truetech

Those of you who know me well know that my home office is currently a corner of my laundry room. It’s not an ideal situation, but it’s workable for now. It’s quiet at night, since I’m on the other end of the house from the bedrooms, and it’s nice and warm in the winter, between my space heater and the dryer.

But as I mentioned, it is not ideal. Last night was a reminder for me of why it’s not ideal. I was planning some music for a show I’m doing with some friends on Saturday, and it was getting late, so I decided to turn in. As I turn around to put my guitar away, I gasped and jumped.

Why?

Because there was a five inch slug sitting on the doormat in front of the back door, not six feet from where I was sitting. It was oozing its nasty slugslime all over the doormat. I don’t know how exactly it got in, except to say that my house is fifty years old and perhaps not as airtight as I might like to believe.

(As I write this, I keep looking behind me to make sure another slug hasn’t snuck up on me.)

I know they’re not harmful to humans (unless ingested, apparently, and disgustingly), but still. It was gross. I don’t like bugs and creepy crawly things. I never went through that stage as a boy where I thought spiders were neat and interesting. All bugs (except ladybugs, grasshoppers, lightning bugs, and butterflies) have always creeped me out and given me the heebie-jeebies.

Plus, in reading the Wikipedia article I referenced above, I just learned that slugs are hermaphrodites, and I don’t go for that kind of of nonsense in my house. I mean…. yuck.

Very interesting discussion of Rainbow Tables over at Coding Horror: But it is possible to attack the hashed value of your password using rainbow tables: enormous, pre-computed hash values for every possible combination of characters. An attacking PC could certainly calculate all these hashes on the fly, but taking advantage of a massive table of pre-computed hash values enables the attack to proceed several orders of magnitude faster– assuming the attacking machine has enough RAM to store the entire table (or at least most of it) in memory. It’s a classic time-memory tradeoff, exactly the sort of cheating shortcut you’d expect a black hat attacker to take.

And that blog post led me to the 10 Immutable Laws of Security. Example:
Law #5: Weak passwords trump strong security
The purpose of having a logon process is to establish who you are. Once the operating system knows who you are, it can grant or deny requests for system resources appropriately. If a bad guy learns your password, he can log on as you. In fact, as far as the operating system is concerned, he is you. Whatever you can do on the system, he can do as well, because he’s you. Maybe he wants to read sensitive information you’ve stored on your computer, like your e-mail. Maybe you have more privileges on the network than he does, and being you will let him do things he normally couldn’t. Or maybe he just wants to do something malicious and blame it on you. In any case, it’s worth protecting your credentials.

Lord help me, I’ve created a Facebook account.

The fact that I did that surprised me. But you know what surprised me even more? Facebook is kind of cool. I feel dirty even thinking it, but I’ve hooked up with a couple friends from high school and learned some new things about some current friends.

Who’da thunk?

New York Times: Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.

May she rest in peace. Oh, how I loved A Wrinkle In Time, A Wind In The Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet when I was child. Those were some of my favorite books, and my sister’s, too, I believe.

The book used concepts that Ms. L’Engle said she had plucked from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children’s literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand. She also characterized the book as her refutation of ideas of German theologians.

I love it. Children’s literature is too difficult for adults to understand. Brilliant.

Slashdot asks: Are Relational Databases Obsolete?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: no, you idiot. Don’t be such an idiot.

A Brief History of Ugly: Apple in the last 10 years
I must take exception with his assertions that the iMac G5, the original iBook, and the eMate 300 were ugly. The iMac G5 is striking, the original iBook was breathtaking, and the eMate 300 was astonishingly unique.

Service Scrubber:
This could come in handy.

Also potentially useful: ThisService.

Insomnia:

Despite the occasional foul language, I love xkcd. I don’t know why, but every comic makes me laugh (especially the recent “River Tam Beats Up Everyone”).

‘What will your obituary say?’ at QuizGalaxy.com

Doesn’t seem accurate somehow. Especially the Paris Hilton thing. She won’t actually miss me that much. Although the hysterical laughter thing? That might be right.

In reality, I want my tombstone to say, “I told you I was sick.”

It’s moments like these when I’m proud to be an American.

Amen.

Great hint here on how to customize the date and time formats allowed in Numbers ’08. I added YYYY-MM-DD for my SQL work. Beautiful.

I have to say that Numbers is a fantastic spreadsheet. The only major flaw I’ve found so far is the lack of a TEXT function, which I often use in Excel to pad data with leading zeroes.

Dan writes: Honestly, I don’t know if this can be stopped. It sure as won’t be stopped by electing a different puppet into the White House… that whole process is just another form of distraction, another form of our own disempowerment. Especially this time around… just look at how Hollywood-esque this election is turning out to be.

That’s fine and all, but there’s a far greater threat looming that Dan seems to be ignoring (related Slashdot discussion here).

Todd Ogasawara writes: Apple iWork ‘08 is available now and can read/write Office 2007 files. It has a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation app. It costs $79. I don’t think Office for Mac 2008 for Mac will be $79 (will it come in a bazillion versions like Office for Windows?). I’ve never used iWork but will guess it doesn’t support macros (big deal since Office won’t either).

Right on, Todd. Right on. I’ve been playing with the Numbers ’08 trial and it’s a lot of fun.