It says something, I think, when someone spends most every day of the past week going to bed at 2100 local time and sleeping clear through until 0600. Plus a nap after coming home from work. An essay I've been working on has been at a low simmer for a few days now until I've got enough neurons online to turn it into a coherent whole. I've got pictures to post that I haven't gotten around to yet.
Come to think of it, I've got two more disposable cameras that I haven't gotten developed yet.
The board of directors of Saloncon announced a couple of days ago that there will not be a Saloncon in 2009. The board is not in a position to spend the money necessary to get it off the ground this year, unfortunately. Also, given the rising rate of unemployment this year (7.2% and climbing, as of December of 2008) and the generally sad state of the economy there is a high probability that many fewer people would be able to attend this year. They are working on throwing a charity event at Teaberrys instead but it isn't known if …
Maintenance on Leandra is finished. I took her offline around 2100 ESET5EDT on Saturday night to remove a dead DVD-ROM drive, remove a pair of 512GB memory modules that weren't doing anything, and swap out her 250 GB hard drive for a 500 GB drive. The RAID array has had 250 GB added to it; specifically, the logical volume holding everything but the /boot and / partitions has had 250 GB added to it. 15 GB from the free pool was added to /usr (so that more software could potentially be installed) and the rest of the free disk space was …
On 24 and 25 January 2008, HacDC, a hacker space located in Washington, DC will be holding a RepRap build-a-thon in conjunction with the Baltimore RepRap User's Group. The build-a-thon starts at 10:00am EST5EDT on Saturday and will run until 3:00pm EST5EDT Sunday.
The RepRap is an open source rapid prototyper which is unusual in two ways: first, it is affordable for the home hobbyist to both construct and operate (typically, it costs $500us to build a RepRap from scrach, compared to the $49,000+ that industrial rapid prototypers cost). Second, the RepRap is capable …
After running around for much of Friday night running errands (like exchanging a hard drive for a faster model) and getting to bed later than expected, Lyssa and I slept in later than we'd expected on Saturday morning - 1100 EST5EDT, to be precise. While that happens to be my usual weekend get-up time Lyssa's is significantly earlier, which basically means that we got a late start to the day. I hurried to get dressed in some of my finest clothes because I was headed downtown that afternoon for the January 2009 Chrononaut's Stroll, organized by G.D. Falksen. In recent …
Earlier this evening, my wife recieved an unusual text message to her phone:
"From: No Caller ID "Date: 1/6/09 5:55 pm "This is an automated message from Arlington Virginia FCU. Your ATM card has been suspended. To reactivate call urgent at (800) 295-3174."
I don't think I have to state that neither Lyssa nor myself have accounts with the Arlington, VA Federal Credit Union.
So I've been doing some detective work on who sent this and I've found out a few things. Unfortunately, because the initial contact came via a text message I don't have any way …
If you've been following net.news in the past twenty-four to forty-eight hours you heard about what went down at the Chaos Computer Congress yesterday - a group of security researchers figured out how to exploit the flaws in the MD5 hash algorithm to forge CA certificates, thus placing SSL encryption as we know it in jeopardy.
...right? Breaking SSL is bad, yeah?
Like many things in life (and nearly everything in cryptography) it's not that simple or that straightforward. Yes, this is bad, but it's not "go back to punchcards" bad.
The powers that be saw fit to give everyone at work an opportunity to go home four hours early on 24 December 2008, the better to go home and get ready for Christmas Eve. To that end, I sniffled and honked a bit and set course for home where Lyssa was still hard at work. I sat down to fill out my paperwork for the week (such is the life of a professional contractor), packed a duffel bag for the weekend, and slowly came to the conclusion that I'd somehow caught the beginnings of a cold earlier in the day …
