novelgazer

RFC: Sans Alternatives pt. 2

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Thu, 5 Sep 2013 23:14:00 -0500

It's been a while since I posed the question in my last post, "What's an ethical outlet for legitimate technical activism?" Now that we've all had some time to gather our notes on the subject, let's continue. At the time, my thoughts were leaning toward the Code for America and civic hacking opportunities I'd been exposed to while working in Chicago, as well as SANS' own Dshield firewall log-sharing program. And while these are well and good, they lack a certain romance and scope that the more chaotic good alternatives offer. I was even starting to lean toward suggesting the training programs around the government's cybersecurity recruiting push might fit the bill. But in the wake of revelations that the NSA has subverted many internet encryption implementations, allowing it to intrude broadly on privacy of communications, security expert Bruce Schneier has presented a really compelling argument that the purest form of hacktivism would be for the engineers of the internet to reclaim it and re-engineer it robustly and securely and openly. He's offering the huge pool of talented and disenchanted hackers out there the opportunity to respond to abuse by building up, rather than tearing down, and I think it's a terribly welcome sentiment.

RFC: Sans Alternatives

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 08:32:00 -0500

Just emerging from the disorientation and exhilaration of SANSFire 2011, a huge computer security training event with weekend and weeklong courses, vender demos, and some really cool one-off presentations. (My highlight – a unified “lessons learned” assessment of the Tōhoku earthquake/tsunami, the Fukushima meltdown and the Sony Hack by Japanese security analyst Tomohisa Ishikawa.)

One of the traditional special events is the annual State of the Internet roundtable, where the Internet Storm Center handlers take questions on the year’s internet security events. Topics include big attack vectors and stories, the tech media, and – this being D.C. – politics and the military. I asked a pretty spontaneous question, inspired by a previous one about getting involved in computer security that hadn’t really been answered terribly broadly (“become a consultant”).

This isn't really my millieu. At the time, I didn’t really have any answers in mind to my question (I have some ideas now), and it seemed to catch the panel off guard as well, with most of their answers overlooking the activism aspect. (To be fair, their focus is tech analysis, not activism, and my question was a bit off topic.) So, I turn to you, my scattering of dedicated readers, for your thoughts:

Anonymous and Lulzsec and other popular “hacking” groups in the media right now seem to exist in a miasma of criminality and pranksterism, but also genuine activism. Who do you see out there right now providing a positive outlet for legitimate technical activism?

I’ll follow up with my own ideas later, but I want to hear from you, first.

Taking the baby blog out of mothballs...

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Fri, 1 Apr 2011 11:41:00 -0500

Annie and I are proud to announce the relaunch of Like we invented it and Project: Baby. Oh, also, we're pregnant.

Better than the real thing

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 18:51:00 -0500

Wired's article on this very cool 360° panoramic photo of the Philosophical Hall at Strahov Monastery in Prague reminds me of our trip there in October 2008, while we were teachers in Slovakia. (Can it really have been that long ago?) And Wired's assertion that “viewing Martin’s web-based panorama might actually be better than an actual visit,” is actually quite accurate. While the Wunderkammer/natural history museum that opens onto the library is quite fascinating, there's nothing sadder than being that close to such a marvel of a library and being unable to browse.

While we were not allowed to take photos in the Philosophical Hall (I forget if it was against the rules, or if there was a photo fee), we did get some great, moody shots from the restaurant beneath the monastery. (As well as fantastic pork knuckle.) Positioned as it is deep in the Premonstratensian Order's former wine cellar, this cool little restaurant is named Peklo, which is Czech for inferno. Perfect place to grab lunch on Halloween, no?

Sad literary news

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:04:00 -0500

Very sad to hear of the passing of Diana Wynne Jones, author of the Chrestomanci Series, Dogsbody, The Ogre Downstairs, and Howl's Moving Castle, among others.

Her rich, familiar characters and effortless world-building sold fantastic, reality-crossing plots. All were crafted with sophistication and her respect for an ostensibly young adult audience won her plenty of fans of all ages, including Neil Gaiman. I never knew, until today, that she studied under CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien at Oxford.

Wynne Jones was never hugely famous*, even after Howl's was made into a movie. When Annie found out I was a fan, it was like discovering we shared membership in a secret society. Along with John Bellairs, Diana Wynne Jones was a literary titan of my youth, and her work set the standard for so much of what I love in fiction today. With dead-tree bookstores and public libraries shutting down by the drove, one wonders how anyone will get their hands on these sorts of magical, secret authors in the future. But I'm confident that, as long as there are kids who read until they've run out of books, who'd rather stretch up to an author than be talked down to, someone will find these treasures, in whatever format, and share them with their friends.

* Even though she deserves to be; Annie points out that Harry Potter pales considerably next to Jones' far more satisfying Witch Week.

Recipe: Bacon Turkey

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:28:00 -0600

We here at Team Edison-Albright try to be health conscious, try take care of ourselves, so I’ve been on the lookout for turkey breast at the local market ever since Mom and Dad E-S dropped off our new roasting pan a couple weeks back (from their market’s incentive stamp program.) Nice healthy lunch option, but I wanted to add a bit of a smoky flavor and didn’t have a grill available, so I slid a couple slices of bacon under the skin while cooking. When I removed both skin and bacon to apply my glaze, I discovered I had unwittingly created a chimerical abomination I like to call “bacon turkey,” pictured here.

The God-fearing human in me confesses shamefully to trying a ~~bite~~ slice; meanwhile my inner scientist is licking his fingers and muttering something about “reproducible results.” Needless to say, this one is not going to be featured on ReciPants.

Is it just me

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 21:49:00 -0600

Or has Google Reader been demoted to the "More" tab in the Gmail menu for everybody else, too? Eric Schmidt hands over the reins and everything goes to heck!

Humbly submitted, for your consideration

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 10:45:00 -0600

So the game I mentioned in yesterday's KDE upgrade post was Bit-Blot's Aquaria – the stand out success (for me) of last year's Humble Indie Bundle. It's a gorgeous underwater exploration and adventure game, with intuitive, learn-as-you-go controls and a commitment to immersive detail on par with Ultima VII. There's a rich backstory, a cool magic system, companions, even cooking.

The Humble Bundle itself is a pack of awesome, DRM-free, multi-platform games with pay-what-you-will pricing. The proceeds are divided (at your discretion) among charities (EFF and Child's Play,) the games' makers, and Humble. The current bundle looks very fun, but there are only 6 days left to grab it, so act fast if you're interested.

This year's big draw seems to be Braid, a clever little time-manipulation side scroller about dysfunctional relationships. Only problem -- it didn't want to run on openSUSE for me. Run from the command line, it complained:

Game Startup Error: Unable to set up graphics.
Reason: Missing required OpenGL extension.

To help fix this problem make sure you are running the newest version of your video drivers.
Lastly, you could try running this game with the -windowed command-line option.

The ubuntu folks, who always seem to crack these problems first, tracked the issue down to missing S3 texture compression support – disabled in the open source drivers because it's patented (further details if you're interesed). Their simple solution (where patent law allows) is to install driconf and re-enable S3, as described here.

Since driconf isn't in the standard openSUSE repositories, you can grab it from the build service. Mine didn't work out of the box, though – it was looking in the wrong place for the python module. So, I edited /usr/bin/driconf and added the line:

sys.path.append("/usr/lib64/driconf/")

which is where I found the file driconf.py. Then, if I were in a country where patent law allowed, I could run driconf, go to the Image Quality tab, and enable S3TC, and Braid would run like a charm. If I were not in a country where patent law allowed, I'd suggest giving Osmos a try, an addictive physics-based osmosis game. Haven't checked out the others yet, but will when I have some down-time.

KDE 4.5 on openSUSE

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 22:23:00 -0600

I run openSUSE as my primary operating system – have done so since I worked at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, which was a Novell shop. Right around Thanksgiving, I somehow ended up backed into the corner of needing to upgrade to KDE 4.5. I don't actually remember the order everything played out, but there was some poor video and resource performance, a game I couldn't get working for the nieces and nephews (okay, and for me on the plane), and knetworkmanager broke -- and my end solution was to plow all those problems under with a big upgrade and start fresh with whatever new issues cropped up.

Thankfully, the process of upgrading KDE to 4.5 is fairly pain-free in openSUSE, as long as you read the fine print. And the fine print is: The knetworkmanager applet won't work under KDE 4.5, so you'll need to switch to the knetworkmanager plasmoid; except, once you've broken the knetworkmanager applet, it's too late to switch conveniently -- you've lost all connectivity. Also, the plasmoid has it's own issues.

So, STEP 1 – you'll want to follow these instructions to make the upgrade, bearing in mind that instruction #5 really needs to happen before #4.

And, STEP 2 – to get wireless networking working in the plasmoid, you'll want to add the command:
qdbus org.kde.kded /kded loadModule networkmanagement
to your Autostart folder, as described in this post. I just dropped it into an executable text file called knm.sh, and that seems to have done the trick.

Forewarned is forearmed. Godspeed!

UPDATE -- I actually used YaST Software Management, rather than zypper as in the first link, but the outcome should be the same.

UPDATE 2 == At some point, I also deleted everything in these directories, because someone on the internet told me to, so if you're still having trouble, give that a go:
/var/tmp/kdecache-$USER
/tmp/kde-$USER
/tmp/ksocket-$USER

Dog days of winter

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Wed, 1 Dec 2010 21:01:00 -0600

Yesterday was Hank's first real snow day – he's seen snow before, but never accumulation – so we took the opportunity and swapped most of his designated walking time for play time. We ran around like crazy puppies, attacking each other, gamboling and rolling in the snow, bounding and sliding across the deck, and sprinting around every corner. He tasted it (black dog with a snowy nose is a picture I wish I'd taken for you), and re-cataloged all his favorite smells – even made his first yellow snow with some prompting.

By his evening walk, when it was cold enough to freeze my beard, he still had the strength of 10 lab/beagle-mixes (Google tells me this is equivalent to 2 great danes or 32.7 chihuahuas) and even managed to pull loose a couple times when I was off my guard. When we finally called it a night, he curled up on the couch in a way that suggested ski lodge, hot chocolate, warm fire...

But where's my chocolate?

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Wed, 1 Dec 2010 14:49:00 -0600

As a relative newcomer to Perl, I was pleased to see Slashdot's link today to the Perl Advent Calendar (although I was disappointed to find it doesn't work in Opera.) I was even more pleased that it reminded me one of my favorite seasonal web design and development blogs, 24 Ways to Impress Your Friends would be spinning back up today. Over the next 24 days, various web luminaries will contribute elegant new techniques for layout, accessibility, development, you name it.

Look back through their archives and you'll find there's something for everybody. Today's entry – an introduction to Google's Static Map API – as it turns out, is not for me, at least not for my leisure. But I'm sure it is for somebody else. Actually the author indicates it is for the 2% of web users who do not have Javascript enabled (minus those using screen readers, I guess.) But I will definitely check back throughout the season.

Finally, my inner pedant points out that neither of these are actually Advent calendars, since Advent starts on the first Sunday of Advent (November 28th this year) rather than December 1st. Metric Advent?

Redeemer's new webpage

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 20:50:00 -0600

So, brag-hat on for a moment here – we just went live with Phase 1 of the new website for Redeemer Lutheran Church here in Stevens Point, WI (just getting the SEO out of the way early there) and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, even though all its little flaws are glaringly apparent to me.

It helps that we met our modest goal, rapid launch with all the essentials. Also, we're immediately turning around into Phase 2 – more robust, built on WordPress as a CRM – so I can instantly incorporate all those little fixes I'd otherwise have stayed up until 2AM tonight cranking out. And I like the overall look of it... I'm a fan of design, but not terribly skilled at it, and I exceeded my expectations for myself here. Still a long way to go, but it feels clean, inviting and modern to me, which was exactly what I was aiming for.

That said, suggestions, bug reports and design tweaks extremely welcome!

Furniture as time machine

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 23:48:00 -0500

In other news, time tourists go to a lot of trouble to enjoy some pretty mundane attractions, but then, why should they differ from any other history buffs?

Doing some time traveling of my own tonight — cut myself on some Ikea mounting hardware, and every keystroke is a sense memory of fingertip blood draws in the hospital as a child. I must have been in for asthma, and they may have only done it twice, but in my memory it was a month of daily finger pricks.

Jackpot

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 23:04:00 -0500

File under "More of the same..."

Hosed my system today updating some software, so I thought I'd go for the full-upgrade. One hour later, no external hard drive to be found anywhere, although Annie assures me we packed it. In the meantime, I turn up my wayward grammar and usage dictionary, as well as some Star Wars action figures and a cell phone charger we lost last year. Eventually find the hard drive...

under the passenger seat of our car...

where it slid when we drove it up here early last month. Bad news is I'm still missing the power supply (yes I checked the glove box), but the good news is that OpenSuse 11.3's upgrade option seems to have successfully solved my issues and is running smoothly. I'm tempted to try to dig up my high school yearbook on the off chance that I'll stumble across the power supply in the process.

Old Timey Unpacking Drama

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:48:00 -0500

We've reached the phase of moving in that I like to think of as stage Zork, where every household quest seems to fail for the lack of a single, crucial item – usually one that I just saw the day before. Today, while looking for my grammar and usage dictionary, I finally found the ruler I needed for assembling the wheelbarrow, right in the closet where I noticed it last week. When I was first looking for the ruler, I found and set aside our printer paper; yesterday I gave in and bought a new pack. And so it goes.

It's not all as frustrating as this sounds, though. Hank Goldberg is getting to know the other puppies in the neighborhood and the congregation; he gazes mournfully at us as we eat, even though I've never asked for a single kibble from him. Evenings we all cuddle up on the couch, fire up the woodstove and sometimes listen to the archives of our local NPR affiliate's Old Time Radio Drama program. It's quite cozy, but it raises the question:

Who was the talent scout that saw Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy performing in the Catskills and said, "This is an act made for radio!"

It's a palace for sure...

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Sat, 4 Sep 2010 10:02:00 -0500

As Tom Waits sings,

What makes a house grand ain't the roof or the doors, if there's love in the house it's a palace for sure.

But it doesn't hurt when the house is as awesome as the one Annie and I have just purchased! After a painless, whirlwind 26-day turnaround (thanks to Bob Siskoff at M&I Bank and Chris Northwood at Re/Max in Stevens Point) we are very happy first-time homeowners. We've got pictures, if you'd like to take a look – bear in mind that these are from our first visit while the previous owners were still there, so it's not nearly so well furnished at the moment.

And just in time, too, as Annie has just begun her first call at Redeemer Lutheran Church. Check out all the ordination details.

And of course, you can always find our most up-to-date contact info at Anne and Sean.

Hank Hank Bo Bank...

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:55:00 -0500

Either Google is better at search than we think, or worse at transcription than I've imagined -- either way, our puppy seems to have a new last name:

P.S. Don't blog from work, unless you're on your lunch break.

Introducing...

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 6 Jul 2010 22:06:00 -0500

The handsome little guy pictured nearby is the newest member of our family, Hank, the dog! His past is shrouded in mystery, as you may have guessed by those soulful eyes, but one could reasonably surmise that he has some lab and some beagle in there somewhere. As in all the best cases of puppy love, there's some tragedy in his background – loud clippers, a death-defying leap from a high grooming table, a broken leg. Thanks to the care and attention of Auds and Curtis, though, he's back running around like a champ. Auds is a vet, actually; she saved his life, and decided he was the perfect dog for us. And she was right; perfect dog period.

We were already planning a trip down to Lexington to spend 4th of July weekend with Auds and Curt, so we combined an awesome visit – including hiking to some gorgeous views and delicious pizza, a blast of a 4th of July party with horses and the perfect spot to watch dozens of fireworks displays, and just great fun catching up with two of our favorite people – with a trial run for my sinuses. One short doggie drive later, and we had Hank home in Chicago, where he'll be staying with Annie's folks until we have a place that allows dogs in a couple months.

He was originally a Henry, but Hank seems the most apt. We've been floating around some of our favorite variations:

Hanko Breadcrumbs Edison-Albright

Hanko Verymuch Edison-Albright

Hanko American Pasta Sauce Edison-Albright

That last one might be a bit much.

Two Times tables

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:55:00 -0600

Illustrious employer got a nod in the NYTimes yesterday, but more importantly (and timely), I can't wait to figure out who my presidential hair twin is! Ladies model also available.

Okay, one article and one table. And I guess the table is more of a chart. Maybe "Hair to the Chief" would have been a better title?

Iron Chef Gar-sieze

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Sat, 9 Jan 2010 19:25:00 -0600

We're fast fans of Iron Chef America, and I recognize the anime cultural connection, and enjoy the aesthetic of excess and bravado that makes it successful*, but has anyone seen the latest promo? The one for Iron Chef Garces' debut? TOO. MUCH. STROBE.

I don't know if they did a Next Iron Chef Production Assistant series to select the person who cut this thing together, but I try to only swallow tongue at delicatessens and taco shops. We can't even protect ourselves by looking away from the screen or closing our eyes, it seems to reverberate off our walls and into our skulls. Thanks for new episodes, but seriously, knock it off.

*The strategy of making a burned plate of garbage palatable by covering it with foie, gold leaf, and shaved truffles will forever be known as the Iron Chef Gambit.

Don't know why...

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Fri, 8 Jan 2010 14:41:00 -0600

Three cheers for Panera Bread — provider of hassle-free, strip mall wifi par excellence! Compelled to ask, though, why the world needs a lite-jazz version of Nora Jones’ “Don't Know Why” arranged for saxophone and harmonica. The original was too hard core? Wait — now they're giving the same treatment to Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.” Someone may be having some fun with me, I suspect. Oh well, baguette sandwich with a side of baguette means all is forgiven!

Anyway, I find myself with a bit of time to catch up on a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy etc. and so forth, here just past the end of the season. (Full disclosure: our tree is still trimmed and burning.) Our schedules wouldn't allow a trip to Pennsylvania, which was a disappointment, but otherwise had a wonderful holiday, including singing at the Christmas eve service, a nice long visit from Nicole, and a grand Sunday-after-Christmas luncheon thrown by Sue and Paul on the occasion of Annie’s guest sermon at St. Luke’s.

But I see you are impatient, so on with the presents (in link form)!

First is a gift from Paul to the whole internet: How we spent Christmas morning.
Annie and I also cameoed in a couple (less musical) Christmas videos thanks to a gift from my folks.
One of our photos and Annie’s eyewitness testimony were used in a French 24 news story about one of our favorite Slovak Christmas traditions.
Meanwhile, Slovakia has been handing out presents of its own.

I’m particularly thankful for my pocketwatch from Annie (more on that later) and we're both very grateful for the ornaments from our parents, which made our first Christmas home so special.

Update: Hey, you in the corner! Who eats the soup and leaves behind the bread bowl?

You brought myrrh?

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:26:00 -0600

In the midst of a frustrating morning tracking down information on the Flare visualization library, I suggested to Matt that he should spend his 20% making a "It's Not Just You" button for the Google toolbar. You know, when a site is inexplicably unavailable, and you think to yourself, is the site down, or is it just me? The second thing I do after refreshing the page a dozen times is to google the url, to make sure I've got it spelled right, see if anyone has mentioned it's gone down, and check the cache for the information I was after. Matt realized we could just use translate.google.com for the same functionality. I tried it out, and it was not just me. Of course, this is the situation 99% of the time, I'm sure, but now I can feel like I've actually done something about it.

In other Matt news -- actually, very other Matt news, as this is about a different Matt -- Matt Stanley, a friend of mine from high school has a really cool audio/photo story on the dying art of rail hunting. Not to be confused with trainspotting. By all means check it out, as well as the rest of his blog.

Finally, cnet presents an object lesson in the pitfalls of web accessibility by including a picture of a table of data. In an article on web accessibility.

None too soon

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:58:00 -0500

Via Slashdot: IT Security Breaches Soar in 2009

Rest easy, North America, I'm back in town.

Bacon blogjam

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:11:00 -0500

A job search can sometimes lead to a bit of a paranoid blogjam -- could this post be too controversial for potential employers?

Well, who could object to these links? The first, found via Chow combines two of my passions (cooking and typesetting) to pose the question of the ages: Cheese or Font?

The second also combines two passions, this time cooking and bacon. It's Homesick Texan's Bacon Jam! Enjoy!

...They're all going the wrong way!

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 4 Aug 2009 22:23:00 -0500

Greetings from beautiful Streetsboro, OH where we are nestled in the gentle and affordable embrace of the Econolodge. Just off I-80, the Ohio Turnpike, which earlier today treated us to this road terror:

The classic oncoming UPS truck. Not pictured: Sean white-knuckling the steering wheel of our new Yaris before realizing the UPS truck was being towed.

Earlier in the trip, passing a herd of cattle, Annie poked up her head and called out to them a sprightly "Meeeeeeyah!" Mad cows, apparently.