Paralipsis

The folks over at Bad Astronomy really put it best, “Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.”

Think on this, and think on it carefully: you are seeing a manmade object falling gracefully and with intent to the surface of an alien world, as seen by another manmade object already circling […]

With the moving of ubuntu from the old fashioned init to the modern upstart, the daemontools svscanboot package doesn’t cleanly install. Here’s how to fix it. The daemontools-installer package modifies /etc/inittab to cause the svscan/svscanboot process to launch. With upstart, there is no /etc/inittab, instead it is replaced with a collection of config files in /etc/event.d.

Microsoft has published tips on how to make vista run faster and in a nutshell, the tips are:

Run fewer programs (though they have to repeat it SIX times)
Defragment your hard drive (welcome to 1990)
Turn off visual effects (isn’t that what the whole point of vista is?)
Restart your computer regularly
Buy more memory

And if none of that […]

Marcus Ranum has an excellent article which I find myself going back to often, it’s titled The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. My favorite is number five, Educating Users.
On the surface of things, the idea of “Educating Users” seems less than dumb: education is always good. On the other hand, like “Penetrate […]

Project Blackbox by Sun is certainly a fascinating concept. The infrastructure needs are significant, and what would be truly awesome is if they came up with a standardized set of quick-release power and cooling couplers. That would make this a truly useful piece of technology. Nicholas Carr’s comments regarding the utilitization of […]

I like a person who takes their pencils as seriously as ninthwave does.
In my search for a replacement of what I consider the best pencil ever manufactured, I needed to find a pencil that had at least these qualities established by the Blackwing 602:
1. Dark smooth graphite with a slightly waxy feel […]

Today the shuttle launched the shuttle Discovery on STS-121. The cool thing, though, was that I was able to easily watch it live, streaming under Linux.
All that I needed to do was go to the NASA TV streaming video page and view the windows media player stream. The stream uses the WMV9 codec […]

I’ve started a new website, Daily UML which is intended to serve as a regularly updated site giving examples and discussion of UML issues. The first post is up and with luck I’ll be able to keep up a five-posts/week schedule. Since it has a specific technical focus, I’m hoping the update schedule […]

The new Apple store in New York, New York is absolutely incredible looking. At least from the outside. The rather pedestrian looking Apple stores in the Los Angeles area are entirely unworthy of visiting now. What really kills me is that the store is supposedly to be open 24/7!
I live in a […]

The pictures to the right from Richard Stiennon’s post on Threat Chaos show the paths of the system calls used by IIS on Win32 and Apache on POSIX to service a single HTTP request. This pictures demonstrates, fundamentally, why IIS on Win32 is simply a bad engineering choice when it comes to security.
Every system […]