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GRAFFITI -- July 24, 2006 thru July 30, 2006>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
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July 24, 2006
1110 - Good morning. I'm pricing out the components for a replacement server for our main backup box, right now. As usual, there are too many choices. And my typing is less than stellar, since I cut the tip of my finger cleaning up after making salsa yesterday afternoon.
But I spotted this 19" LCD display deal that I thought you'd like to know about: NewEgg is running a one day sale today on a 19" Viewsonic LCD display. Good specs, excellent price: $209. As Bob said by reply email, "Hmmm. If I needed one, I'd grab it."
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July 25, 2006
0634 - Good morning. I was reading this article from the Perdue Journal and Courier, about the secrets kept so far in reviewing the "Bubble Fusion" work of Rusi Taleyarkhan. There are clear indications that dude was simply making stuff up, and denying colleagues the facilities they needed to prove him right (or wrong). I flatly don't understand the motivations of a scientist who has falsified results. I mean, seriously now, do they ever really believe that no one is going to check up on their results, replicate the conditions and try to duplicate the experiment? That's at the core of what Science is: repeatable results. This sort of behaviour befuddles me. I'm not the brightest bulb in the knife drawer, but I'm sharp enough to know what intellectual honesty is, and how failing to maintain that will destroy a scientific career, and possible take the lab down with it. What's the motivation? Clearly it happens, but why?
Just My Opinion: I stand behind Israel (and not just because being in front of them seems extremely foolhardy). Hezbollah has as members some nasty pieces of work, and all that Israel asked was to be left alone. Hezbollah, a dominant part of Lebanon's political arena, chose to fuck with Israel, and is to blame for the results. If your neighbors harbored illicit gun dealers, but stayed out of your way and didn't cause trouble until one day ... One day your child is kidnapped. Do you (or your proxies, the police) go in to just rescue your child, or do they go in to wipe out the gun dealers, one way or another? Is it your fault if the neighbor's wife dies in the conflict? I think not. The neighbor and his wife harbored and accepted the villains in their house. The consequences belong to them, and to the bad guys. You go in for your daughter, and the bad guys start lobbing Molotov cocktails back over the fence at your house. Your goal SHOULD be to make sure the bad guys are put down. Yeah, collateral damage, blah, blah, blah.
Shit happens, war is hell, and Hezbollah cares not a whit about the human cost of their actions. It sucks to be Lebanese and trapped in the middle of the shitstorm, but there you go. They accepted and allowed Hezbollah, a known terrorist organization, to continue to operate in their society. What? The cost in lives to remove Hezbollah from Lebanon was too high for the Lebanese to pay? The cost of not doing so is now becoming evident. They didn't clean their house, the rats attacked the neighbors, and the neighbors are coming in to clean house for you, and they're pissed. Do you really blame them? Okay, then go to Lebanon and fight for Hezbollah. I have no words that will convince you, I consider you insane, and putting you in combat against the IDF is just another way of putting you down.
It's not a fair comparison? Have you seen what happens when an effective neighborhood watch starts out in a gang-ridden borough? Bad things happen to nice people, but slowly the neighborhood cleans up. But if no one watches, if everyone turns their head and doesn't "see" when a van full of AK-47's is delivered three doors down, eventually there's going to be hell to pay. I don't believe that all people are inately good. Oh, well, so sad. I don't even think you can kill them all. Like fools, there's another born every minute. But liberals and the UN conspire to support bad people all over the world ... because they're misunderstood, or their father beat them, or, or ... sigh. When the bad people poke their heads up too far, say by kidnapping soldiers, or by sending rockets blindly into cities instead of returning the kidnapped soldiers, well, Hell's invoice just came due.
Just My Opinion.
I managed to configure a storage server for about $2800 yesterday. How about an Intel server platform, Pentium D 2.8 GHz processor, 1 G RAM, 3Ware hardware RAID controller, and four 500 G SATA II (3Gb/s, NCQ) hard drives? Yeah, two terabytes raw, one terabyte in the RAID 10 configuration I plan to use. Of course, I could use those four drives as RAID 5 with a hot spare. I may do that, instead. Still, two terabytes of raw storage usable for so little lucre? Amazing. I could buy an equivalent configuration from Penguin Computing for about $3500, but that only has a 350W PS. I've configured an Antec 550W True Power, which won't even breath hard in the setup I'm looking at. Not breathing hard means greater reliability.
Now to see what the day brings. Enjoy your Tuesday, support our troops!
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July 26, 2006
0625 - Good morning. I'm sure that, as readers on this site, everyone is already more aware of vulnerabilities and the mitigation thereof than the average bear. So it is in my "preaching to the choir" mode that I bring to your attention such items as:
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1509
Therein, publicly available exploits are shown to exist for this last round of MS vulnerabilities that were "patched" two weeks ago, on July 11. These include both Windows and MS Office vulnerabilities. Now, many of you legacy OS users are, I know, properly configured to automatically download and apply updates ... but check anyway, please. Use Microsoft Update (not "Windows Update", upgrade if you need to) to check. Better safe than sorry.
Additionally, you've all heard about the latest Powerpoint vulnerabilities that are currently being exploited in the wild, and are not yet patched for. Most of these attacks can be caught by keeping up with updated AV definitions, and by NOT opening documents from within Outlook. Right click on attachments and save them to the local machine. That process invokes the realtime scanning functions of your anti-virus softwarwe. A number of these attacks via powerpoint appear (without close examination of the email headers) to be coming from internal users or people you know. This social engineering tactic can be mitigated by awareness (how likely am I to send any of you a PPT file???) and by using different document flows: Instead of Joe sending Bill a file via email for review, Joe can write the file to shared space on one of the many available servers, and send Bill an email telling him where to go find the file. Then, should Bill get an email purporting to be from Joe, with a PPT attached, it's easier to think, "Hmmm, maybe I ought to look at the headers, or ask Joe if he really sent this to me, because usually he just tells me where the file is."
Email attacks require user participation - you can make it harder for them to succeed.
Yesterday generated a fair bit of mail. One reminder that I was using Niven's Second Law: Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at a man with a gun. That describes the unfortunate position of the Lebanese Christians and Druze. Other commentators suggested that I don't know enough history, that the Israelis are viscious enough in their own way that the Islamics are somehow justified in their actions. And am I aware how blogging can hurt my career? One can easily extend the arguments therein to the private sector, surely. But then, I'm not a normal bloke. I do understand that in today's multicultural mishmash of diarrhea left behind by the American Dream, it's not PC to criticize anyone. Nor is it really safe to laud anyone too much, because it might be considered to be critical of people who disagree with the lauded party.
I have opinions. One such opinion is that foreign aid (ALL foreign aid, public and private) is a waste of America's treasure, and should be halted immediately. After all, what's done with it? Among other things, it's used to buy greenhouses for the Gaza Palestinians as the Israelis unilaterally withdrew from those lands. What did the Islamics do? Loot the greenhouses. Morons. What happens to Israel if we withdraw all of our foreign aid? Well, that's their lookout, actually. We've given them enough money, trade goods and weapons systems over the years. Time to wean them from the tit.
What do I think America should do? Trade with anyone who doesn't threaten us, nor harbors, nor supports anyone who threatens us. Protect our borders. Allow immigration, but make those who would be citizens learn our language. We speak English here. Stop with the ballots in foreign tongues - to vote you need to be a citizen, to be a citizen, you need (among other qualifications) to read, write and speak English. Clear, easy objective. If you're not a citizen, or here legally, then you and your offspring are eligible for precisely NO financial or medical assistance. If you're here legally, then you have a visa, or a green card, and are paying the appropriate fees (taxes and whatnot) to get the services that we do provide. If you cannot document your status, then you're not here legally. Get out of line and wait for the INS to come deport you.
Does that strategy make the world more dangerous? Possibly. Is it a dangerous place now? You betcha, only we pay blackmail (I mean, give aid) to many countries who harbor our enemies. We pay for oil, filling the coffers of countries who would happily see America burn. The world is a weird place. One can only try to find a place to make a stand, and hold that place. I do believe that given their druthers, Islamics would put all of the West in servitude, or put us to the knife. I say, better them than me.
In closing, I say this: I can see a point of view where our expeditionary forces may seem as "terroristic" to those on the other side as their terrorists certainly appear to us. My stated preference is not to be there at all. When Islamics hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and into the ground in Pennsylvania (Flight 93, where the passengers fought back), I could have happily just nuked Mecca. Terrorists could kill a few of us here and there, and yeah, that's terrible. We can *destroy them*. But we have no national spine, so instead we sacrifice our young men and women in a noble cause, however futile. We should protect our borders. No more. No less.
Just My Opinion.
Is there anyone else I can offend? The day is young. Oh, okay. And let's drop ALL of the UN over Somalia. Their choice: chutes or no chutes. No more money for the UN from America.
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July 27, 2006
0904 - Good morning. Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey all have updates available from mozilla.org. The updates address vulnerabilities in all three products, so I suggest updating any of those apps that you use.
Pournelle's April column is now up at Chaos Manor Reviews. I recall being pleased to see Oblivion get a good recommendation from Jerry when I first read that on the Byte site. In general over the last few years, Jerry's been a MMORG type of gamer, while I've stayed with FPS and RPG games. After I formatted that column yesterday evening, Marcia and I watched an episode of Poirot, and generally relaxed.
Nose >> grindstone. Happy Thursday.
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July 28, 2006
0836 - Good morning. Welcome to Friday! I'm sure glad about that little factoid, even though Friday afternoon commutes home are about the worst of the week, all things being equal. That is, without weather or traffic accidents interfering in the normal congestive freeway failure.
Moshe Bar is running a lab at Harvard! I noticed the other day that his personal site had just started redirecting to his new home, the Visual NeuroCognition Lab @ Martinos Center. Going to the Publications shows me just how busy he's been in the background, while running OpenMosix and being CTO at a couple of companies. Wow! I'm even more impressed with his breadth and depth than I was before! Check it out! I wonder if he needs a(nother) geek on staff?
Okay, time to get busy. Have a great day!
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July 29, 2006
0930 - Good morning. After a brief IRC chat with Greg (happening in a moment or two), I'll be headed out to the garden to do a bit of maintenance: weeding, pulling out all the dead squash, harvesting cucumbers and tomatoes and whatnot. More here later, should events permit.
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July 30, 2006
1341 - Good afternoon. So, yesterday morning I was chatting about our assorted hosting issues with Greg in IRC on a machine locally here (he uses ssh to connect), when there's a knock at the door. The dogs go insane, so I go downstairs to help control them while Marcia lets Linda Rose in. She's here to help Marcia out with a new stitch. Downstairs I notice the time and the temperature ... it's time to get the yardwork done. So out I go, pruning out the dead squash and harvesting tomatoes and cucumbers. I cleared all the dog gifts from the back yard. 
Then I mowed the front lawn. Halfway through that task, I remembered the IRC session with Greg. Argh! I finished mowing in front, and decided with 96° and high humidity, 15 minutes past noon, it was time to stop with the outside work for the day. Greg had moved on to his chores, of course. Sigh. Meantime, Lucy was just being cute.
Marcia went out to supper and fabric shopping with Allex Kitterman. I fed the dogs, played some Oblivion, and did a little home office reorganization. Pretty boring, actually. I've got some ideas for future postings laid out, though.
I find it interesting that Iraq is nowhere mentioned on CNN's "International Edition" homepage, at the moment I write these words. Are there no newsworthy events happening in Iraq? Nothing more important there that could have supplanted the "news" of a studio chief unhappy with that Lohan person? I am pleased in reading this article about John McCain's son setting up to join the Marines. It's likely to be good for him. In hindsight, though my life would have been dramatically different, I probably should have enlisted in one of the services after my bid for a berth at the Air Force Academy failed. It would have given me the personal discipline that I lacked for so many years. I am proud of our serving troops and veterans, and honored as well as saddened by their sacrifices.
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
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