-hand side of my mouth will be worked on as soon as the new crown's in place. I'm not looking forward to this, as one might expect. My bank account is waving a white flag and begging to negotiate with Happenstance, which has thus far only handed one buttock of my bank account's ass over; the rest of its ass is still in cold storage. I don't know if a sling or roll of duct tape are part of the negotiations.

Rather than spending the day killing untold trees by filling out paperwork for the last project and my new assignment, I found myself on the beltway headed for southern Virginia and my next assignment. Still patially numb, with a headache, and fighting the brain-fogging effects of low blood sugar because I hadn't really had any breakfast before leaving the apartment this morning. I consider it an act of divinity (or more likely, divinity's pity) that I actually found my destination with only two false starts. No one has bothered to tell the team in charge of the GIS database at Google Maps that one of the roads has been bisected into a dead-end alleyway and a road of unknown usability two miles farther south.

The hell of it was this: Unbeknownst to me, my boss had called on ahead, informed the team that I wasn't running at optimal capacity, and all involved agreed that I should probably spend the rest of the day recuperating. I discovered this after an hour of travel to the site, bumbling around to find where I had to be, and figuring out who my point of contact was.

I headed home and spent the next five hours doing paperwork and the requisite research for same. Yay.
More under the cut...

Linux, UDEV, HAL, and removable drives.

Thursday 17 April 2008 at 11:48 pm Now that I've metabolized the caffeine from the two-and-an-unknown-fraction pots of coffee I've drunk today (don't ask), I have it together enough to write about an unusually annoying glitch that plagues Linux users from time to time: Automatic mounting of USB storage devices stops working after you tinker with the systemware, usually after recompiling something or upgrading a package. I ran into this a few days ago but didn't think much of it because I've mostly been using Windows XP for work (yes, yes, you may now all laugh) but I decided to sit down and figure out what happened tonight.

As near as I can tell, it has to do with an unusual interaction between gparted (which I'd been using to nondestructively repartition a USB hard drive earlier this week) and HAL, the Hardware Abstraction Layer. Gparted is nice, but every once in a while after it finishes an operation (it batches the things that you want to do to a drive and executes them in sequence) it'll segfault and die on you (when I have free time, I plan on debugging this). It will have done what you wanted but it might not have cleaned up after itself, and when you plug a USB device in you'll suddenly feel like you're within spitting distance of Jupiter while locked out of your spaceship. Gparted alters the HAL daemon's policy files in the /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/ directory for a very logical reason: When you're using it to manipulate the partitions of a disk device, you don't want to distract it if you accidentally plug another device in. Specifically, it creates a file called gparted-disable-automount.fdi, which tells the HAL daemon to do exactly what the name suggests: Disable the automatic mounting of hard drives and data keys when you plug them in, even though they will show up normally as manually mountable block devices. This is all well and good, but if the file is left behind when gparted crashes, hald doesn't know any better and does what it thinks is the right thing. If this happens, there are two things that you can do: The simplest is to delete the above file, reboot (or log out and restart hald), and see what happens.

This didn't work for me, unfortunately, so I had to take a more invasive approach: I booted Windbringer down to single user mode, uninstalled HAL (emerge -C sys-apps/hal) and deleted all of hald's policy files (rm -rf /usr/share/hal) to start over. Then I did some poking around and realized that I'd accidentally compiled hald with gparted support (on Gentoo, the USE flag disk-partition was turned on, which mucked with the HAL subsystem). After turning that off and recompiling the subsystem (emerge sys-apps/hal), I rebooted and everything was back to normal because all of the files in that directory tree had been replaced.

Major thanks to the Ubuntu and Gentoo users' forums for making their archives freely accessible (and for documenting the hell out of the lshal utility), and for pointing me to this entry on the Gentoo wiki, which doesn't show up early enough in web searches on the topic.

I don't think that caffeine is my friend anymore.

Thursday 17 April 2008 at 3:41 pm My attention span is shot to hell, and has been for about two weeks now.

Time to start cutting back my daily coffee intake.

Fribet: A RAT that chews holes in SQL servers.

Thursday 17 April 2008 at 3:12 pm Since the country of China stepped up its activities in Tibet hundreds of pro-Tibet websites have been springing up all across the Net. Predictably, some subset of those sites are being compromised by pro-Communist China crackers, which is a popular political maneuver (of questionable effectiveness). Not content to merely deface these sites, some of them are being infected with a malware agent called Fribet, which attacks vulnerabilities in the user's web browser to silently install itself. Fribet not only sets up a backdoor into the system that allows it to be remotely controlled but it is capable of attacking other machines on the same network as the infected host - specifically, it makes use of the SQL Native Client ODBC library (which is on most Windows machines by default, so far as I know) which gives it the capability of attacking MS SQL servers on the local network. Now, an infected machine going after other boxes on the network is bad enough, but when you take into account how widely spread IFRAME poisoning attacks are these days, this should give one pause.

Often, IFRAME poisoning attacks are performed by exploiting SQL injection vulnerabilities to alter the content of a website kept in a database, or by inserting references to remotely includable files elsewhere on the Net. In theory, you can put anything into a database, including HTML code that silently appears along with content. This HTML code can be used to attack vulnerabilities in the web browser. However, SQL injection attacks stick out like a sore thumb in a web server's logs; direct connections to a database, on the other hand, are rarely recorded for later analysis. Because this little beastie is capable of making direct connections to other database servers, it is now possible to compromise sites much more rapidly than the "search Google for a particular URL and fire an exploit at each returned result" attempts.

The origin of and solution to Google Calendar spam... for now, anyway.

Thursday 17 April 2008 at 2:03 pm Early last month I wrote a short article about having recieved spam to my Gmail account that automatically added itself to my personal calendar. As I'd expected, I wasn't the only one who'd recieved one of these, and that it would be a matter of time before Someone Out There had the time to really look into it. As it turns out, anyone can send an invitation to a Gmail account and have it automatically added to an associated calendar because such invitations are automatically added by default (regardless of poor sentence structure). I would guess that this is so that the recipient doesn't forget about the event in the event that circumstances change. Preventing this from happening in the future is quite simple: Go to your calendar settings and turn off this functionality.

Next up, posts that don't suck once I get used to this new text editor.

When windbreakers are too professional, along comes these.

Thursday 17 April 2008 at 1:45 pm Yeah, yeah, this is late. Work before blog and all that.

Last year bulletproof windbreakers hit the private security market, with all of the usual implications that personal protection brings. Now a company with the unusual name of Bladerunner has perfected bulletproof hooded sweatshirts that are supposedly proof against 9mm rounds. Called the L300 Defender, this hoodie combines teen fashion with a relatively new fiber called Dyneema, which is supposed to be thinner than the Kevlar thread used to manufacture bulletproof vests but just as strong. The inventor of the L300 and owner of Bladerunner, one Barry Samms, says that the easiest way to disguise the fact that one is wearing personal armor is to make it not look like armor at all. He does raise a valid point in saying that putting a zipper down the front of something designed to withstand shots from a handgun at close range compromises the protectiveness of the garment.

Once again, life imitates Cybergeneration. You can, too, assuming that it's legal for you to own one.

The L300 Defender is set to hit the market later this month with a starting price of 300 £. Availability in the US is sketchy at this time.

Another weekend in the nation's capital.

Monday 14 April 2008 at 11:37 pm Aside from a few bouts of tenderness in the new dental work on Saturday, the pain and infection in that one particular molar are gone. Praise be to the gods of dental medicine. I go in on Friday morning to get fitted for the mounting post and temporary crown. Whether or not I'll be able to afford them is a different matter entirely. Time will tell, as it always does.

On Saturday, Lyssa and I meet up my mother and Judy, who happened to be in DC taking a bus tour of the nation's capital. Even though they were staying at a hotel just a few miles from our apartment, their tour was planned out on a minute-to-minute basis, so there was little time to hang out and wander around the city. Lyssa and I met up with them at the Ronald Reagan building downtown and after wandering around the building a bit (amazingly, my usual batman factor cleared the metal detector without raising any eyebrow -- even the Leatherman), we wound up in the basement at the food court for lunch. Down there we spent the next few hours catching up on the past few months, talking about everything going on, and stuff like that. Being a family, in fact. It sounds so strange to say that after so many years, probably because I've said it so little, but it's true.

We even caught part of the Sakura Festival from slightly behind the scenes; Saturday was the last day, in fact. Every year, we make plans to go and see what's going on, but somehow we never quite seem to make it for one reason or another. It kept threatening to rain on Saturday, but thankfully it held off until Lyssa and I got home. It was all too soon that we had to head back because we found the rest of the tour group. Unfortunately, they didn't get to see our apartment.

I dropped Lyssa off at home and then headed out to the Mad Scientist Coffee Klatsch to get a cup or two of coffee and hang out with everyone. I wound up talking about Babylon-5 with Jason and Hasufin after we got off on some tangent or other about the relative power levels of First Ones and younger races in that particular series, and tied it all up with gaming. Jason's developing a B-5 campaign around Mongoose Games' RPG (you know the one - the one that doesn't suck). Hopefully things will slow down soon, and we'll be able to start up our gaming nights again.

To avoid pushing my luck (and already compromised immune system) too far, I spent the evening at home hacking around with ISC BIND v9.4 to see if I could get DNS zone views working (which means that depending upon which side of the firewall you're on, trying to resolve the same hostname will result in a different IP address), and I think that I've got the configuration worked out. By writing about it on a Monday, this pretty much assures that something's going to go ker-flooey before the week is up. Time will tell.

Sunday was kind of a slow day. Lyssa and I got off to a rather late start (mostly because I slept in) and wound up going to Anita's for lunch. I don't know what's happened since March, but every time we've been there the service has been horribly slow, and you can only eat so many chips before you start wondering when the real food's going to come. It's getting a little annoying, and I'm definitely going to stay away from there for a while to see if things even out there a little bit.

Sunday night brought with it an unexpected bit of excitement: While cleaning Lucy the hamster's cage, we put said hamster into her plastic runny-ball and turned her loose in the apartment so I could wash out the cage and plastic basin. About halfway through the process, when I walked into the kitchen to get a roll of paper towels, I was quite surprised to see one plastic hamster ball and one lid to a hamster ball, but a notable lack of the ball's pilot. Somehow, Lucy had managed to slip the lid and get loose again. I took a quick glance around the apartment, but didn't see a small, fuzzy black critter running around anywhere. I called Lyssa out of the office and went to find my flashlight so that I could look behind or underneath everything in the apartment that Lucy customarily explored while still safely enclosed in a six-inch hollow plastic sphere, such as under the couch, behind the home entertainment system, and behind everything in the kitchen. Thankfully, Lyssa found Lucy by the wall behind the dining room table, and after a bit of fumbling and trying to grab her without causing any injury, I was able to scoop her up and drop her back into the runny-ball so that I could finish fixing the cage back up. Note to self: Try to get Lucy used to being handled more, so she won't squirm out of our hands. Further note to self: Look into putting Lucy into the bathtub when we clean her cage, because she can neither climb nor jump out of it.

The month of April is fired.

Friday 11 April 2008 at 11:17 pm No, more than that. If I could nuke the month of April clean off of the human calendar, I'd do just that. There'd be a big, 30 day gap between March and June where nothing would have a chance to go wrong, blow up, or otherwise try to fuck people without the usual accoutrements of dinner, a couple of drinks, and some lubricant first.

First of all, my federal income taxes got screwed up this year. Somehow, I was marked as already married on my W-2 form, which means that not enough money was taken out up front for taxes. This means that I wound up owing Uncle Sam money. A lot of money. $4300us, to be precise.

Secondly, work has been such that it's now seriously affecting my health. Not only has it turned my sleep schedule on its head, so that I'm lucky to get about three hours of rest per night, but it's also distracted my body's immune system by trash-talking at it while something nasty snuck up behind it and whacked it over the head with a folding chair. I think I've been running a low-grade fever for at least a couple of days, and at work today after standing up, I suddenly broke into a cold sweat and felt the urgent need to sit down again - hard. All of this had the signs of dental work going bad. Then, around 0930, during my first cup of coffee (wouldn't you know), the second molar on the top left side of my mouth started throbbing all the way up into my left eye socket. I ran down to CVS to pick up a bottle of Motrin (horse doctor's size) to get me through the day, but while the pain eventually faded to an unusual sensitivity to pressure, I still couldn't concentrate.

In hindsight, I think the inability to concentrate, inability to sleep, random headaches, irritability, and unusual tiredness and lethargy should be filed away under the tag "Hey, dumbass - dental trouble off the starboard bow!"
More under the cut...

Pictures from the wedding, et al.

Monday 07 April 2008 at 11:12 pm Pictures from the wedding of Elwing and Irregular Expression are now online.

My .plan file has also been updated. Warning: Some NSFW content.

I have no idea what you're talking about...

Monday 07 April 2008 at 10:58 pm ...so here's a merangue cookie floating in hot chocolate.

Back from Elwing's wedding.

Monday 07 April 2008 at 10:42 pm I'm proud to day that the wedding of Elwing and Irregular Expression went amazingly well, and with no major hitches to speak of. Congratulations, you two.

After my last post from Elwing's place on Saturday afternoon, I loaded the TARDIS up for the trip back to the Strong Mansion in Maryland as the best... what would you call the female counterpart of a Best Man, anyway? Best Woman? Best Friend? Google's copy of The Groom's Guide says that Best Lady is appropriate, so that's what I'll use henceforth. Resuming, Sarah, the Best Lady, helped Brian (who was unfortunately still quite ill, even after spending the night with a cup of honeyed tea in one hand and a dose of Nyquil in the other) get everything packed up in her car so that we could caravan back out to Sugarloaf Mountain. The trip took only about forty five minutes due to the lightness of traffic on route 270 north, and thanks to the gotcha of the night before I was able to get there in plenty of time regardless of the lack of GPS navigation capability that far off the grid (as evidenced by the fact that the in-built maps have no roads stored for that area).

Here's the thing about being the officiant: Once you're there, there isn't a whole lot to do until the actual wedding ceremony starts. One could sit around drinking coffee and reading the paper, if one so chose, but I'm not the sort who can do that. For the next couple of hours I wandered around more or less aimlessly, helping out where I could. Moving stuff? Check. Tracking down the wedding license, special pens, and suchlike? Done. Checking the ornate silver coffee urns to see if they'd been pressed into service yet? As if I had to mention that. Wandering around the mansion's grounds?

Oh, yes. You betcha.

If you want to picture what the Strong Mansion is like, picture whatever country or mountaintop mansion you like best from television or the movies, and you won't be too far off the mark. You've got your rolling hills, your steep hills, your outcroppings of natural marble that make up the mountainside itself, the woods re-awakening after a winter's slumber, the signs of a woodpecker busily looking for grubs to eat (as evidenced by the neat, round holes punched into most every tree in the woods), and a beautiful view from the hilltop overlooking the valley... I'll post photographs later.

More under the cut.
More under the cut...

A whirlwind recap of the links that piled up in my blogfodder folder.

Saturday 05 April 2008 at 2:21 pm Medical doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital have discovered that hydrogen sulfide gas can cause the metabolic processes of mammalian cells to drop drastically, thus approximating a state of suspended animation. By breathing a low concentration of the gas the heart rates of experimental animals plummeted rapidly without a corresponding drop in blood pressure or the need for refrigeration; moreover, the state appears to be reversible. This means that the organism requires less oxygen in the depressed state, which means that cells remain viable much longer. The surgical applications should be obvious.

The Internet Storm Center reported not too long ago that a new form of malware has been released on the Net. Rather than sending spam, or being used to packet storm networks into oblivion it it searches the machine it's infected for PGP keyrings, which are then transmitted overseas as well as installing a keylogger that could record the passphrase to unlock the private keys. Net result: An attacker could impersonate you by forging digital signatures and decrypting files and messages sent to the real owner of the keyrings. As cryptographers have known for years, if you can't attack the cryptosystem, attack the people using it because they're less resilient. At least the attack doesn't involve trips to Guantanamo Bay or having bits of your body struck with a telephone book.

Holy crap: Light-up mechanical wings as fashion accessory. Their price starts at $1kus, but when you factor in the facts that they're built out of laminated carbon fibre, extruded aluminum, and use compressed air to extend and retract the six foot wingspan (a small electric pump is used to recharge the compressed air reservoir) the cost makes sense.

Late last year I covered a series of police investigations about SWATting, a nasty prank pulled by modern phone phreaks in which telephone calls to local 911 are spoofed; the calls are generally about false crimes of a magnitude which requires the presence of a SWAT team, hence the name. Whenever someone gets SWATted it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that all hell will break loose at the house in question because SWAT teams give no quarter nor take one - that's their job. Not too long ago, however, one Randal Ellis of Mulkiteo, Washington plead guilty to computer access fraud, false imprisonment by violence (i.e., the SWAT team), falsely reporting a crime, and assault with a firearm due to taking part in SWATting. Ellis was sentenced to three years in prison and a fine in excess of $14kus.

Last and not least, dental science may have discovered a way to regenerate tooth enamel in humans, which would hopefully render fillings obsolete. Enamel and dentin are some of the strongest materials in the human body, which is also why they're the trickiest to work with. The structure of a tooth is far more complex than high school health class would have you believe: Enamel has a unique crystalline structure that makes it very hard, and dentin can be compared to a very dense, hard clay with fibers of collagen running through it. However, both are suceptible to weak acids, such as those secreted by the bacteria living in one's mouth as a byproduct of metabolism. Laboratory tests have been able to remineralize parts of teeth after they've been cleaned of bacteria and decay, but the process probably won't be practical for another decade or so. Still we (meaning, people with teeth as bad or worse than mine) can hope...

No rest for the righteous or the wicked.

Saturday 05 April 2008 at 1:49 pm Work was work this week, and that's the fairest thing that can be said about it. It wasn't glamourous, it wasn't fun, and it wasn't an adventure, but it wasn't horrible, either. It's long, tiring, and a case study in how badly screwed up things can be without actually self-destructing. Consequently, I haven't been sleeping a whole lot, nor have I had the time nor energy to post here.

I have a cat in my lap that knows that I don't own a cat, and is ensuring that my good clothes (trousers, shirt, and waistcoat) will be covered with cat hair in time for the wedding ceremony later today. I need a roll of duct tape, and fast.

Yes, about the wedding ceremony... Elwing and Irregular Expression will be getting married a couple of hours hence, and they've asked me to officiate. To that end, I left work early yesterday, drove up to Maryland in general and Sugarloaf Mountain in particular, guided by my trust GPS navigation system, and discovered that I didn't know exactly where I was going because roads stop a) having names, and b) showing up in GPS maps that far off the grid. For those of you that've been there, it's only a few notches beneath the Four Quarters Farm in terms of technical accessibility. As it turned out, I was almost there, but didn't go far enough back on the road labelled 'NO ACCESS' in big, friendly letters on the sign. This meant that I got to the rehearsal forty-five minutes late and running on petrol fumes.

Those of you who know me are utterly unsurprised, I can tell. I don't hear any headslaps.

Rehearsal went as well as can be expected - better to get all the mistakes out of the way now rather than during the ceremony itself.

Weddings have their own special brand of worry and distress unavailable anywhere else, though accessible to anyone in attendance regardless of whether or not you're the people getting married. In my case, this means worrying about getting lost, running out of time, family crisis that no one can reasonably do anything about (like Uncle Foobar suddenly having a heart attack, cousin Alice and cousin Bob getting dry gulched by second cousin Eve because they drank the last martini at the rehearsal dinner the night
before, or brother 'Checkpoint' Charlie suddenly coming down with a migraine headache and being rushed to the hospital with the wedding band still in his pocket), or most of all, whether or not the state of Maryland honours weddings performed by ministers of the Universal Life Church, which I happen to be.

This was almost a show-stopper last year at the wedding of 'lex and Marlise, but we managed to pull a rabbit out of a hat and make it work, no thanks to the state of Pennsylvania. In Maryland, however, all of my research shows that we shouldn't have any problems later today.

But I ramble. I ramble, but I worry.

After the rehearsal dinner last night, I stayed at the Marriott in Maryland because I was too tired to drive back home. I'm at Elwing's place right now with one of the cats in my lap typing this.

On other fronts, things are home are going extremely well. My mother is entering her fourth month of not smoking, an amazing accomplishment. My grandfather is doing much better these days, also. I miss hacking code. There are a lot of personal things that I need to finish but haven't had time or energy to work on. I wasn't able to up the bandwidth at home last weekend because our apartment is just over 14,000 feet away from the Verizoff central office, which means that trying to squeeze anything more out of the DSL line is going to make service unstable. No more bandwidth for me.

Not much time from work today, but here's a quickie.

Tuesday 01 April 2008 at 12:27 pm Video footage of the first fully viable cyborg insects has been posted to the Net by cyberneticists at Cambridge University. They've managed to tap into the visual processing neural networks of dragonflies and horseflies to use them as drones.