Paralipsis

Who knew that shouting could cause disk problems.

I just received my Android DEV phone in the mail and discovered it’s a bit tricky to set up without purchasing the special service plan that T-Mobile wants you to buy at around $40/month. Unfortunately you CAN NOT setup your android phone without first logging in and syncing to a google account. This [...]

I held off for as long as I could before purchasing an Android phone. Frankly once they offered an unlocked restriction free developer version, it was hard to resist.
Next is to get the build environment working and start tinkering with the OS. Top on my list is figuring out if vpnc can be made [...]

There’s really nothing like some new hardware to get the blood pumping. I’ve been converting my sad, old, NFS + LDAP serving cluster over to a fancy new Kerberos + AFS + LDAP + XEN environment. Virtualization is truly awesome, being able to create and reboot hosts at will without concern for the [...]

reCAPTCHA is awesome and I’m shocked I haven’t heard about it before. This is an absolutely brilliant example of distributing a little bit of work to many people in a socially productive way. Whomever is behind this is a genius and deserves a firm handshake.
In a nutshell, reCAPTCHA provides a free (!) [...]

Joe Davis has an excellent exercise in exploration and expansion of concepts. You must check out Telescopic Text.

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 [...]