Archive for July, 2004

Disco Dancing

Friday, July 30th, 2004

Andy showed me this awesome link: http://www.appelsiini.net/~tuupola/misc/disco.mpeg

New Project - port Zplet to J2ME

Thursday, July 29th, 2004

http://sourceforge.net/projects/zplet/

Ruby CVS Server cracked - interesting incident analysis report

Thursday, July 29th, 2004

A CVS server at www.ruby.org was cracked recently using a CVS exploit on a chrooted CVS installation. Their intrusion report is top notch, and shows an administrative staff that knows their system very well and was able to do a thorough analysis of the break-in. Really interesting stuff.

Net Carbs

Monday, July 26th, 2004

Post Cereals has launched a new marketing blitz recently: the idea of ‘net carbs’. Apparently, a gram of fiber acts as the anti-carb, and cancels out a gram of carbohydrates. This nutritional wizardry will no doubt revolutionize the ‘net health’ of Americans.

Press release that includes the term ‘net carbs’.

Personally, I have vowed to consume only 1 ‘net candy bar’ per day. Of course, this means when I eat 11 candy bars, I also eat 10 bran muffins.

How to Deconstruct Almost Anything

Monday, July 19th, 2004

An oldie but goodie.

RHEL 3.0 @ ServerMatrix, Postfix / Cyrus-SASL / TLS

Friday, July 16th, 2004

After much gnashing of teeth, I finally went to the last resort. Note to self: ALWAYS run rpm -ql and look for documentation before running to the web.

What’s great is that RHEL’s postfix rpm comes precompiled with SASL/TLS support built in! So, other than self-edification about how SASL/TLS works with Postfix, the hours I spent researching various SUSE and Debian readmes were kind of a waste.

It turns out, you mostly just need to use the right commands within the /etc/postfix/main.cf, and source the appropriate ssl certs, and you’re good to go.

Good instructions for preparing self-signed CA plus certs are here. I’m still not sure how to get md5 working, but i’m happy with plaintext over TLS. RedHat put a lot of time and energy into making a system that’s relatively simple to administer if you don’t stray too far from normal configurations. I would have considered secure SMTP an outlier, but I was happy to find that RHEL ES does support this with a tiny bit of additional configuration.

Plus, there was a readme distributed in the postfix package all about this, a few PDF’s, and a bunch of config sample files.

Biff: a definition

Thursday, July 15th, 2004

One of the BEST dictionary.com entries ever:

Biff, B1FF, BIFF, biff

I’m especially enamored of the lower, nerdy entries:

/bif/ vt. To notify someone of incoming mail. From the BSD utility `biff(1)’, which was in turn named after a friendly dog who used to chase frisbees in the halls at UCB while 4.2BSD was in development. There was a legend that it had a habit of barking whenever the mailman came, but the author of `biff’ says this is not true. No relation to B1FF.

We used to say “BIFF!” in elementary school whenever we hit each other’s head. This was around the time of Back to the Future. Did anyone else do that?

J2ME Plugin for Eclipse

Thursday, July 15th, 2004

http://eclipseme.sourceforge.net/

Google for Macs

Thursday, July 15th, 2004

Did you know there was a google for mac-related topics?

Southern Cal (Santa Ana) Sony Ericsson Service Center

Wednesday, July 14th, 2004

These guys do firmware updates in Santa Ana: http://www.globalmob.com/cart/customer/product.php?productid=32&cat=55&page=1 - Need to find out if they allow walk-ins.