It is somewhat stereotypical that folks who didn't grow up with a lot of money or are considered lower class than whomever you happen to be tend to have bad teeth. Braces cost a lot; I don't know how much they are these days but when I was a kid it was a couple of grand easily. Dental insurance is still not very common these days ("Do you offer dental?" is still a question people ask when looking for a new job), and dental insurance that actually covers anything is even more difficult to find. Plus, USian healthcare being what …

A couple of weeks back, as part of our continuing education program at my dayjob I ran a hands-on class on locksport, the quasi-science (perhaps art) of picking locks for fun and... well... fun.  I'm a security wonk so most of the talks I run have some security content in them, but I wanted to do something that was fairly suitable for everyone (coders and not).  So, I got the go-ahead to expense a few more locks and some intro picksets to give away from The Lockpick Shop (no consideration for mentioning or using them, they had what I needed …

On Saturday, 8 October 2011 I will be at HacDC giving an impromptu class on personal privacy, online anonymity, and operational security for activists. I will be talking about some of the online surveillance technologies in use right now, risks inherent in organizing online and how to mitigate them, practical cryptography, practical anonymity, and operational security. If you are not familiar with using PGP or GnuPG and would like to generate and distribute a key or learn how to send and receive encrypted and signed e-mail, I can walk you through the process during the class. I will probably be …

Thursday nights at HacDC for the next couple of weeks have been taken up with a nifty new class courtesy of Elliot - a basic electronics course in the guise of building noisemakers. From basic oscillator theory we moved on to... I couldn't make it to the second class due to a scheduling conflict, truth be told, so I don't know what was taught. Jade and I did make it to the third class which was about low-pass filters (which allow low frequencies to pass (the definition of 'low' is highly situational) but filter out high frequencies), how to vary the …

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 …

After a long and unfortunately tiring week, I limped my way home after work to be greeted by Lyssa and Laurelinde, who had been kind enough to put dinner together. Lyssa's been on a jerk chicken kick lately, not that I'm complaining, it's one of her best dishes, and often just what I need after dealing with.. well.. work. Afterward we packed up the leftovers and set about gathering clothing and laundry, for we'd be vacationing (sort of) at Laurelinde's place for the weekend.

You see, there's something that you need to know about the apartment complex that Lyssa and …

GNU Screen makes coding so much easier: Run screen to multiplex your shell, then run a text editor in one, a debugger in another, have another shell open to compile.. no more mousing between windows. There isn't much of a learning curve, if you feel comfortable coding under Unix (or using the Cygwin tools for Windows) you'll pick it up in no time.