Written by What Tom Ridge really meant to say.
Monthly archives for February, 2003
Sometimes truth is funnier than satire
So the pseudo terror-color warnings have been topped. By Tom Ridge himself, and our wonderful federales, at the new Homeland Security website.
This site apparently broken in IE for mac
IE for mac doesn’t render the stylesheets right I just noticed. Safari’s fine, mozilla is fine too. IE for windows looks fine. IE for mac: broken. Bastards. Maybe I’ll take a look at fixing it while I’m on the plane to the UK on friday. If I remember to pull a copy of the HTML and the stylesheet to bring with me on the plane so I can do it while offline.
Enhanced DEFCON warning added
Found a new, higher-granularity terror threat alert code snippet here, and have added it to the page under the previous one. This new one features an enhanced terror alert coding system with no fewer than 23 unique color levels which delineate exactly what kind of terror you should be fearing right now.
The secrets of the mustache
Best part about this site is the soundtrack with the “despot, sexpot” lyrics.
Microsoft filing suit against spammers
According to CNET, Microsoft is filing suit against “John Doe” spammers who have used dictionary attacks to harvest email addresses of Hotmail accounts. They’re also trying to get legislation making email address harvesting illegal, which seems like an odd thing to legislate — plus poorly drafted legislation here could easily accidentally illegalize all kinds of web-scraping applications like comparison-shopping tools and such.
I hate hardware
So my linux box has been randomly seizing up for a while, intensifying in the last couple days. I strongly suspect hardware flakiness, since I’ve checked and double checked, and then re-checked all the software. I’ve recompiled everything, turned on all logging, all to no avail. But today I unplugged my SCSI CD-writer and that seems to have resolved some of the more severe visible aspect of the afliction. So now my list of stuff that could be the ultimate cause is narrowed down to:
- Bad CD writer drive
- Bad SCSI cable
- Bad interaction between CD writer and SCSI tape drive on same channel
- Random SCSI voodoo
- Bad SCSI card
- More than one of the above
- PSU is overloaded with all the devices I have in the tower
- More than one of the above
- Bad motherboard
- Bad CPU
- Overheating over time causing any/all of the above
- Something else
And being hardware, there’s pretty well *no* way to narrow this down, other than randomly disconnecting things (or binary-search disconnecting) and reconnecting, then heading down to Fry’s when I’ve got things stable and trying to get a replacement part, then plugging that in instead. And then if thing go to shit again, trying to guess whether it’s a bad part from Fry’s, or the problem was something else.
Actually, this leads me into wondering whether there’s some probability analysis which could be used to help figure this out. Assign probabilities to each of the problems you think the thing might be, assign probabilities to how likely it is that the replacement part from Fry’s will be DoA, and then determine an optimal strategy for debugging the problem and replacing parts. The complicating factor in all this will be the high DoA rate for most parts from Fry’s. You could also factor in the “has a return sticker on the box” vs “looks like Fry’s never sold it before” failure rates….
Anti-anti-spam group/coalition formed
Well, they have a Yahoo group set up and a news story on CNet anyway. The most amusing part of the whole thing is the group’s acronym: NAI — curiously similar to the initials of Network Associates, Inc
Feels like a big company
So I signed up for the softball team at work. What’s the point of working at a big company if you’re not on the company softball team? I’ll be playing right field (apparently there’s another person playing “far right field” as well). Should be fun.
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