More interesting information has come to light due to the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial, going on right now in DC. It was one thing for an ambassador to find out that the tales spun into the news were fabricated but the White House was having daily meetings to plan how best to discredit the damning information. It seems that Dick Cheney didn't take well to their misinformation tactics going down in flames.
The good news is that Lyssa is all right; as I alluded to yesterday, she's been in a considerable amount of pain over the past couple of days. Rialian was nice enough to drive her to the doctor's office yesterday afternoon and it's been determined that she might have temporomandibular joint dysfunction. We're working on getting her to a dentist who specialises in such things to find out for certain, and thus set a course of treatment. She now has a prescription for painkillers that can actually cut the pain caused when the trigeminal nerve, which carries a large amount …
Mark Nicholas, formerly known as the synthpop act Cosmicity, has released his first album in four years, entitled Duchess 33. Cosmicity wrapped in the year 2003 with the release of Escape Pod for Two, which marked a turning point in his life. Mark got married, you see, and that changed his creative outlook on life quite a bit, if tales told are true.
Mark's an awesome guy; I got to meet him at the Summer Synthpop 2000 Festival way back when, and he's a lot of fun to talk to. However, seeing as how this is his first release since …
Wireless net.access is not yet ubiquitous, but it's pretty common and becoming moreso every day for a variety of reasons. Net.access is definitely in enough demand that a lot of places sell wireless access to whomever is willing to pay for it. If you're lucky, you'll get a good price on an hourly rate or a daypass, but if you're not you'll get reamed on the price of daily access (I remember one hotel I stayed at in Florida that demanded $30us per day for 802.11b access). This has angered some people to the point at which …
The Seventh Circuit of the US Court of Appeals has decided that it does not violate any of your rights for police to place a GPS tracking unit on your vehicle if they have probable cause. The case in question has to do with someone whose car was tagged with a locator beacon by the police because they thought that he was up to something. He says that it violated his fourth amendment right to freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. The thing is, it wasn't a search or a seizure. In fact, I'd say it was no different from …
The more densely packed computing circuitry becomes, the fast it can run, in part because the connection paths are so short. Until room-temperature superconductors are invented, passing an electrical current through a physical connection, no matter how short, will prevent the current from running at the speed of light due to the phenomenon of electrical resistence. Another problem arises as a result of densely packing circuitry: Heat. Lots of heat.
This is a problem that can't really be eliminated, because heat is a natural manifestation of entropy. When you lose decoherence in anything for any reason waste heat is generated …
MD5 hashes are not only good for digital signatures, they're good for making sure that files you've downloaded weren't corrupted. However, a directory full of files can prove problematic because you have to cat the text file of MD5 sums to expect, run md5sum against a file, compare it visually.. it can get annoying afte a short period of time. Thankfully, the GNU implementation of the md5sum utility has the option --check, which lets you pass a text file of lines ("MD5 = ") to the utility. It will automatically compute an MD5 sum of each file in the text file and …
In this modern age of viruses, worms, and script kiddies, there are manufacturers who will, in fact, pitch a fit if you try to install a security patch of any kind. There are also network-accessible appliances out there that require the use of telnet and eschew SSH for secure administrative connections.
It's a good idea to assign values to variables as close to where they'll be used as possible so that you don't lose track of what they are called or what they're supposed to do.
Write the simplest regular expression that'll do the job that you can, so you'll …