…if you say “gullible” slowly, it sounds just like “oranges”.
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I just noticed that… →
Swamp maintenance →
It’s hard to maintain the Everglades for the tourists when you’re up to your ass in alligators.
Curious about what I do? Here’s a glimpse.
slip:4ubote2.
(If you’ve understood any of that, you will be cursing the scum-of-the-earth people who spend time making up this malicious stuff. Awesome that! …let’s fix this sh*t and go get beers.)
Now, Imagine you were working on something when that little item was brought to your attention. “Hmmmm, I wonder if that’s as serious as it sounds . . . “
- You need to understand the threat; That’s rather difficult once you realize that the god-level security geeks haven’t fully figured it out yet.
- You have various systems that might be affected; You need to check them.
- If you’ve been attacked, is it safe to even check the systems? …ok, you’ve figured that out.
- Check them. All of them.
- Devise your defense, (or decide it doesn’t apply to you.)
- Now implement changes to fix, or prevent, future problems.
- Then wonder: Do my usual work practices and designs prevent this vulnerability? …should I change my practices or designs? …can I generalize this specific problem into a general sort of problem that I can defend against all future problems like this one?
- Great! Do that.
Then you can go back to being the mother hen roosting on her eggs.
I’m not complaining. This is simply a part of what I do. Just thought perhaps some of you, dear readers, might like a glimpse behind the curtain.
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Impossible? →
Nothing is impossible. You just have to want it more.
~ unknown
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America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead →
Gasoline lead may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.
slip:4umoei1.
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Three Waves of Massive Change in Human Society →
The Republicans fondly remember 1860, when the common man stood behind a plow, and the Democrats fondly remember 1960, when the common man stood behind a stamping machine. … the Republicans shovel money at farmers, endorse prayer in school, and tell us to worship our heroes fighting for manifest destiny, and the Democrats shovel money at unionized teachers, endorse government run mass transit, and tell us to worship dense urban living.
~ Patrick Clark from, «http://www.popehat.com/2013/02/12/one-wave-behind/»
slip:4upooe1.
From a great piece about the waves of change in society; You might want to bone up on your Alvin Toffler too…
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RFC for HTTP 700-series errors →
oh. my. god. https://github.com/joho/7XX-rfc
This is, hands down, the geekiest piece of humor I have ever seen. HT to @dmuth who now owes me a cup of coffee to replace the one I blew out my nose onto my keyboard.
If you, my dear reader, care to do the ‘what the hell?’ deep dive:
- What’s an HTTP header?
(it’s the glue that makes all the interwebs parts work together) - What are the actual HTTP response codes?
(200 good, 404 bad, 759 – Unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM !) - What’s an RFC?
(request for comments, i.e. “hey, uh, fellows, maybe we should do it this way…”) - The HyperText Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)
(ie, prior art in RFC humor. Please notice the honest-to-gawd IETF.org URL on that one kids. Yes, the IETF like kinda determines how the intertubes work, and they have absolutely THE ugliest website.) - An obscure HTTP response code joke
(you do know to read the “alt-texts” on XKCD cartoons, right?)
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Noriaki Inoue, Aikido’s Forgotten Pioneer →
Of the areas I have explored …, I think two in particular stand out for having caused a fundamental rethinking among the aikido community of how our art evolved. … The second is the part played by the Inoue family of Tanabe, especially Morihei’s nephew Yoichiro, in the progression of early events that allowed the Founder to pursue his martial arts career, and eventually develop the art we practice today.
~ Stanley Pranin from, «http://blog.aikidojournal.com/2011/10/30/historical-photo-noriaki-inoue-aikidos-forgotten-pioneer-by-stanley-pranin/»
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Quality happens only when someone is responsible for it →
…to anyone who has ever wondered if using m4 macros to configure autoconf to write a shell script to look for 26 Fortran compilers in order to build a Web browser was a bit of a detour, Brooks’ book offers well-reasoned hope that there can be a better way.
~ Poul-Henning Kamp, “A Generation Lost in the Bazaar“, CACM vol 55.10
slip:4uaode1.
The article is a scathing condemnation of, well, an entire generation of programmers. There is merit to Kamp’s criticism, but he’s thrown the baby out with the bath water.
The explosive growth “of IT”, (as Kamp calls it,) in the last 15 years was made possible by the behavior and activities he’s condemning. The pendulum is, in my opinion, now swinging in the direction of “craftsmanship” and “professionalism”, and the chaos is settling out. I’ve encountered several projects where a small group of people, operating ala Raymond’s “bazaar” have undertaken replacing foundations of things for the right reasons.
We still build “cathedrals”. The definition of “cathedral” has simply been improved.
You might want to read…
Brooks, F. The Design of Design. Addison-Wesley Professional, 2010
Raymond, E. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. O’Reilly Media, Sebastapol, CA, 1999
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The Battlestar Galactica Symphony →
Bear McCreary, who wrote the music for the BSG re-imagining, has a detailed discussion of the music for the Daybreak episode. (Boingo fans: Bartek and Avila were involved!) It even describes the meaning and derivation of the final coordinates. I wildly enjoyed the re-imangining of BSG. And the music . . . the music is epic.
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Nevermind →
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
~ Harry S. Truman
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