To be fair, APL was a wonderful language, and perfect so long as you didn't want to actually /do/ anything.

I worked with a guy in the mid 1980s who used APL for everything. He came from the mainframe world, but had APL for MS-DOS on floppies. When he was contracted for writing an MS-DOS application in RM-COBOL, he used APL to write a full screen text editor so that he would not use edlin and such.

I've got 8GB on my machine, and every day or so I need to shut down Firefox to reclaim the memory it's been leaking. Firefox starts at around 300MB of RAM, and grows to 1GB if I let it.

I had 4GB and upgraded to 8GB, and have 1200+ tabs open in 19 windows. Firefox is fast, and the whole laptop is smooth.

Just install NoScript and don't enable Javascript for any but the sites you use more often. This way Flash ads will not play, and memory usage will be far less.

And make sure you disable Firebug as well as YSlow if you have them.

If you want to know how much each device uses by hour, day, month, then you need wrtbwmon.

It is a simple shell script that uses iptables, and runs on OpenWRT just fine.

wrtbwmon shows a graph for each device by MAC address. if you configure OpenWRT to use a fixed IP address per MAC address, then you see the device name that you assign on all graphs.

The original is here. There is also this fork.

I have modified it to run off of a USB memory stick, and store its data there as well. It does not use much storage, barely 85 to 100 kilobytes per day. So even an old 512MB USB stick should last for many years.

According to the statement on the CRA web site, it was security agencies that told the CRA that 900 SINs were stolen:

Regrettably, the CRA has been notified by the Government of Canada's lead security agencies of a malicious breach of taxpayer data that occurred over a six-hour period. Based on our analysis to date, Social Insurance Numbers (SIN) of approximately 900 taxpayers were removed from CRA systems by someone exploiting the Heartbleed vulnerability. We are currently going through the painstaking process of analyzing other fragments of data, some that may relate to businesses, that were also removed.

So, are the security agencies monitoring traffic to government web sites, so that they are so specific? What else are they monitoring?

Back in 2008 when Israel attacked Israel because of foolish Hezbollah misadventures, Condoleezza famously said:

What we're seeing here is, in a sense, the growingâ"the birth pangs of a new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East.

Here is the source.

To this day, the words "New Middle East" is believed by a vast majority over there as a USA conspiracy against Arabs/Muslims. When the 2011 revolution broke out, the first explanation by many was : "It is the USA conspiring against Mubarak, Egypt, Arabs, ...etc."

Now both sides of the political divide in Egypt (pro-Military, pro-Muslim-Brotherhood) point to the other party as an accomplice or agent for that conspiracy.

It is so powerful and pervasive .. no thanks to that ideologue of a Condy ...

Here is how you can test your servers to see if they are vulnerable.

Download this Python SSL Heartbleed test script.

Download it, rename it to ssltest.py, then run it as:

python ssltest.py example.com

You did not understand what I said ...

First, I was giving an example of how to get free Dynamic DNS if you already host with Linode. No extra service needed.

Second, the script I described and included the source code for, runs on OpenWRT. Since OpenWRT is a router it does not need to run a remote script (PHP or otherwise) to know what its external IP address is.

Finally, the PHP script was if you do not have OpenWRT, and want to have the equivalent functionality with Linode from a Linux machine that is not the router, inside your network. In this case, you need to get the external IP by running a script on your Linode VPS, then updating Linode's DNS using curl command.

Clearer now?

If you have a Linode VPS, then you do have free Dynamic DNS. All you need is a script to update the relevant subdomain.

Here is a script that does it for an OpenWRT router.

Using Linode Dynamic DNS with OpenWRT

If you don't use OpenWRT, you can still use any Linux box behind the subdomain, but you need to setup a small "what is my IP" script outside your subdomain. For example, simple script like so will do the trick:

<?php
print $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . "\n";
?>

Now, you need to change the OpenWRT script above to contact the server that has the PHP script, and get the public IP address of the subdomain.

He is the 21st century edition of Jon Katz.

Here is a list of the current ten theories on the disappearance of flight MH370.

The electrical fire theory is simple, compelling, and wrong!

The codebase is huge, many many billion SLOCs.

But, most of the functions never get called, and the rest is code comments ...

Tired of the pace of upgrades that Mozilla (and Ubuntu) forces on you?

Well then, install the Firefox ESR on Linux, and stay for a year without changes ...

No, it is never too late for someone who is willing to learn ...

My career spans some 30 years, and I did reinvent my skills every now and then.

I changed careers to computers in the mid 1980s, from pharmacy, of all things. Started with playing around with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. A year later, I got a job doing programming in COBOL on mainframes, along with PCs. A couple of years after, it was finally UNIX, where I realized this is the system for me. Some years after, it was Linux. Several years after that, it was LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).

Now I do consulting on open source exclusively, as a small business owner.

Just have to learn new things every now and then, and do actual projects with them.

There are nutcases everywhere ... so what ...

Here in Canada we have them too. For example, this is a Canadian member of parliament who said military action may be needed against Russia.

But when you know Anders' views, you will not be surprised. He is a Conservative MP, who voted against granting Mandela honorary citizenship, calling him a communist and terrorist.

Here are the rest of his extreme views.

So, one news anchor spewing nonsense is not surprising.

What matters is not letting these type of pro-escalation voices drown out a more level headed reasonable approach ...