So, I won an Xbox last night in a raffle at the Disaster Recovery BoF. A few hours prior to that, I hadn’t even heard of the Xbox.
Walking through the vendor exhibition hall with a colleague earlier that afternoon, he remarked how cool the Xbox was. “What’s an Xbox?” I asked. “A game console”, he replied.
I told him how glad I was that I didn’t have one, because I didn’t have enough time for my interests and hobbies as it was. My life would be over if I had such a device.
Now I own one.
Hmm…
I’ve finally put up a page for my bash completion and other cool bash stuff.
We spent Thanksgiving in the Santa Barbara area, in Carpenteria to be specific, staying at Prufrock’s Garden Inn.
Saturday evening, I’m flying down to San Diego for the LISA 2001 conference. That should be fun. I just hope they have a wireless LAN for my laptop so that I can still do stuff.
On Sunday evening, we’ll probably head down to tacky Tijuana, just over the Mexican border.
Flight prices are still ridiculously cheap right now, so Sarah and I have decided to go for a long weekend on Maui in January. So it’s the rainiest month of the year in Hawaii, but who cares?
Spent some time hacking on Junkbuster today. It’s rare that I get to hack on C code in my day job (or even outside of my day job).
Basically, Google needs to be able to strip out the Referer header from HTTP requests when said URL refers to an internal Google document, just in case the file name compromises confidentiality.
We now have a trio of Junkbuster proxies running on a single machine. Port 8000 filters out Referer and User Agent headers, port 8001 filters out both of those headers as well as ads, and port 8002 filters out those headers, ads, and cookies.
All in all, a decent step in the direction of anonymous browsing. It’s just unfortunate that Referer and User Agent information can also be retrieved via JavaScript. Nothing is infallible.
Looks like tomorrow is going to be taken up with documenting the proxy implementation and putting together an LDAP design document.
On the home network front, I now have monitoring, thanks to mon. I’ve also replaced wu-ftpd with vsftpd and syslogd with syslog-ng, which is a vastly superior piece of code. CVS is one of the next things I’ll need to set up, but that’s pretty simple.
Hi mperry. It sounds like you’ve arrived at a crossroads in your life and I wish you the best in your future endeavours.
Your diary entry yesterday was most tantalising and I find myself wondering how much of the change in your life is related to unstoppable events at work.
Will Linuxcare implode on itself like a dying star? Almost no news comes out of that company these days. Once upon a time, people would dread the poison pen of Maureen O’Gara as she sought to trash Linuxcare and all other Linux companies. These days, Linuxcare isn’t even important enough to be worthy of her bile.
It’s true what they say: the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Anyway, I successfully migrated all services from my old machine in Amsterdam and now have everything running on a new machine in my apartment, down here in Palo Alto.
The last few weeks have seen me fine-tuning the configuration of Postfix and BIND, as well as nailing down the security of my network as tightly as possible.
I’ve now got IPSec based access into Google, which is very convenient when I’m on-call.
I also installed an excellent Web based e-mail client for family and friends to use to access their e-mail account. I didn’t want to be offering either POP or IMAP over the Internet, so SquirrelMail provided an excellent alternative.
Future projects will see incremental improvements in the network here. I require more flexible logging, which I’ll get from either msyslog or syslog-ng.
Then I’ll need a more secure FTP daemon, for which I’ll probably go with vsftpd. Another worthy project is monitoring, where I’ll probably use mon, since that has served me well in the past. Somewhere down the road, I also want to install a news server to gate some of the mailing lists I’m on to newsgroups.
In short, projects aplenty. The only issue, as always, is finding the time.
I dropped Sarah off at San Jose airport this morning. I felt as nervous as hell while she was in the air. I’m flying out to the east coast Friday night and I’m not worried for my own safety at all, but it was awful knowing that the person I care most about in the world was in what has been exposed as an extremely vulnerable position. To my great relief, she arrived safe and sound.
First of all, hi to mperry. Welcome to Advogato! It was always a pleasure to work with you and who knows, maybe our professional paths will cross again in the future.
The stuff you’re doing with your iPAQ sounds very cool, but I wonder how much you must have spent on all of those accessories. I would love one of those things, but know that it wouldn’t stop at the initial cost of the unit itself. There would be the card expansion pack, the extra memory, etc. Life’s hard when you have to justify expenditure to your fiancée. Maybe I’ll reassess when the H3800 comes out. That looks like it will be a great unit.
Well, I spent some time configuring Apache last night and should be ready to make the switch to hosting www.caliban.org sooner rather than later. Hopefully, I’ll manage to grab some time today to start working on e-mail.
As a former employee of @Home Benelux, it comes as no big surprise to read about the chapter 11 filing of the US variant and shareholder. Management at that company was always in disarray, with a fatal unwillingness to listen to the wisdom of others.
More illuminating, though is this article on how the whole @Home/Excite merger was doomed from the start, with cynical executives and VCs looking for artificial ways to bump up the stock value so that big investors could cash in and bow out, without any care for the long term future of the business, its employees, its customers, or minor investors in its shares.
This is cynical big business at its worst, especially when one considers that those guilty have what I disaffectionately call resumé buoyancy. They’ve risen so high on the totem pole that they can just waltz into a similar position elsewhere and rape and pillage in the same fashion all over again. OK. that’s my Saturday morning rant out of the way. Time to go and do something useful now…
