synfinatic

Woot.

Politics

Working hard for your dollar

According to this report on USA Today, members of the House of Representitives worked for a total of 47 hours in Janurary and February of this year. As of March 17, the House was in session for just 19 days. At this rate and with plenty of more vacations planned,

Geek Law

Patently Mad

Michael Crichton wrote a great opt-ed piece for the New York Times called, This Essay Breaks the Law. It’s a great two pager on how the patent system in the US has gone to hell and how it will effect not just large corporations, but you and your family.

It's Funny

Dad! Tom Cruise won't come out of the closet!

So let me get this straight… it’s ok for South Park (one of my favorite shows on TV) to make fun of Christians, Jews, Muslims and Mormons, but when they make fun of Scientology (which is more cult then religion) all of a sudden Comedy Central pulls re-airing the

Geek Law

RIAA puts profits over lives

I dunno, I should be shocked (shocked I say!), but I’m not… Every so often, the US Copyright Office takes comments regarding the DMCA (the law which makes it a crime to use products you paid for in ways other then the creator intended). Most recently, Sony-BMG (a member

Security

Will Tor have Extrusion Detection?

Richard Bejtlich wonders in light of Tor being able to be used to anonymously attack other systems, will Tor add extrusion detection capabilities? I seriously doubt it. First, there are technical reasons for this, namely each exit node would need to have their own policy since some operators would want

Security

SSL on the cheap

Well I finally got a real SSL certificate, signed by a trusted CA for www.synfin.net. For less then $20/yr no more annoying popups in webbrowsers, mail clients or my Treo. Anyways, overall I’ve got to say that GoDaddy made the process pretty painless and quick. So

Geek Law

Shame

Shame on Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. But part of me understands. For better or worse, companies are ultimately responsible to their shareholders, not morals or concepts of right and wrong. Even Google’s motto of “Do no evil” is convienently pushed aside when it becomes monetarilay inconvient. Given the choice

Geek Law

Fair Use under attack (again)

Actually, there are a lot of reasons why I support the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  One such reason, is that they’re one of the few organizations fighting for our Fair Use rights.  Fair Use provides some basic rights allowing greater creativity and expression of ideas.  It also

News

Where does one begin?

Your random quiz for the day: Basically, a 12yr old boy has been charged with a felony for: a) Bringing a gun to school b) Selling drugs to his classmates c) Joking that the powered sugar for his science experiment was cocaine Meanwhile… Vice President Dick Cheney made a far

/dev/random

VP of Eng.

At Mu we’re looking to hire a VP of Engineering. Anyways, I figured I’d list some of my interview questions I plan to ask. 1. As a manger, what kind of environment makes you the most effective? The least? 2. Every manager seems to claim they have an

Life

Well that was painless...

Just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.0.1.  It was almost too easy.  Cool. Anyways, today was just like most any other day.  Meetings, coding, fixing bugs… all that good stuff.  Earlier in the week, our company offically “launched” and started sending out press releases

Tech

Don't be evil (unless you can make money!)

So we all know Google’s corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.” It’s not the most inspired thing in the world; since evil is a rather strong term and it leaves a lot of wiggle room compared to something like “Always be good.” Now recently, Google made a

Geek Law

First rule of Congress: you must not talk about VEIL

I’m trying to understand what is so important to secure that the US Congress is not only considering mandating certain security methods, but that those methods be a secret from the general public. Nuclear weapon control systems? New kind of stealth aircraft? Some kind of spy satellite? Maybe some

/dev/random

RAID & Backups

So every IT person worth a penny knows that RAID isn’t a replacement for backups and that backups are worthless if you don’t test them. So why do so many of us find ourselves “too busy” to bother testing backups? So today I almost found myself burned. After

Life

Wow, spammy

So lately, I’ve been really annoyed with the amount of spam I get. After various custom filters + SpamAssassin, I still get around 100 spams/day (of which about 20% finds it’s way into my inbox and the remaining 80% into my spambox which I have to check for

Geek Law

Don't hit F5

Because apparently this prosecutor in Canton, OH thinks hitting F5 on your keyboard to reload a web page repeatedly is a *felony*. You know, the same sorta thing like rape and murder. Ok, so maybe conspiring with your friends on the internet to “crash the webserver” of your high school

/dev/random

Drugs are good.

Well finally went to the doctor yesterday. First time in something like 5 or 6 years I think. Got me some new fangled antibiotics which you only take once/day for 5 days and some Flonase for my allergies. Should be interesting to see if the Flonase works better then

Rant

... and things you read on the Internet.

If Mark Twain was still alive, I’m sure he would of said, “There are lies, damned lies and things you read on the Internet.” This is of course quite obvious to anyone who has been using the Internet for more then a few weeks so you would of thought

/dev/random

Confidentiality in Email

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed more and more companies have been adding confidentiality notices to the bottom of emails. Lately, I’ve been wondering why. I mean, just what is the purpose of these notices? Are they legally binding? Do companies really believe that people will do

/dev/random

Well this sucks

It’s 3:40am and I’m awake. Not sure if this is just a bad case of allergies anymore or a head cold, but I can’t sleep. Claritin and Sudafed 12hr have failed me. Maybe I’ll try some Oban 14. So here I am, working on my

News

Moved to WordPress

Well I finally got sick of writing custom code/templates (I’ve used static files using templates/Makefiles as well as dynamic pages using Perl/HTML::Mason). While I’m quite proficent with Class::DBI and PostgreSQL, it just wasn’t worth the effort of writing all the administrator forms

/dev/random

Oops!

A simple story which should give any geek pause for concern before helping his mother use this internet thingy.

/dev/random

Educated vs. Trained

I assume most people intuitively already know this, but I found this article to be a clear explaination of something that I’ve found 100% true… that there is a real difference between people who are “educated” and “trained”. “This brings me to my last point… I have noticed a

Politics

Rep. Marilyn Musgrave

Today, I got a spam from Rep. Marilyn Musgrave from Colorado about the 2007 Farm Bill. I thought since she took the time to email me, I should send a thoughtful reply: ——— Dear Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, Thank you so very much for your email. I found your words especially relevant

News

More news is good news

Two things of note recently… tcpreplay 3.0.beta6 was released which continues to fix bugs reported by all the beta testers out there. Many thanks to them for keeping me honest. On a more political note, SCOTUS recently ruled that eminent domain extends to allow the government to take