...more recent posts
I'm off to Boston for the night. Back tomorrow. My phone should work if you need me.
It's the 15th of the month, so that means a new crypto-gram from computer security big boss man Bruce Schneier. The first item is about honeypots, which are network connected computers set up to monitor crackers "in the wild." One such installation is called Honeynet, and is described this way:
The Honeynet Project was initiated to shine a light into this darkness. This team of researchers has built an entire computerWhat did they find out? Well...
network and completely wired it with sensors. Then it put the network up on the Internet, giving it a suitably enticing name and content, and recorded what happened.
A random computer on the Internet is scanned dozens of times a day. The life expectancy of a default installation of Red Hat 6.2 server, or the time before someone successfully hacks it, is less than 72 hours. A common home user setup, with Windows 98 and file sharing enabled, was hacked five times in four days. Systems are subjected to NetBIOS scans an average of 17 times a day. And the fastest time for a server being hacked: 15 minutes after plugging it into the network.
Morning meditation: Fibonacci grid.
I usually don't link to java applets, but this one's pretty cool: visual thesaurus. Pretty slow on my machine, but Mac java support is poor, so you may have better results.
Datasynapse just got $15 million in new financing. Nice going guys.
photo series of the basement office construction.
Photos are back.
Wow. This seems reasonable given the current economic situation, but I hadn't seen it in writing (although this is just a note, not an official message.) Anyway, looks like Userland isn't going to be offering free Manilla sites forever. Apparently they've alread turned off the ability to create any new free sites.
I've been trying to think of a way to organize photos on the site. This started in an effort to support Alex's work, but as always I want to generalize anything I build so that it will work for a variety of people in a variety of situations. This is efficient, in one way, but also difficult. As the scope of a tool increases, it's utility often decreases. Anyway, I had been trying to think this problem out (walking the line between a general enough solution so I can reuse it, and a specific, and simple, enough one so that it is really useful) and hadn't been having much luck. Then the other day I started putting up some photos, and as usual, once I started to get some real experience with the problem (instead of just thinking about it) the answer was clear immediately. What I want is a way to make closely linked series of pictures. Something like a slide show, where each frame is a new page. Traditionally the pages would have forward and back buttons to either advance or retreat through the series. (This is what Alex does a lot for the picture pages accompanying Arboretum.) I was going to build a whole new system to deal with this, but of course now I see that the archive system for these pages is exactly what I want. If the window for display on the page is set to 1 post (instead of several,) and the '...more recent posts' and 'older posts...' links have their wording changed (to '...previous' and 'next...', say) then that is exactly what I want. To make a slide show like series, just post all the pictures to one page, and then crank the window down to 1. Easy. I'll get this finished up right away.
Anyway, I'm mentioning this mostly to help me remember the lesson. I try to do this anyway, but often I forget. You can't just think about a problem. You have to really get involved with it. And luckily this is often easier than just trying to think about it. Jump in and swim around - even if you don't know how to swim - and the answers will come fast.
So I'm taking down the awkwardly architected photo pages here, and they'll reappear in the new style soon. I think this will be a good solution.
Friends of Jezebel's Mirror has been much imporved on the server side and relaunched as the mirror project. Very nice. If I were smarter I'd try to say something about why this is so cool. Just hit random for a while and you'll see.