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, and also touch on fractals, the Juliet Set, complex numbers and topology. This correspondent was only able to catch a tiny glimpse of 4-space, but it was stunning. It looks like an exquisite world, maybe even more beautiful than ours.
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 be proud.
besides the official documentation, some must-read overviews of the issues with PHP’s session support are provided by Harry and segfaultlabs.
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 always use the black helicopter and the police roadblock to teach budding DHS Stormtroopers how to detain miscreant Safe Crackers and take their DNA samples before throwing them in the Enemy Combatant Detention Center where they will never be heard from again.
Aug.2008
in apache installation security
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.
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 of having to upload your whole database or file set each time you start one.
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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 tricky. Here is how it is done.
On Friday the Wall Street Journal officially put on mask, fins and snorkel and lowered itself into the cesspool.
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 initially thought this should motivate me to get SMTP running over SSL on my mail server (POP3 already is), but Plesk makes life more complicated for the admin, as usual. Then I came across a knowledgebase article at mediatemple that helped get xinetd to listen on a non-standard port that Comcast is not so concerned with, an inferior but much easier solution. It was so easy I felt I should write a blog entry to make up for saved time.