http://L.Bukys.org security, policy and law, software development, and more Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:30:02 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Ole Eichhorn has written a great essay on “the lost art of desk checking,” sharing how slow and painful experiences with debugging led to habits of deliberate and careful pre-planning and checking. My own parallel experiences: Okay, I’m doing to date myself here too. I’m also 49 years old, ... http://L.Bukys.org/2008/04/03/desk-checking/ MessageLab mail forwarders have been unwilling to talk to GMail servers at least since Saturday 2008-03-29, with a mix of TCP “connection refused” and SMTP “421 Service Temporarily Unavailable”. Perhaps it’s related to flurry of articles about GMail CAPTCHA cracking three weeks ago and the resulting surge of spam. Whatever the reason, ... http://L.Bukys.org/2008/03/31/messagelabs-versus-gmail/ I’ve been using the blogbackuponline beta since last April. It just works. Now it’s out of beta. I recommend it. (I’d recommend it even if Techrigy didn’t offer a small incentive to share the experience.) http://L.Bukys.org/2008/03/14/blogbackuponline-recommended/ Yesterday I reported to my local Hall of Justice for jury duty. They offer free wireless for jurors waiting to be called into the court. In the vicinity was the state-run access point, and a host-to-host wireless network calling itself “Free Internet Service”. What could that be but a man-in-the-middle attacker ... http://L.Bukys.org/2008/02/22/mitm-on-jury-duty/ Note for other open source color management system users searching for more transform speed from the LittleCMS library: Turning off the one-entry cache cuts 40% from runtime - unless you’re transforming large uniform blocks for which a one-entry cache is actually suitable. Eliminating the general-purpose byte packing and unpacking functions and replacing ... http://L.Bukys.org/2008/01/15/lcms-speed/ Like many others in 2008, I am cheap, don’t buy TVs very often, subscribe only to basic cable, and have questions about the impending February 17 2009 shutdown of analog over-the-air TV channels. My prediction for 2008 is that confusion will reign because part of the answer is provided by cable, ... http://L.Bukys.org/2008/01/04/dtv-non-answers/ September 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day. It must be ever more popular, because one Talk Like a Pirate Day web site and its text translator died from overload. Meanwhile another Pirate Speak Translator offers text like: I’ve been helpin’ t’ orrrganize a rrregional securrrity conferrrence, th’ second ... http://L.Bukys.org/2007/09/19/talk-like-a-pirate-consultant/ I’ve been helping to organize a regional security conference, the second annual Rochester Security Summit, scheduled for October 3 and 4. Good presenters, both business and technical tracks. Some seats are still open, register now! http://L.Bukys.org/2007/09/18/2007-rochester-security-summit/ Local Rochester-area political blogger Thomas Belknap recently railed about HR 811, interpreting its requirement of a voter-verified durable paper ballot as a small-minded banning of an attractive future of modern networked reliable electronic voting machines. I could not resist posting my disagreement into the comments on his blog, and ... http://L.Bukys.org/2007/09/07/vote-but-verify/ I participated in the public beta of BlogBackupOnline.com, and since then the service has gone live, and, for now, free. Signing up is relatively effortless, and now I have an extra up-to-date copy of my blog content without any administrative effort on my part. They don’t back up image content ... http://L.Bukys.org/2007/04/25/blog-backup/