Hurricane Gustav incoming.

Sunday 31 August 2008 at 11:32 pm If you haven't been paying attention this weekend (like me, actually), hurricane Gustav is headed toward the coast, and Louisiana is once again squarely in the line of fire. I've heard that Gustav is currently a category 3 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, and it's expected to hit category 4 at some point.

You know, there isn't a whole lot that I can say on this topic because someone far more erudite than I said them far better than I ever could. However, I'm collecting links to resources that I hope will be of help to everyone.

First and foremost, Radio Reference has set up a resource wiki for people who still have connectivity. There are links to Shoutcast streams coming from communication nets in the general area, conferencing servers, and other things that'll be of assistance.

Something I'm considering doing is building a few of these portable telecommunications relays to connect some VOIP phones to the Net by way of a series of wireless repeaters, where people can then get in contact with people outside of the zone.

It's been posted to the Scan-DC mailing list that the Hurricane Center is broadcasting on 14.325 MHz (thanks, W3CQH). 7.268 MHz and 3.950 MHz are also part of the Hurricane Watch Net, which is coordinated by station WX4NHC (thanks, James Richardson). Scanner frequencies for the National Guard are being posted to the blog Milcom Monitoring Post (thanks, Punworg).

Jessica Melusine has posted her own list of Gustav resources, such as charities that are already involved in organizing relief efforts, Habitat for Humanity, and the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital.

I'm going to be updating this post as I find more stuff. If anyone reading this comes across helpful links, please post them in the comments and I'll add them.

I don't know what else I can do but try to put people in touch with the right people right now. I'm not down there, and I don't think I can get down there anytime soon, but I can help keep the lines of communication open.
More under the cut...

Engineering and re-engineering over the long weekend.

Sunday 31 August 2008 at 10:36 pm If you normally browse my website directly (i.e., not using an RSS feed aggregator of some kind) you'll see that I made some major changes to the front page late last night. For the past couple of days I've been profiling load times and such like, and discovered that I could improve the code and structure markedly with some changes. I've been using the Firebug and YSlow plugins to see where the bottlenecks were, and as a result I removed a half-dozen or so badges from weblog directories that did little else but add to the page loading time. I also restructured the links along the sidebar so that it was better organized and put the useful bits near the top and the archives at the bottom, which flows better visually I think. The Delicious links are rather incongruous; I'll figure out what to do with them later.

The tag cloud? Had to go. It kept trapping search engines.

Yesterday afternoon the folks down at HacDC had a free afternoon class on Python, an object-oriented scripting language on just about every platform you could care to mention. Just as was said in XKCD, it really is that easy. Because you don't have to worry nearly as much about variable typing (even less so than in Perl) and it does a lot of heavy lifting (like error detection and handling). I also very much like the fact that it's mature enough that people are writing whole applications in it. For example, many Gnome apps.

Note to self: Clear my next project with $boss before starting on it.
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Privacy policy.

Sunday 31 August 2008 at 01:31 am It's about time I got around to writing this - my website's privacy policy.

The Apache web server maintains logs of all accesses - every PHP page, every HTML page, every image file, every JavaScript snippet gets logged with your IP address, like so:

192.168.1.254 - - [30/Aug/2008:21:45:44 -0400] "GET /pivot/index.php HTTP/1.1" 200 14346 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008081820 Gentoo Firefox/3.0.1"

Logs are kept for nine (9) weeks only - the current week is the active one, the previous eight (8) weeks are kept on disk in compressed format for the purposes of security auditing, debugging, and usage tracking. I analyze usage tracking because I'm curious about how people use my site and what they look at most often. Every Sunday night, the oldest archived log file is erased to conserve disk space. Various kinds of analytic software are used to digest the logs for usage tracking; analyses are archived for one (1) calendar year and the oldest are automatically erased to conserve disk space.

One of these days, I'll put my page of weird search results (without any identifying information) back up for the amusement and edification of everyone.

When you leave comments on posts, your e-mail address is not publically exposed. It's used internally so that you can be notified if anyone responds to your comment. By no means do you have to give real info when you do this.

Every once in a while I'll link to things sold on Amazon which are associated with my Amazon Associates account. If you happen to buy whatever is linked to, I'll get a few cents of credit which goes toward books or music. If you just click on the link, I don't get anything. I don't know who clicks on them, so I can't use them for data mining or usage tracking. You're not under any obligation to buy anything (but if you do buy me something from my wishlist I'll be grateful and think you're awesome).

I also make use of Google Analytics on my site, which means that every PHP and HTML file has a link to a chunk of Javascript hosted on one of Google's servers. That Javascript is used to gather usage information which I examine periodically to see what people are looking at on and how they're making use of my site. If you disagree with this, I recommend that you a) run Firefox and b) make use of the Customize Google add-on, which has a setting that dodges Google Analytics. I happen to use it, and recommend it highly for this reason.

That's it, really. If this changes anytime in the future, I'll update this post and tell everyone that it's been edited.

Now I get the hype about the NIA.

Friday 29 August 2008 at 8:02 pm A couple of months back there was quite a bit of hype (which vanished rapidly as people forgot all about it when the next new thing came around) about the NIA brain-computer interface from OCZ Technology (which is also known for its build-your-own-laptop kits). Ostensibly, it's a consumer-grade, non-invasive EEG that you strap across your forehead and jack into a small interface unit which then plugs into a USB port on your computer. The unit comes with drivers that can map certain inputs from the dermatrodes (good call, Mr. Gibson) to keyboard and mouse events defined by the user.. the upshot of this means that you can, once you get good at it, use learned thought patterns to carry out tasks, such as moving around inside a spreadsheet or playing video games.

I must confess, I was highly skeptical of devices like this when I first heard about them. In undergrad I knew that there were a few people playing around with homebrew versions of this technology but they never really released any specific information so, without proof, I had to write them off as rumours. I also recall the Nintendo Powerglove, which wasn't a very good way to play games but was nifty to hack around with. Revolutionary devices for user-computer interface usually aren't, unfortunately.

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked.
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Work progresses on the sonic screwdriver.

Wednesday 27 August 2008 at 7:01 pm One of the main reasons that I've been hanging out at HacDC lately is the fact that they've got a pretty well stocked electronics lab in the loft. There are shelves on the walls holding parts for sale and parts that have been salvaged from discarded equipment, boxes and boxes of spare everything you can imagine, and a couple of racks of power tools and other sundry equipment... in short, all stuff I don't have at my apartment.

More the point, the HacDC loft is a place where I can safely work on projects and not mess up the environment. Like the good couch. Or the kitchen table.

So, here's what I got done...
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Getting down to the wire.

Monday 25 August 2008 at 8:04 pm Time's getting down to the wire and there's no escaping it. The wedding is now two solid months away and Lyssa and I are scrambling to get our plans in motion. Last week the invitations came back from the printer, the directory of local hotels came back from Kinko's (I'll mirror them here to make it easier), and the custom printed stamps that my mother had made up for were put to use. Last week, parts of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were spent writing names and addresses, stuffing envelopes, and sticking things together. I spent a goodly amount of Friday evening riffling through archived papers and e-mails searching for snail mail addresses, e-mailing and texting people, and making phone calls. While I personally have no problem addressing invitations by handle, I'm told that it lacks a certain amount of decorum and etiquette (to say nothing of the arcane vicissitudes of the US Postal service, which seems to think nothing of sending bills addressed to someone three years dead but won't send a post card to Chainsaw and Dave Tunahead in Minneapolis even if the address is correct).

Lyssa and I relaxed a bit on Friday night by watching the third Ghost in the Shell movie, called Solid State Society. While technically canon, it actually bridges the first and second seasons of the television series rather than the movies. Visually speaking it's as well done as the series, with the same voice actors playing the same characters. If you've watched either the first season or are familiar with the other movies or manga you'll have enough background to understand and appreciate what's going on. Solid State Society takes place two years after the Major resigned from Section Nine and covers the investigation of a series of odd suicides throughout Japan of the future.
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Busy times.

Saturday 23 August 2008 at 2:29 pm I haven't been writing much about what's been going on in my life lately because there's been so much of it. Working out wedding plans, picking out tuxedos, trips to the HacDC loft to work on stuff, hanging out with Zapheus from Brass Goggles, shopping, keeping the apartment picked up.. I haven't had time to write about things like that. Most of the posts I've been putting up lately I actually wrote offline over a period of days in a catch-as-catch-can manner and then cut and pasted them into entries.

I haven't forgotten anyone, and I'll get posts up as soon as I can.

Wedding invitations were mailed out this morning.

By the way.. when did Radio Shack start carrying infra-red LEDs, infra-red sensors, and high-intensity ultraviolet LEDs?

For those of you trying to comment lately but not seeing comments appear, I noticed in Leandra's server logs that some of you don't seem to have Javascript in your web browsers turned on, which causes hashcash to fail, and some of you have been using words that the (seemingly overzealous) spamword blocker has been picking up on. I've removed the words in question from the blocklist, which should fix things. Sorry about that.

Next up: installing mod_gnutls on Leandra so that I can use SSL v3/TLS v1 on the web server to encrypt traffic for all of the websites hosted, not just the frontpage which doesn't have much on it.

Oh, by the way... Saloncon is the weekend of 13 September 2008. Abney Park will be headlining Saturday evening. I'll be the DJ at the dance immediately following, so bring your dancing shoes.

Passwords, passphrases, and practical use.

Thursday 21 August 2008 at 6:18 pm One of the most annoying things about the modern world is that pretty much everything you're likely to use these days, from your network login at work to your webmail account to your bank's website requires a username and password before you can actually do anything. Way back when this functionally didn't used to be such a big deal - people chose easy to guess passwords for their accounts and left it at that. Later on, admins discovered that crackers probably wouldn't spend hours on end guessing passwords, they'd spend a few hours writing software to do it for them (which you can find on the Net with a couple of clever web searches) and accounts would fall. They finally got with the times and required users to choose more and more complex passwords with capital as well as lowercase letters, numbers, and the odd punctuation mark, combinations which are guaranteed to not show up in the dictionary (and are probably not likely to be guessed by password crackers that can mutate dictionary words with the same odd characters). The problem is that passwords start looking more and more like line noise, and because people tend not to remember them, they wind up written down on sticky notes and left in desks and under keyboards. When they do remember their passwords, people often use the same one everywhere so they don't have to remember another string of line noisee.
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Privacy, anonymity, and security, part the first.

Tuesday 19 August 2008 at 10:52 pm Longtime readers of my weblog are no doubt familiar with my preoccuptation with security, which lead to my working in that field of endeavour, and also my interest in personal privacy. A couple of weeks ago, some of my readers asked me what they, as computer users who aren't experts but aren't starting from square zero either could do on a personal level. I thought and thought for a couple of days and put together a list of things, and then realized that making all of it make sense would take much more than a single post because it's not a simple topic at all. Using personal technology to secure one's privacy and anonymity, should they desire it, is a modular topic, however, which lends itself readily to a serialized format.

Like a bunch of blog posts.

The first question that you have to ask yourself is probably the hardest of all... how paranoid do you really need to be? What do you do that would make adding a couple of security measures a worthwhile activity?
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Preparing for the End of Time so soon?

Monday 18 August 2008 at 8:49 pm While browsing the newsfeeds a couple of nights ago, I came across an interesting article from ABC News about people dropping out of workaday life and preparing for the end of the world. From the United States to France to the Russian Confederation, stockpiles of crop seeds are being built, water purefiers are vanishing from the shelves, and basic knowledge about farming, medicine, and engineering is being crammed into many a brain. Normally, this isn't a very interesting phenomenon because people have been doing this for literally centuries - the end of the world as we know it is a hot topic of discussion in the western world thanks to the sex-and-death trip. Sometimes it seems as if you can't throw a crashed hard drive without hitting someone who declares that the apocalypse is coming and we should all be ready for it. Their theories now incorporate magnetic pole reversal, solar flares, world-rending earthquakes, and potentially alien invasion or the second coming (sometimes both).

In truth, I closed my browser window seconds before one particular tidbit of information jumped out at me, and I re-opened it to take a closer look: Rather than Christmas Day, New Year's Day, the Year 2000, 5 May 2000, or any of the other dates that come and go, the date they're shooting for is 21 December 2012. Afficionados of the strange and unusual will recognize this date immediately, but for those of you who aren't up on your western psychedelic mysticism this is the date that the Mayan calendar comes to an end.

Sit back with your drink of choice, and let the Doctor tell you a tale, a yarn spun by another who actually Did the Work and came back to recount his adventures. Unlike the man whose story I'm about to summarize, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon about stuff like this.
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Photographs from Jill's wedding.

Saturday 16 August 2008 at 12:51 am I'm not much at editing pictures, but I've finally got pictures from Jill and Mike's wedding online.

Just a bit late: Jill's wedding.

Friday 15 August 2008 at 9:41 pm About two weeks ago Lyssa and I took a couple of days off from work to drive in the direction of Princeton, New Jersey to attend the wedding of her sister/my future sister in law. Lyssa was Jill's maid of honor, so it was essential that she attend; for a change, I didn't have anything official to do so I was sort of at loose ends much of the time. So, we packed our stuff, loaded up the TARDIS, and steeled ourselves for a cross-country drive to the Garden State. Before we had a chance to depart, we heard a loud "thump!" outside the door of the apartment. Ordinarily, this is not a good sign but as I cautiously peeked around the doorjamb it was neither a group of angry federal marshals, one of my exes, or a sniper accidentally firing a 50 caliber round into the front door but a package from UPS.

Perhaps I should explain.

About a week before Jill's wedding I rediscovered the Dell gift card in the china cabinet which I'd gotten for being such a good customer (eleven years of laptops and counting) earlier this year. Due to the fact that I was on field assignment much of the time I dropped it into the empty sugar bowl in the cabinet and promptly forgot about it, but while cleaning up I noticed the gift card and attached rectangle of white plastic. I wracked my brain for a while to figure out what I should order (even considering ordering a solid-state video camera that looked a bit too much like a gun for my general safety), but it was Lyssa who suggested that I buy myself a digital camera to replace the one on extended loan from my mother, which I really should get back to her. What arrived on my doorstep that morning was a Canon Powershot SD1100 IS, a digital camera about the size of a pack of cards with an image resolution of eight megapixels, a zoom function that's half optical and half digital image extrapolation, and best of all image stabilization algorithms built into the CPU that correct for the jitters (like my hands when I've had too much coffee to drink). In short, it takes wonderful pictures, and it came with a two gigabyte SD card, so as of right now I have more image space than I know what to do with.

So now I had a camera with which to take some (decent) photographs at the wedding.
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Restaurant review: Jaipur

Tuesday 12 August 2008 at 9:53 pm One of the reasons that I haven't been updating much lately is because I've been doing a lot of running around after I get home from work, usually to take care of errands. Every once in a while, though, Lyssa and I make the time to spend with some friends whom we don't get to see during the week. On Saturday night, for example, we gathered up everyone we could after Mad Scientist Coffee and headed out to Jaipur Royal Indian Cuisine (9401 Lee Highway; Unit 105 (at the Circle Towers); Fairfax, VA; 22031; phone 703-766-1111; fax 703-766-1113) for a long-over Indian dinner on the town. Jaipur came highly recommended by not a few people; some said that it's the closest thing to home cooking that they've had while in the States.
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Where did they get this?

Tuesday 12 August 2008 at 9:47 pm I'm at HacDC at the moment, and I'm trying to figure out where the hell they got this.

For the record, the inscription reads "Hot-Shot Electric Shock Prod model B12".

Yes, I'm still alive.

Tuesday 12 August 2008 at 09:50 am Work and travel (mostly the former and some of the latter) have kept me too busy to write much anywhere, let alone in here. I've got scads of pictures from Princeton and Jill's wedding to put up, as well as a run-down of getting out there (making amazing time, let me add), the Nassau Inn, and the wedding itself.

Hopefully I'll have something more substantial to write in short order, ideally by tomorrow night but the end of the week at the very latest.