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Interesting data set showing trends in consumer spending, and how IT spending trends tend to lag–but magnify–trends in consumer spending. Look for more info about this in coverage of SOURCE Boston.
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Dan Guido’s presentation from SOURCE Boston. I found myself thinking that these tips could apply generally to teaching any class, not specifically pen testing.
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Dino’s presentation from Source Boston. Buffer overflow exploitation strategies and other fun stuff. Question: does Snow Leopard get significantly more secure?
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Because Boston shouldn’t be the only city with a big dig–er, big elevated rail project.
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Cool. New metro station near my old address! Coming one of these days.
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The new iPod Shuffle is awesome. But queue some sort of lawsuit regarding the voice features in 5, 4, 3…
Hidden messages and no regrets
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It’s nice when family legends, attested in the New York Times, are verified by the Smithsonian. I’ve been looking for verification of our family legend for quite a while without much luck.
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“Gosh, how could anyone think that an opinion voiding the Fourth Amendment might endanger the Constitution? How could anyone worry that legalizing torture might endanger human rights?”
Grab bag: Freedom Babbitt Dance
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I’ll have to check the archives in my basement. I’m pretty sure I have a Mac OS X Public Beta CD ($100) and an original Mac brochure from 1984 ($200) down there.
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The Bard apparently did have a portrait painted in his lifetime. Neatly kicks another leg out from under the Bacon theory.
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Milton Babbitt by the Bad Plus, plus dancers — awesome. This will do more for “thorny” modern music than … well, many other things… Do click through to Ethan Iverson’s blog for the cover notes explaining the modernist covers that the group did on their most recent album.
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Making enterprises secure by demanding that all code be secured at the border — of the organization itself. Meaning: don’t purchase anything that you haven’t examined for security issues just as though you created it yourself.
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Sasha Frere Jones thinks the new Neko album is her best yet. I’m still working on deciding that.
More snow, and bistro
Words cannot express the emotions I felt, after a weekend in the 50s, I awoke this morning to see big fat flakes of snow coming down. I keep thinking that I’m used to it, but at heart I’m still a Virginia boy; snow is a rare treat at the beginning of winter and a stupefying chore at the end. I can tell my town is reeling a little bit too; our street wasn’t plowed, a fact I didn’t fully appreciate until I began the descent down the steep hill leading down to Mass Ave. The hill was completely covered in snow turning rapidly to ice, and I had to really jam on the brakes at the top of the hill to keep it a controlled descent.
We’re supposed to get four inches today. Sigh. I guess what they say about March is true.
March has been an insanely busy month for me already, so I was relieved to get a rare night out this weekend. We went back to Petit Robert, which I see I haven’t plugged yet on this blog. If there were ever a perfect combination of Parisian elegance and comfort food, it’s this place. Lisa had beef bourguignon. I started with a plate of mussels, then moved on to calf’s liver with onions and bacon. Let me tell you: it’s moments like these that made Proust a household name. I was instantly five or six and eating liver at my mother’s table, back in the days before cholesterol counting removed it from our diet. It was spectacularly earthy and tender, and I had to make myself stop before I devoured the whole thing; it’s deceptively easy eating, until the last few bites when you suddenly realize how rich it really is.
Now: snow. Sigh. Ah well, I have memories.
Grab bag: Theremins WITH music boxes would be nice too.
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The title track of the new Neko Case album features programmable music boxes first featured in MAKE magazine.
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Just because the military doesn’t carry it out doesn’t mean it wasn’t government policy. Nasty.
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Theremin kit! Fun for the whole family! I’d love to be able to do a home studio version of “Velouria” with this.
Grab bag: Windows Mobile too late
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This is a new product? OMG. OMFG. If Ballmer isn’t throwing a chair about this, he’s not paying attention to his competition. Safari Mobile doesn’t just drink Windows Mobile IE6’s milkshake, it slays its cow and burns down its barn.
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Review of Alan Gilbert’s Sibelius/Rachmaninoff/Ives program. The TFC (not me) sang in the Ives.
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Joe Gross lays out the impact of Watchmen on the 12-year-old psyche.
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A great Christmas project.
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Reality based science collides with some kind of … what the heck is this? It’s not like there’s a big deep pocketed “Pluto is a planet” lobby out there…
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Congressional API! Let the XML-RPC vs. JSON vs. REST debate commence.
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Time to get the updates.
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I really dig this hack. I’m dissatisfied with our current setup; might be time to budget for a little shelving unit and hackery.
When your PowerBook G4 screen goes dark
I had a panicked call last night from Estaminet, whose PowerBook G4 laptop screen was going dark just seconds after booting up and staying dark. She had a paper due tomorrow morning. Could I help her out?
I have a karmic obligation to answer these kinds of support calls, considering that the lemon laptop in question used to be mine. So I Googled the problem while I talked her down. The most likely answer (though we’ll know for sure once she has it seen by a specialist) was that the inverter board went south. This is a hardware failure and can’t be remedied by poking about in the system, but since it’s confined to the video subsystem the rest of the PowerBook was still working.
Racking my brain to figure out how to get her paper-in-progress off the machine, I had her try a tip from the MacOSXHints forum: shine a bright light, like a flashlight, directly at the screen to see what the computer is doing, then turn on iChat. I then sent a screen sharing request, which she was just able to see and accept, and then I saw her whole desktop clear as day on my machine. I fired up Firefox and Gmailed her paper to her so that she could work on it on another machine.
So, in summary: iChat screen sharing is your friend if your screen fails.
Grab bag: It’s Thursday, it’s random
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Tactical tips for doing win-loss analysis.
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This is a big and long overdue shift.
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Nice step by step instructions for cleaning up those shots of Mt St Helens from the air.
Grab bag: It’s just business.
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The Kindle app for the iPhone highlights Amazon’s razor and blades strategy with their ebook reader. They care about the content sales, not the gadget sales.
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Another nail in the coffin.
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Sam Ruby leaves Big Blue.
Grab bag: Flexible bailouts
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Smart thinking about flexible layout strategies with CSS.
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Sure, the banks don’t want that bailout money. So they’ll pay it back. Um, when they get around to it.
Grab bag: Laws and hypotheses
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I’m only a lay reader and not a theologian, but having grown up working my way through various gospels I find this sort of stuff–which gospel came first, and what other traditions might be in play in the later ones?–fascinating.
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Guerrieri’s First Law? “The perceived difference between the musical past and the musical present is a symptom of the limitations of information technology.” I think this axiom only works in classical music: it doesn’t explain the timelessness of Nick Drake compared with the temporal anomaly of, for instance, Hanson.
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Really? I’m not sure I see the point… and looking at the download it’s all PHP code, with no .NET glue that I can see. Very odd.
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A full plain-English explanation of how AIG took itself over the edge with incredible hubris and why we’re still on the hook to bail them out. Required reading for those who still don’t understand why trusting financial institutions with strings-free bailout money is a bad idea.
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The hagiography on display here is a far cry from Joe Gross’s more tough-nosed take on the album. I guess I’ll have to hear it for myself.
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I started losing my shit when Larry wrote about Steppenwolf singer John Kay getting a beatdown from Junior Wells, whose song he had just stolen on stage, and lost it completely reading about the demise of the toughest motorcycle gang in Minnesota. Absolutely essential reading.
Superlatives for Rove
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This wasn’t the point of Sullivan’s column, but it’s the most quotable part: “Rove today endures as the architect of the biggest and deepest political implosion since the Democrats in the 1970s. It was all tactics, no strategy; all politics, no governance. He remains the worst single political strategist of modern times.”
Grab bag: Austerity and zombies
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Hidden defaults setting that forces links that would open in a new window to open in a new tab instead. Should be default behavior.
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Why I don’t want to hear any more Republican austerity claims: “Louisiana has gotten $130 billion in post-Katrina aid. How is it that the stars of the Republican austerity movement come from the states that suck up the most federal money? Taxpayers in New York send way more to Washington than they get back so more can go to places like Alaska and Louisiana. Which is fine, as long as we don’t have to hear their governors bragging about how the folks who elected them want to keep their tax money to themselves. Of course they do! That’s because they’re living off ours.”
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On the stupidity of the publisher’s guild. I can’t imagine that a text-to-speech feature is going to dent the sales of audiobooks.
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Do we have a bank recovery strategy, or are we just going to keep the zombies going?
Bobby Jindal is Kenneth the Page
The funniest meme to come out of Tuesday’s very serious speech by President Obama was the chorus of voices who noticed how much Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who delivered the GOP response, sounded like Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock. A Facebook group helped amplify the chorus of voices asking for a furtherance of the meme. And Jimmy Fallon obliged, spinning up Jack McBrayer, who plays Kenneth, to provide a response to the response to the response:
We are down the rabbit hole.
Grab bag: Insensitivity edition
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As Dave has written elsewhere, the interests of the shareholders and the public are not in alignment on the bank bailout.
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Digging into the various theories.
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The DTD for importing a bug into Bugzilla.
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Master list of color scheme tools online.