August 2006
11 posts
All Aboard
One of my favorite blogs just published a new essay All Aboard The Gravy Train:
Recently, some of the loudest rumblings have been coming from that quarter who current fascination is the scripting language Ruby, and its ORM library Rails. Think back to the last cycle of hype you saw in our industry, perhaps the Extreme Programming craze, and you’ll recognize many of the phenomena from that...
Why Switch To Ubuntu
Why Linux over XP? How Ubuntu Users Respond - and many of the reasons are valid for OSes other than Windows XP (coff*OSX*coff).
The computer whisperer
Yet another great BOFH episode:
“Why’s it gone dark?”
“You need the power off when you install some things.”
“What things?”
“Hatchets mainly…”
IT LIVES
This blog was down for the past 24h or so… a scheduled server maintenence turned into a disaster when the database backup got corrupted somehow. Fortunately another backup (made at the same time) was found and the database restored.
All’s well that ends well.
except for my knife - she’s sad cuz she won’t be used today…
3 Things We’ll Never Run out of
People willing to create their own alternative protocols
Covert channels
Side channel attacks (wikipedia) - didn’t read about any new one recently ;)
FEAR Combat
F.E.A.R. Multiplayer to be made available for free:
08-08-2006 - Sierra Entertainment today announced that the multiplayer component from the award winning PC title F.E.A.R.™ (First Encounter Assault Recon), has been renamed F.E.A.R. Combat, and will be made available to the public as a free download on Thursday August 17th, 2006.
F.E.A.R. Combat is the complete multiplayer component of F.E.A.R....
AV Good or Bad?
What Were They Thinking? Anti-Virus Software Gone Wrong made me wonder if it’s such a good idea to be runing anti-virus software. I’ve always used AV software in Windows and I’ve advised others to do so too but in the past (almost) 10 years all that the AV software has managed to do effectively is bug me. And I’m not talking about what it did to my 29a files or about it...
Sony Vaio FE11S Linux (update)
When I made my first post about my new latptop, there were still two missing key hardware drivers - the nividia driver for the Nvidia GeForce Go 7400 and the wireless driver which I didn’t bother to compile by hand (and therefore didn’t mention). I’m happy to report that both the graphic card and the wireless driver now work out-of-the-box in ubuntu 6.06 after updating the...
Some KDE apps I use
I dumped the then over bloated KDE for GNOME when 2.6 came out. Eventually that decision forced me to change from my long time linux distro of choice, Slackware (slackware doesn’t officially support recent gnome versions, which means you’re stuck with dropline and a lot of problems). For a while, I jumped from distro to distro, not happy with any until I came across a worthy...
Computer Security Community Rant
There are two things I’ve long decided not to blog about (to quote South Park, “I’m not touching that one with a 60 foot pole”):
1) The Arab-Israeli conflict
2) Mac OS
So you’ll forgive me (or not) if I totally sidestep the issue - the one Thomas Ptacek, Rui Carmo and others have been going on about - and quote Rui Carmo, totally out of context, to rant about...
Bugle
Bugle is a collection of search queries which can help to identify software security bugs in source code available on the web. The list at the moment is rather small (you get the idea though), hopefully people will start sending more queries. Source code review is not a straight forward operation , using the list you will get pinpoints and not definite results.
If regular old google can be used to...
