It seems that quite a few people are moving away from /. journals to more traditional blogs. Slashdot has been neglecting the journaling system for quite some time, lacking many of the basic features that are in most blogging packages. I've been flirting with the idea of moving to my own blog but the problem is that I want to notify my /. friends that I have a new journal entry available.

I've heard some people talk about creating a new site for slashdot journal users who want to have the same sense of community but with functionality that users come to expect in a blogging system. While I think this is novel idea, it seems be a lot of work and would require a huge paradigm shift to get people to move to a new site.

An alternative option, that I've been contemplating for quite some time is writing a plugin for one of the more popular blogging packages, like wordpress. What is there was a blog plugin that would automatically post the url and/or content to your slashdot journal? I have yet to confirm the technical feasibility of such a feature, but it seems like it would take care of a lot of problems for those seeking to have their own blog but not abandon the /. community.

I have to stop working for a quick second to post a quick rant. I opened up my e-mail client today to find Bruce Schneier's CRYPTO-GRAM in my inbox. CRYPTO-GRAM is a great little e-mail newsletter and now they are going to publish it in blog form also. Sounds like a reasonable idea, the blog has the same content but it also includes a picture of Schneier posing like he is thinking over the computer.

Why must people take themselves so freaking seriously that they need to have a picture on their blog looking like they are in deep thought? I'm going to measure the validity of your opinions based on content, not whether or not you look serious in a picture.

So who is to blame for this epidemic of posing for your blog picture? I like him a lot, but look no further that Lawrence Lessig. This picture looks like it should in male seeking male personal ad. My favorite is his old pic. I'm sure he is thinking deep thoughts while someone is sitting there with a camera.

Well it looks like the FDA approved implanting RFID's in to people to serve as identifiers for medical records. I like the notion that a proprietary RFID chip should serve as the preferred unique identifier for everyone.

The privacy implications for this technology are huge. You might as well walk around with an access point stuck up your ass that broadcasts your SSN. Speaking of SSN's, why didn't the government just make everyone get ssn tattoo? There was a perfectly good explanation, its a question of privacy stupid. I love how people despise low-tech privacy invasions, but they have a "gee-wiz" attitude towards the latest technological privacy invader.

In the last debate, President Bush talked about Kerry's plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the top 1%. Bush called this a small business tax cut and declared that it would force small businesses to freeze hiring or even lay off people. This is simply not true.

From what I understand, about half of the top 1% are small business owners, many of them have S corporations. An S corporation gives small business owners the advantages of a corporate charter while taxing the businesses' profits as personal income. The key word here is profits.

Anyone who took a basic accounting course will understand that hiring a new person is an expense. When a small business or any business decides to hire someone, that expense is accounted for before the federal, state, and local governments attempt to tax the company directly.

Increasing or Decreasing personal income tax will have no direct effect on small business hiring but it can have an affect on after tax personal spending. In the case of small business owners, they will simply purchase whatever items they need through the business to reduce their tax burden regardless of what the current rate may be.

Raising or lowering personal income tax on the top 1% will have no effect on small business hiring and very little effect on small business spending.

OK, I will even admit it. I am a wired subscriber. There is at least one interesting article in every edition of Wired magazine. The problem is, there are so many other articles that are either factually incorrect, biased, or just flat out wrong. The latest example is what amounts to a press release for the country of India? I'm not one of these anti-outsourcing nuts, but can anyone call that journalism?

The article outlines a few uninnovative projects and then tries to glue it together as a trend where India is now becoming a leader in technology innovations. I'm sorry, but those examples do not amount to shit.

The funniest link in the article is the "also by this reporter", which includes a bunch of other stories of similar quality. I guess as long as the cover design and format look good it doesn't matter what kind of second rate garbage actually passes for content in the magazine.

I went home this weekend to my father's house near Wilkes-Barre PA, which is about two hours north of Philadelphia. I spent most of my formative years in this house. The house is actually all local fieldstone. One of my fathers hobbies is heavy equipment/farming, so when he decided to build the house out of local fieldstone, he simply hauled out stone from many of the old fieldstone walls surrounding the property.

The house its on top of hill with about 100 acres of surrounding fields and forests. There are all types of creatures in the area: Deer, Turkey, Black Bear, Coyote, and just about any other creature that resides in the Pennsylvania woods.

On Friday my father told me about a raccoon he saw on his way back from work that was on the road leading up to the driveway. The road is a 3/4 mile stretc in thick woods that has only one other house on it. He was driving up when he saw a young but full size raccoon. He stopped the car and the raccoon seemed to be tame, putting both paws on his car almost like a dog would do.

The next night, my girlfriend and I were driving back to the house around 1am when we first saw this raccoon. As we drove by it darted in to thick patch of ferns, probably because of bright headlights. We were excited to see the animal, although I spent 5 minutes arguing that it was a raccoon and not a "large cat" like she initially thought.

The next day, around lunchtime, we decided to go grab some Mexican food. As flew down the driveway past the barn, my girlfriend noticed something laying near the barn. I didn't bother to look as I was too concerned with getting lunch and was still 1/2 asleep.

After lunch, as we came back towards the house she pointed out what she saw earlier. Near the barn which about 500 yards below the house, was some creature either eating something or laying down near a tree. I stopped the car about 30 ft from the animal and it hardly flinched. As I approached I could see quite a few flies hovering above it. By now, I could tell it was our raccoon friend but at first I thought it was eating something. When I moved closer I could see that it was really sick, it looked like it was attacked or suffering from some kind of sickness. My initial thought was rabies, since in general, raccoons are rather weary of humans and daylight.

I drove the car back up to the house debating with myself about what to do. I brought my shotgun to the house this weekend because of my new favorite hobby, skeet shooting. I decided to walk down to the barn with my shotgun. As I walked up to the animal, I tried to evaluate its condition, it looked like it was in tremendous pain, and it had been in the same spot all day long. After standing there for a few minutes, I decided to walk back to the house and make a phone call.

I called my father who left for Chicago earlier that morning. After describing the situation, I asked him if I should put the animal down. He concluded that it was probably the best course of action and I should bury it just in case it happened to be diseased. I also confirmed that there was no possible way that the raccoon was pregnant, which was one of my initial suspicions.

After I hung up the phone, I started to second guess using a shotgun. I wanted to kill the animal in the most humane way possible but at the same time I didn't want to blow it in to a pile of guts. After thinking for a little bit, I decided to grab a little .22 rifle that was in the house. The gun has a little scope on it. I gave to my father about a year ago as a present for some holiday. I decided that a .22 to the head would be a quick and clean way to euthanize the raccoon.

I walked down to the barn for the second time that day now furnishing a scoped .22 rifle. The raccoon was in really bad shape, there were twice as many files swarming around its body. It was still shaking, in a movement that was reminiscent of a dying cowboy in a western. I said a few words to the animal to get its attention. "I'm sorry about this mr. raccoon, but I know this is for the best." I stood about 15ft away from the animal and fired the first shot in to its head. The animal was still shaking and I wanted to make this as quick as possible. I fired the second shot in its head, and it was still shaking. I didn't know whether it was nerves or if it was moving in pain. About 5 seconds had passed since I fired the first shot but I decided to dispense my last two rounds to try and end the animal's life as quick as possible.

The raccoon rolled over a little and appeared to be dead but it's one leg was slowly stretching in the air. At this point, I decided to run up and grab my shotgun. By the time I got back (~1min), the animal was definitely dead.

Now I was faced with the grizzly task of burying the animal. I dug a small hole about two feet deep 50 yards from where I put the raccoon down. Grave digging is hard work! After fifteen minutes of digging, I buried the raccoon in the ground and went up to house to reflect on my rather unusual day.

The vice presidential debate was pretty good, all things considered. I thought Edwards did a good job pointing out a lot of Cheney's weaknesses. At the same time, Cheney did better than I expected. Republicans will probably spin this as a Cheney win, Democrats will say Edwards won, but all things considered it was probably even. Although tomorrow's polls will probably give some indication of a bump for one of the candidates. Vice presidential debates are really not that important and by Friday nobody will care or remember tonight's debate.

One rule of tonight's debate that really gave Cheney an advantage was the table. Tables totally kill the debate atmosphere and turn it in to more of a conversation. Have you ever seen Cheney on a podium? Edwards would have killed him if it was the same format of last week's presidential debate. The table request was also a rule of the 2000 vice presidential debate. The Bush team tried to spin this by saying that Cheney can't stand for 90 mins but the truth is Cheney can stand for every other speech or working a fundrasiser. The truth is Cheney wouldn't stand a chance against Edwards in a traditional podium debate.

I really like Debian and Gentoo, they are my favorite Linux distributions. Right now, I use Gentoo on all my desktop machines and Debian on most of the server machines.

One aspect of Gentoo that seems to be far and above Debian is the level of user support. Gentoo Forums is probably the best Linux support resource period. Not only, do I use Gentoo forums for Gentoo support, but I also use it when I run in to problems on Debian and when I hit programming roadblocks.

Given the runaway success of the Gentoo forums support model for the past two years, you would think Debian would set up a similar resource? Nope, apparently the web folks over at Debian have yet to catch on to this "trend." The only Debian forums that exist are either unoffical low traffic sites or usenet. Which, as much as I love usenet, web forums make a lot more sense for end user OS support.

I watched the debate on Thursday with a big degree of skepticism given the insane amount of rules designed to prevent the debate from being a real debate. Amazingly, it turned out to be a pretty good one despite all of the bureaucracy. I thought Kerry did a pretty good job but I think it was more a case of Bush lossing rather than a Kerry winning. Historically, Bush has an advantage when he is the challenger. The only debate he lost before this, was his relection debate for governor but that loss had no effect since there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell of the challenger being elected.

I am really sick of this whole "flip flop" crap, which is one of those Bush "messages" that has been regurgitated by every right wing pundit and supporter. Every politician changes their stance on issues. Bush does it, Kerry does it, everybody does it. The 9-11 commission and the homeland security department are two great examples of Bush changing his position due to political pressure. Reevaluating your stance on something after learning new information or because of changing conditions is just plain common sense. Bush supporters tout his unwillingness to change in the face of common sense as a strength, but in reality its a huge weakness for the president. A position where a leader needs to make decisions based on logic, not concern for how others may view a change in policy.

One of the best lines I hear from people leaning towards Bush is "Kerry has no Iraq plan!" One thing I thought Kerry did do a great job of is articulating his strategy for Iraq, so I would love to hear people who have watched that debate would tell me that Kerry has no plan. The fact is, most people can't articulate the Bush plan for Iraq. Anytime I ask a Bush supporter what the plan is I usually get some garbage like, "stay the course."

Moveon.org has become an exceptionally powerful voice in politics. On Friday, I went to a concert that was essentially a fund raiser for moveon.org. They had several of these events across the country with big name artists such as Dave Matthews, Bruce Springsteen, and the Dixie Chicks. Moveon.org has really innovated from the traditional methods of a political organization. Their use of the Internet, the political TV commercial contest, print campaigns, and now concerts are all examples of how Moveon.org is breaking new ground. It will be interesting to see if other groups and the traditional parties, attempt to clone Moveon.org.

A few of you may know that I work for Penn State's Information Technology Services division, otherwise known as ITS. When I started working for Penn State a few years ago, I was really impressed the University's thinking when it came to networks, security, and open source.

When I started working part time about three years ago, everyone on the network had an unfirewalled public ip connection to the Internet. This let faculty, staff, and students take full advantage of the promise that is the Internet. Security, was expected to occur at the system level, instead of having blocked ports and firewalled connections, which just give the illusion of security.

Last fall, Penn State rolled out a firewall in all of the dorms. The party line was that it was for "security" but coincidentally the Napster music service was rolled out at the same time for dorm students. The Napster service is where students pay the RIAA for a music service out of their IT fee, whether they use the service or not.

While I complained to a few people, but I'm practically on the lowest end of the totum pole so there was nothing for me to do and from what I heard, the firewall was minor compared to what some administrators wanted to do to appease Penn State's partner, the RIAA. The dorm firewall didn't effect me, so the anger soon went away as I went back to my unfirewalled office connection.

So a few weeks ago, I went to SSH in to one of our servers as I do multiple times every day of the week. To my surprise, the connection was refused, so opened up my e-mail client to send out a message to see if there were any network problems. Low and behold, I see a new e-mail message letting me know that they are blocking ssh coming in to every system at Penn State's computer building.

So why would the network management decide to block ssh to all of the systems on the PSU computer building ip range? Apparently, someone was launching a DDOS attack that attempted to brute force any box that had port 22 open, so instead of attempting to block the attack, they just ended up blocking the target.

I thought this was a quick and dirty method, that would just be temporary until they found a real solution later in the day. I sent a nice e-mail to the people who handle these sort of things and asked if they could be kind enough to unblock our development server. Within five minutes, we were back online and commiting to cvs again, so I guess my explanation was good.

So at this time, three weeks later, word has come down that this block of port 22 is not temporary and the only solution for those under the block is to bind ssh to another port. So instead of trying to take on the attack, Penn State has chosen to punish its employees instead.

I can't think of a more illogical, shortsighted, and just plain stupid solution to a denial service attack than to go ahead and deny the service! Using this rationale, if I were to launch a DDOS attack against the psu.edu webserver, their solution would be to bind apache to another port, thus blocking all traffic to www.psu.edu.

This is another case, just like the dorm firewall, where I am not affected. My office is not in the computer building so its not under the port 22 block. The only server we have in the computer building is unblocked. The main issue I have is that their seems to be a trend towards backward thinking. Penn State's approach to networking and network security appears to moving progressively towards the wrong path of "firewall everything" and "security by obscurity." I hope that is not the case.

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Almost every faculty or staff member has a personal computer and has connected it to the Penn State network either directly or indirectly. Networks bring with them many opportunities to explore a wide range of subjects. But networks also represent a hostile world, making it imperative that we proactively protect both our own computer and Penn State's network. There are a number of resources that will help you to protect your computer, including anti-viral software and spyware, available at no charge from Information Technology Services. This is provided either on the PAC-ITS CD you can obtain from most Help Desks or at http://downloads.its.psu.edu/. It takes very little time to secure your computer against network threats and keep your online experience safe and productive. And the peace of mind you will gain is priceless.

There is yet another serious computer issue that concerns all of us -- copyright infringement.

In the last few years, many people have learned that they can obtain music and other media through the Internet. Unfortunately, the common result has been unauthorized downloading of copyrighted material. Please understand that making such copies is against federal and state laws. It is also a violation of University policy.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), copyright infringement is a serious violation and is subject to harsh penalties. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have increased their enforcement efforts. The last thing I want is for one of you to be punished for something you mistakenly thought was not a serious matter.

Employees who make or distribute copies could lose their network access privileges at Penn State and face the possibility of lawsuits from the music industry. For the most serious offenders, criminal charges can result as well. I urge you to think carefully about the risks you are taking if you make illegal copies. University policy AD 20, Computer and Network Security, http://guru.psu.edu/policies/AD20.html#F covers aspects of infringement and sanctions for violations.

I recommend that you take time to learn more about this issue. The Information Technology Services Web site http://its.psu.edu/ discusses this matter further under the heading "It's so cool to get any song I want from the net." There is other valuable information on the Web listed under "Copyright Resources" at http://its.psu.edu/policies/.

For those who want to download music for a fee from the Internet, I suggest you register at http://napster.psu.edu for the Napster Premium Service Penn State is offering. This legal service offers music streams or downloads from over 800,000 songs, access to professional radio stations, pre-released exclusives, and more! Last spring, the Napster program was only available to students who lived in a residence hall on any campus. Over 85% of our residence hall students signed up for the service during our pilot semester. Napster's Premium Service is now available to all University faculty and staff at all campuses at a discounted price of $6.95 per month.

Again, I urge you to take the ramifications of copyright infringement seriously and resist the urge to engage in illegal downloading or file sharing. For those of you with regular contact with students, I urge you to educate them on the need to respect the intellectual property of others.

Sincerely,

Rodney A. Erickson Executive Vice President and Provost of the University

Looking for career change? How about the exciting position of Underwater Lumberjack?

Divers using special hydraulic chain saws had been swimming down 70 feet or so into the reservoir, attaching themselves to submerged tree trunks, cutting them and then watching as the trunks were hauled to the surface by iron cables.

"On a good day, you could cut maybe 8 or 10 trees," said Benedito Sidinei Correia de Medeiros, a 38-year-old diver who, after five years, had worked up to a salary of $275 a month. "You have to be very careful down there, because the chain saw can slice you in half if you let it go, and it's so dark during the rainy season that you can't see anything."

Still, he described his work as "neat" and "a lot of fun." Though divers constantly need to be on the lookout for alligators, snakes and a particular species of tree whose bark is poisonous, he also recalled curious dolphins and bass playfully approaching and nudging him.

Sign me up!

Interesting post in the Politech Mailing List

From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
To: politech@politechbot.com
Subject: [Politech] Politech offline -- thank you, Apple Computer
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2004 12:07:18 -0500
Dear Politech subscribers,

If you've been wondering why the list has been basically silent since
the weekend of August 7, there's a good reason: Apple Computer.

I switched from a 17" Sony Vaio to a Powerbook 15" G4 laptop in
February, and love it. Even though an OS X machine is tricky to use
with CNET's Windows environment, the struggle has been worth it. (I've
had a Mac off and on since a 512K "Fat Mac" in 1985 or so, and a NeXT
in the early 1990s, but have been buying PCs for the last 7 years.)

Then my Powerbook died three weeks ago. I dropped it off at the Apple
store in Clarendon, Va. on August 8. Apple has had it since then -- 19 days
and counting -- with no end in sight.

Today's not-very-helpful report is that the Powerbook needs a new
logic board, which is "on a ship somewhere," according to Apple. They
have no idea when it'll arrive. Given that the Pacific Ocean is a
large place that takes some time to cross, I'm hardly hopeful.

Having a computer out of service for three weeks is unacceptable. Sony
typically provided me with 5-7 day turnaround time. (And yes, I did
buy AppleCare, though the Powerbook would still be under warranty
without it.)

Making the lack of a laptop especially acute is that I've been on the
road constantly: in Aspen for the last 8 days and leaving Monday for
over a week in Palo Alto and San Francisco and then South Africa (I'm
happy to meet up with Politech folks during either trip).

If Apple wants to be taken seriously in the business world, then it
has to get serious about technical support. I'm sure I'm not the only
one who's having these problems.

-Declan
_________

I can sympathize with Delcan on this one, After using three different Apple computers (tibook, ibook, and dual g5) I can make five statements which I believe are true.

1. Apple product design is top notch.
2. Apple products are prone to greater hardware failure rates over time.
3. Quality Control is a problem for Apple.
4. Apple's default warranty (1yr or 90days for refurb) is substandard.
5. Apple is lacking in the product replacement and repair dept.

The 2000 election was suspect, but it never really made me too angry. While I still suspect that Gore might have won the election, I was just happy for the media coverage to end.

The stem cell decision in August 01 was very disappointing but frankly with Sush being an evangelical Christian, I thought it could of been a lot worse. I was expecting some type of ban on privately funded research but I still don't understand the argument against government funded research? Maybe one of the /. born again's can explain why they don't support stem cell research? Also, can an evangelical explain to me in a logical fashion why the believe in the Rapture?

Bushes reaction to 9-11 was very disturbing for me in many ways, the whole "US vs. Them" talk and the religious references "axis of evil," "evildooers" left a bad taste in my mouth. I completely supported the war in Afghanistan, which was not fully committed to by Bush for two reasons.

• To demonstrate the effectiveness of Donald Rumsfield's transformation strategy
• To have enough manpower to go in to Iraq

The fact is that post-war aid to Afghanistan is completely underfunded. It would have been nice to us succeed in nation building on a much smaller scale before attempting it twice in a little over a year.

When bush started mentioning Iraq, it just made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. WMD? Most of the countries in the world have WMD. I couldn't understand why if Saddman had WMD, that would be a justification to go to war, regardless of whatever UN resolution he was violating. Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11 and was not an Islamic extremist, in fact he wasn't very religious at all. He was a terrible power hungry dictator, but he wasn't interested in attacking the US. The bottom line is Saddam wanted power + money and attacking the US would provide neither, only certain doom.

The way the war was dealt with by the Bush administration portrays how they deal with anything that may be perceived as a threat or weakness. Any time a situation arises that exposes a weakness in either their mantra or actions, the party line is to deny that such a weakness exists. It is clearly evident in the way the administration acted when the war turned sour. Its also the way it acted when the economy was/is having problems.

Now the legacy of denial has gone even further with these "Swift boat" ads that are designed to do one thing, distract the American people from George Bush Jr's record. This is the same thing GW B pulled when McCain started winning primaries. Question the patriotism and performance of a decorated veteran with a smear campaign designed to distract voters from the real issues, Why? Because on the issues, GWB doesn't stand a chance, the only way he makes gains is by emotional appeal and diversion.

What really set me off today, was the new overtime rules that went in to effect. The legislation drafted by the business lobby and supported by the Bush administration, makes millions of people ineligible for overtime! Oh but of course, they act like its a good plan for labor.

• Workers earning $23,660 annually or less are eligible for overtime pay for working more than 40 hours a week. The department says about 1.3 million workers will be newly eligible.
• White-collar workers earning $100,000 or more a year are newly exempt from overtime pay.
• Changes to duties that determine whether an employee is professional, executive or administrative and exempt from overtime will result in "very few, if any" workers losing overtime, the Labor Department says. Critics say 6 million could lose overtime.
• Union workers covered by contracts will not be affected by the change. Critics say changes will hurt future contract negotiations.
• Police officers, firefighters and other public safety officers are not affected, nor are blue-collar workers.
• People identified as generally exempt from overtime pay include pharmacists, funeral directors, embalmers, journalists, financial services industry workers, insurance claims adjusters, human resource managers, management consultants, executive and administrative assistants, purchasing agents, registered or certified medical technologists, dental hygienists, physician assistants, accountants, chefs, athletic trainers with degrees or specialized training, computer system analysts, programmers and software engineers.

Labor laws such as overtime and the move towards a 40 hour work week were put in place beginning in the 19th century as a reponse to great injustice being done to workers of that period. Business owners were taking advantage of labor, forcing many to work 60-80 hr work weeks without overtime, without benefits, and in many cases without pay. Miners for example would generally rent from the mine owner and earn credits to spend in a general store also owned by, the mine owner.

The relationship between employer and employee is naturally imbalanced in favor of the employer. Overtime and other labor legislation were put in place to try and balance that relationship. The growing economic disparity between classes, coupled with the demise of unions, the death of US manufacturing jobs, and a reduced regulatory environmental will become a toxic mix.

I do not care for unions, and I believe in many ways the whole labor movement is a relic of the past. I simply cannot stand socialism and especially class warfare. However, if lawmakers keep reducing labor laws as directed to by big business, and the economy keeps dropping good jobs for unskilled workers in favor of low-paying service jobs, there will eventually be a state of general unrest.