Vault

Testing a new blogger desktop tool. To keep this from being a totally worthless post, here is a quote for the day:

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

–Aristotle

For years I have been using an autoclave floppy to securely delete my hard drives. Well, autoclave is no more but its creator is recommending another linux-on-floppy formatting disk known as Darik’s Boot and Nuke (aka DBAN.) The author of Autoclave has this to say about it:

If that was not high praise enough, it should be pointed out that DBAN is used by the National Nuclear Security Administration to safely delete old hard drives.

Developer Works has another great Linux/DB2 article titled DB2 memory and file cache performance tuning on Linux. Article covers the tight integration that exists between Linux and DB2; and how to best leverage it for improved performance. For those of us who suffer live with DB2, tips and techniques improving it are always welcome.

Newsforge has a nice tutorial on setting up a invoicing system with OpenOffice.org. It’s mostly aimed as small business markets who store their customer information in a generally available address book; but the information might be useful as a tool for SMB open source consulting.

You are a Social Liberal (63% permissive) and an… Economic Conservative (73% permissive) You are best described as a: Libertarian Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating

Props to Jason for the survey.

Got a couple really cool links. The first is by a guy who built his very own Sentry Gun. Its made from an air-soft bb gun but who cares. That is what I call home defense!

The second link is 20 CSS tricks. Things like making rounded corners without images, styled lists, tab bars, etc.. Very cool stuff if you are into web design. Just make sure you are running a real web browser (i.e. non IE.)

Living in Oklahoma, I am constantly trying to find out-door activities for my family and I. Found a link to Oklahoma City Outdoor Network. Covers just about every out-door activity happening in the OKC area including camping, hiking, climbing, kayaking, sailing, fishing, hunting, and lots more.

States:

create your own visited states map

Countries:

create your own visited countries map

American “bashing” has been a part collegiate academia for the better part of the twentieth century. One of the reason for this is the fundamental nature of professors to question the status quo. This role is entirely justified (and even required) in a free society. However, many of those outside of academia have noticed that this skepticism seems especially focused on the capitalistic nature of our democracy. Why the intensity of disdain for our American style capitalistic democracy?

Lee Harris writing for in the December 2002 issue of Policy Review says that at least part of it stems from the failure of progressive socialist Marxism. Specifically liberal socialism attempt to salvage Marxism by restructuring the theory of material separation (the immiserization thesis) from an absolute difference to a relative one. However, Harris points out that doing so invalidates one of the primary strengths of Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”; namely that the failure of capitalism rested on weakness in its fundamental nature and not some perceived Utopian ideal. Restructuring for relative differences put modern socialists in a position where they were pursuing a theoretical ideal; something Marx himself wholly condemned. Regardless if you agree with Harris or not; his article is wonderfully interesting and worthy of a weekend read.

Nowdays it is sometimes held, though wrongly, that freedom is an end in itself, that each human being is free when he makes use of freedom as he wishes, and that this must be our aim in the lives of individuals and societies. In reality, freedom is a great gift only when we know how to use it consciously for everything that is our true good.

-Redemptor Hominis

Freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth. When freedom, out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth… then the person ends up by no longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim.

-Evangelium Vitae

The future of filesystems is not Microsoft’s WinFS (no longer an actual filesystem but instead an API built on top of NTFS) or even IBM’s mainframe lineage XFS. Instead a Linux filesystem known as Reiser4 is poised to change the way we think about computer technology. Check out kerneltrap.org’s interview with Hans Reiser, the creator of Reiser4. Reiser4’s speed looks to be nothing short of revolutionary. Add to it a plugin-able architecture that allows unheard of functionality to take place in filesystem space and you get what could be the most disruptive filesystem technology to be seen sense the advent of the modern computer.

Marcus Ranum has listed , in his opinion, the six dumbest ideas as releated to computer security. Not everything on the list is as intuitive as one might guess. Overall its a great rant about how we shold frame the computer security debate.

Jon Smirl has posted this article on the current state of Linux Graphics. It basically tracks the technologies and limitations of the current form of X, based on the coming X.org 7 codebase. While X provides an amazing number of features, ones that are not available on any other platform, is has huge limitation when it comes to 3D support. While these limitation are notacible, they also provide a significant opportunity X and Linux.

I am always google searching for this list. The top 75 security tools, based on a survey of the nmap mailing list, consistently points out some of the most powerful security tools available on any platform. While there are obvious “newby” entries (i.e. SuperScan and Zone Alarm) overall insecure’s catalog is probably the most solid you will find on the public Internet.

I am working on building Linux From Scratch to use as a learning experience for another side project of mine. While reviewing it I ran across this tutorial on setting up LFS. The same site also has Part II and Part III (titled “Beyond Linux from Scratch”) that extends of the original tutorial. Even after all the years I have been developing on Linux; the idea of building an entire OS from source seems pretty amazing.

Want to keep your current job forever? Concerned that some out-sourced pimple faced teenager will replace you? Then you simply need to get creative about how you write your code. Having had to maintain other people’s programs… I can attest to the accuracy of this article. In fact, its my guess that most programmers must already be familiar with it, based solely on my evaluation of most program documentation.

…and I have GOT to memorize that Latin phrase.

Economics provides some of the most powerful tools for data analysis available to society. Yet historically these tools have been used almost exclusively in the realm of finance and business decision support. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner talks about the work of Steven Levitt, one of the most respected economists alive. Levitt uses economic models and data analysis tools to find answers to some of societies most interesting questions.

I enjoyed this book enough to read through it in one sitting, in one night. And I strongly recommend that anyone with interest in socio-political issues read it. Freakonomics will make you take a second look at what you though was common sense. However, the book does have its notable shortcomings.

First, this book is little more than an extended version of the newspaper article by Stephen Dubner on Levitt’s work. If you are familiar with the article there is little reason to buy the book. Second, the book covers almost nothing about economic method. As such it leaves itself open to more criticism that it generally deserves. Third, Freakonomics is definitely dumbed down to make it readable (and probably profitable) to a wider audience. However, the lack of technicality makes the book an enjoyable weekend read and may even encourage the reader into a greater interest in economics and its usefulness.

The OpenSUSE project is really starting to look exciting to me. With the recent release of Beta4 we are just 9 days away from the first release candidates of OpenSUSE 10.

One of the first difficulties of any Linux distribution is package management. Fedora uses Yum (not bad), Kubuntu uses apt (great!), Suse uses Yast (not good.) Yast was fully capable of doing everything the other package managers were but it suffered from two problems. 1) The newest version of Suse never had online packages available; 2) Older versions were really slow and pretty buggy. Steady progress on problem #2 has been going on since the 9.x releases, to the point were Yast is pretty nice to work with. Problem #1 was solved… with the creation of OpenSUSE.

So here are a couple of useful links for getting Yast working with online package repositories. A tutorial on setting up Yast; and the locations of OpenSUSE repositories.

I am getting a pretty big thread bug in my mod_perl/apache setup. It seems to have started when I began using the new credit card server. Looking for some tips on mod_perl administration (to help with debugging) I found this link and this link. Both of which are part of the online mod_perl Guide.