So, it appears that this is outlawing attaching a camera to your kite, to a model rocket, to an arrow... many forms of amateur photography are basically becoming misdemeanor offenses. so if one decides to start their iphone recording and throw it up into the air to see what they can see, or throw their recording ipad like a frisbee in the park, if either captures images of a place or person who didn't give express permission to photograph, you could be charged.

that's all nutso to me.

That's the most realistic description of the modern definition of credit. When it comes to credit cards, you're pressured into using them to cover things that you should have been able to afford to begin with, enticing you with low monthly payments. The problem is that you get a couple things that you *need* for a while, then you get one or two things that you want and next thing you know you're stuck with no way out.

10 years ago, it was easy to get a new card with a low interest rate (typically 0% for a year) on balance transfers, so if you planned it properly and you got into a hole, you could consolidate to a 0% card and be able to pay off a significant portion (if not all) within that time period. Obviously this is assuming semi-responsible spending habits with the occasional lapse in judgement, not the spend thrifts that will blow their entire wad on clothing, a flatscreen TV and an home theatre system the day they get the card.

Today, those 0% cards are pretty much non-existent. The only way out of the hole once you're in is to either get help with it (many people don't have a friend or relative willing to loan that kind of money), go to a debt consolidation agency (also a racket, but if you can get a good deal can actually work) or completely change your way of life (move closer to work, sell your car for a more fuel efficient one, move to a state with cheaper gas, move to a cheaper household, etc), but that isn't necessarily an option for many people either.

If I decided to do this, I would need to operate my LAN like every node was bare on the internet. I've got fileservers with guest access (for, you know... houseguests), web services, my invoicing system, and a whole slew of other personal services. The thought of open wifi on the LAN kinda scares me from a security perspective.

Given that the majority of people out there aren't security conscious, there are all kinds of implications for keeping default router settings/passwords.

When I was staying in the Oakwoods in Burbank, CA for work (long-term housing, like... for months), I could see every machine on the LAN and all of the windows machines had read-only filesharing on, so I was able to loot up on all kinds of raunchy porn that people downloaded from limewire. One guy even had a bunch of tax documents in a shared folder. This included a PDF of the lease on his lexus, and some credit card statements. Another guy had 8GB of photos of his kids and family.

Shit can be dangerous out there if you're not careful.

When it comes to the Creative Suite (especially Photoshop and Illustrator), Adobe has been really good about actually giving you value for your money. Sure they break compatibility, but that's because they give you new features that you actually use all the time. The bad thing about these features is that techniques that retouchers used to charge $100/hour for and work on a photo for 14 hours now takes someone who has zero experience 20 minutes to accomplish, so it's ruining the industry... but at the same time, the quality of work and amount of work you can accomplish in a given amount of time has increased dramatically.

Some examples of valid compatibility-breaking features:

  * gradient mesh (illustrator)
  * transparency (illustrator)
  * support for more than 99 layers (photoshop)
  * layer groups/ folders (photoshop)
  * embedding fonts (photoshop/illustrator)
  * effects (photoshop/illustrator)
  * artboard size (illustrator)

Many of these features are older. I haven't used the suite extensively since CS3 when I was a certified expert in photoshop and illustrator. I'd been using photoshop since version 2.5 and illustrator since version 7, so I've seen the evolution of the products and they are incredibly impressive. I'm constantly amazed at what they've been able to do with these programs.

Things like Office are a different story. I'm not aware of any specific features that they've added in any recent versions. MS changes their file formats with every new version of their package and doesn't seem to be adding any additional features beyond user interface (which is no excuse for breaking compatibility).

From what I see, though, one of the big issues is that when you get to be the size of Facebook or Twitter, it HAS to be about making money. Who is going to pay for your servers and who is going to pay your employees who work on the site full-time? Once you hit critical mass, in order not collapse under your own weight, you need to protect your monetary interests and that means closing off access to competing services.

Now, in the past, this wasn't as much of an issue because people actually paid for things and/or the advertisements covered costs. Today, the bottom has fallen out of the advertising market and no one wants to pay for anything anymore. I have friends that think Flickr's $25/year pro account is a rip-off. I think that's a *steal*.

The ecosystem of the web today is full of freeloaders and "entrepreneurs" who are trying to make a quick buck (via VC or getting bought, primarily) rather than trying to build awesome new products that people would actually want to pay for. No one wants to build companies anymore, they just want to build windfalls.

I really liked internet time. It was great because I had a widget in my menubar that showed the @time and when I met people in chat rooms, it was easy to synchronize...

for those of you not in the know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

I've spent the better part of the last year trying to bring this back. Not to use as a primary time-telling device, but as a way of easily synchronizing across timezones, mostly for IRC/IM and teleconference meetings.

I also think we need to completely kill daylight savings (as many people are suggesting). It is definitely time to do that worldwide.

A very large problem with this forcing of real names is when the sites in question have blacklists for certain names. I have a friend who's real, birth certificate name is "Aragorn" (his parents are HUGE LOTR geeks) and facebook does not allow that name, so he goes by Aragor. It's incredibly annoying to me, but he doesn't really care that much. facebook wants him to send a copy of his driver's license as proof so they'll allow him to use the name.

I'm just glad that they let me use Spike. I mean, it may not be on my birth certificate, but it's the only name I use. It's on my bank accounts (BofA doesn't seem to care), credit cards, cell phone, work ID, everything. My parents have called me that since before I was born and it's all anyone calls me.

In "Rant," there's a character who purposely gets bitten by spiders in order to get the proper erection. Life imitating art, again?

docs were read. mass-googling was done. I'm talking about apple's utilities... `networksetup` in the instance of the LOM and the network port bonding. There's no consistency in the docs about what they mean by "Service Name" which is what they call the "interface." However, there are 2 names for the interface... the user-specified one ("Ethernet 2") and the bsd name ("en1"), but the docs call them both the servicename. The only way I was able to figure out which gets used where is by trial and error.

in many cases, apple has provided their own tools that completely replace the standard toolset. hdiutil and networksetup are 2 prime examples.

another thing I forgot to bring up is ipmitool which mostly works unless you try to do serial-over-lan (sol) connections; it's completely unusable and you have to go to sourceforge and build your own ipmitool to do that stuff.

I mean, I'm not an OSX n00b. Typically I'm a linux engineer, but I've been OSX on the desktop since the developer previews and the server I've had running at home for a while and I've done contract server set up on versions going back to jaguar... the thing is that this is the first time that I've had to do seriously low-level shit (building a large xserve infrastructure with customized management and deployment tools) and it's like running into a concrete wall headfirst every time a new task comes down the pipe.

Apple has no real interest in the enterprise market.

And this is terrible news.

Content providers for apple MUST provide video files in Apple ProRes fileformat which is ONLY able to be encoded using apple's tools which only run in OSX. I don't know how apple expects large content producers to encode high-volumes of videos for them without the xserves. MacPros are not an option as they are not enterprise ready (single PSU, no management port, they're HUGE and must be de-"racked" in order to swap drives, etc). MacMinis are not suitable for this as they don't have enough CPU/RAM. The xserves weren't even that great, but they were the right form factor.

Apple's been seriously fucking up with regard to the enterprise lately. I've been running into issues with their commandline admin utilities --they don't give access to everything that you can do with the GUI. You can't configure which port to use for management from the CLI (the docs say you can, but it doesn't work), it renames your interface when you bond network interfaces by appending " Configuration" to the name, which doesn't happen in the gui... and now, 10.6.6 doesn't properly image using System Image Utility (http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3665)

Now, they're bundling OSX Server into OSX Lion. Who knows whether they'll continue to support ALL of the non-home user features of server like OpenDirectory. WTF.

apple's mobileme has had this since at least 2003. It was the one feature (but not the only reason) that has kept me from migrating my email over to gmail or other provider. They have an email aliasing feature which allows you to not only create new aliases for your main account, but you can choose what address is in the reply-to field in Mail.app or through the web app.

This has been great since I signed up for MobileMe (then, .Mac) in 2000 when I was 19 and used spike666 as my moniker, and was able to use a more professional name when the time came without needing to create a separate account.

I really wish gmail would add that. There's no way to change my google account's login (according to their faq) and I'm not about to get a new account and lose my entire search history and everything else that's tied to that account.

I would use an email address on one of my domains, but after having the same email address for 11 years, it's kinda hard to switch.

So this also proves that, ultimately, this list of passwords was not properly hashed.

People jump up and down and scream that SHA1 and MD5 are broken, but if properly used, they still offer significant password security. One trick is to use salts when storing passwords in the database.

password: 'foo'
salt: '2010-11-16T08:39:05Z - some_random_string$#@!'
password-hash (md5): 14e80778512f578a5fe263abe4b58e9c

that increased the amount of time required to brute-force the password significantly. Also, the use of a database of hashes is largely worthless since each password in the list would have a completely unique hash. for the sake of brute-forcing the data, short passwords don't matter (on the other hand, brute-forcing login to the application is not affected). Having a different salt for each password makes the time spent on each other password completely worthless once the cracker gets to the next item in the list.

to improve that, we can say... hash the result 1000 times in a row. For someone trying to brute force the hash, they would spend 1000x the CPU resources creating the hash. It's mostly not a big deal to run that hash 1000 times when creating the information for the database or authenticating the user.

of course, SHA1 and MD5 are still broken when it comes to file integrity checking (when it comes to tampering) since there are documented collisions. For this case, cryptographic signatures are where it's at. You can guarantee that not only was the file not tampered with, but also that the person who supplied the signature was who they say they were. Gotta love public key encryption.

...you insensitive clod!

8 commands. period. no more, no less. Super maintainable, cross platform and...

bah, who am I kidding?

cars are lame.

friends from out of town don't understand my love affair with being carless. living in NYC, public transportation is spectacular... I just wish it was better outside of the city.