dimension digression
A French team of mathemeticians and computer artists has just released a documentary that attempts to help us mere math-mortals transcend the three-dimensional space we are trapped in, and visualize regular polyhedra in 4 dimensions just as a Escher tile-lizard might visualize our 3-D world. The two hours worth of videos are very well done, [...]
Grimes against humanity
And speaking of totalitarian police states, it has come to my attention that Jack Grimes, indefatigable leader of the United Fascist Union, and 2008 candidate for US president, who wants to re-make America in the model of Mussolini’s Italy, with mandatory worship of the Roman Pantheon, is from my home town. Yet another reason to [...]
notes on PHP session security
besides the official documentation, some must-read overviews of the issues with PHP’s session support are provided by Harry and segfaultlabs.
tot-alitarianism
Speaking of security – unfortunately the Playmobil Security Checkpoint is out of stock. This toy would really help any young thought-criminal become habituated to the pervasive “security apparatus” they will be growing up under the all-seeing eye of. But while the children in the overseas toy factories ramp up production of this item, you can [...]
installing mod_security on CentOS 5
Installation of mod_security from source is very easy, but did not quite go according to the published documentation on CentOS 5. Following is a brief detail on steps required.
cloudy with chance of persistent elasticity
The cloud is good. The cloud is new. We like cloud. Now that that’s settled, AWS engineers are well underway in making persistent, durable storage available to EC2 instances. This opens up a whole new world of possiblilty to those of use who have been intrigued by running AMIs, but put off by the fact [...]
how to stop FTP brute-force attacks with DenyHosts
We use DenyHosts on several servers to keep the annoying kids in the neighborhood from banging on the ssh door all day. This has been working fine for years. But getting it working for FTP or other authenticated services was thought to be impossible by some. It isn’t impossible – but it is a little [...]
Too fit to print
On Friday the Wall Street Journal officially put on mask, fins and snorkel and lowered itself into the cesspool.
Blocked but not beaten
As of today, the local cable utility monopoly has decided to block outgoing port 25 in our neighborhood. Strange it took them this long – but it means sending email suddenly became a bit of a problem this morning, because we are in that “technically savvy” minority that owns their own off-site mail server. I [...]
