From my friends over at Boing Boing come the following two adventures in silliness:
Santastic! Holiday Boots 4 Your Stockings – A Christmas and Rap Mashup. I really dig the Charlie Brown tune.
Q-Unit Greatest Hits – a Queen/50 Cent Mashup. I’m a huge Queen fan from way back and this is kind of amusing.
That’s the title of a Bruce Schneier column in Wired.
Since 9/11, our nation has been obsessed with air-travel security. Terrorist attacks from the air have been the threat that looms largest in Americans’ minds. As a result, we’ve wasted millions on misguided programs to separate the regular travelers from the suspected terrorists — money that could have been spent to actually make us safer.
I know quite a lot about this. I was a member of the government’s Secure Flight Working Group on Privacy and Security. We looked at the TSA’s program for matching airplane passengers with the terrorist watch list, and found a complete mess: poorly defined goals, incoherent design criteria, no clear system architecture, inadequate testing. (Our report was on the TSA website, but has recently been removed — “refreshed” is the word the organization used — and replaced with an “executive summary” (.doc) that contains none of the report’s findings. The TSA did retain two (.doc) rebuttals (.doc), which read like products of the same outline and dismiss our findings by saying that we didn’t have access to the requisite information.) Our conclusions match those in two (.pdf) reports (.pdf) by the Government Accountability Office and one (.pdf) by the DHS inspector general.
It’s an interesting read. Bruce knows what he’s talking about. Link
Here is the story of a guy who tried to buy a $3000 digital camera on the internet from a store in NY.
What he got was a lot of abuse, a big hassle, and no camera.
“I will make sure you will never be able to place an order on the internet again.” “I’m an attorney, I will sue you.” “I will call the CEO of your company and play him the tape of this phone call.” “I’m going to call your local police and have two officers come over and arrest you.” “You’d better get this through your thick skull.” “You have no idea who you are dealing with.”
These are all direct threats that I received today from an individual who identified himself as Steve Phillips, the manager of PriceRitePhoto in Brooklyn, New York when I called to inquire about my order with them. My crime? Telling him that I planned to write an article about my unfortunate experience with his company regarding the camera order I had placed with him yesterday.
Read the rest of this long story here.
SciFi.com has an interview with Terry Pratchett – the writer of the Disc World books. Link
One of the security issues that Bruce Schneier talks about on his blog is movie plot threats. These are security threats that are so over the top that they could be used as a movie plot.
Here are some of the most recent:
A Thai minister has claimed that by returning missed calls on their cell phones people from the Muslim-majority southern provinces could unintentionally trigger bombs set by Islamic militants. Link
A scientist is concerned that the SETI signals may be an alien computer virus. Link
The United States is highly vulnerable to attack from electronic pulses caused by a nuclear blast in space, according to a new book on threats to U.S. security. Link
Movie-plot threats aren’t limited to terrorism. Bird flu is the current movie-plot threat in the medical world. Link
Kentucky has been awarded a federal Homeland Security grant aimed at keeping terrorists from using charitable gaming to raise money. Link
Plenty more if you go back into the archives.
Now this is very cool. I may have to see if I have enough Legos to try this.
This guy makes his D&D Dungeons out of Legos and has the characters walk around in it. Way cool.
Check it out here.
This comes from Boing Boing, of course.
Oh my, more reading provides the fact that even the character sheets are made of Legos! Too fun.
Dilbert was pretty good on Sunday.
or Tim Learns Four Lessons
Holy crap was THAT a huge pain in the ass.
I had a couple of hours this morning, so I thought I’d do some preliminary testing before doing the big hardware swap I had planned for this weekend.
Boy did that turn into a FUM (fucked up mess.)
My main server was an IBM Intellistation with dual Pentium III 550MHz CPUs and a gig of RAM. This is a fine box, but I had gotten a 3RU rack mount case and Tyan S1832DL motherboard from Nate and I wanted to move my system to that platform. This is the same motherboard that I toasted the BIOS on not long ago.
The motherboard came with a pair of 400MHz Pentium IIs on it, but the manual from Tyan said it would support the 550MHz PIIIs, so I figured I was golden.
Lesson number one: Never trust the manual.
Continue reading →
Well, I have tested all six Western Digital WD800 drives using the WD DLGDiags tool and the one Samsung SP8004H drive with the Samsung HUTIL tool.
Of the six WD drives, two are dead. They don’t even pass the quick test. Heck, they can’t even start the quick test. When you tell the sofware to quick test them, it just hangs for about 5 minutes, then spits out a page with all kinds of parameters, showing you the errored ones. It would be cool, if it didn’t mean the drives were dead.
On the other hand, the four remaining WD drives all passed the extended media test with zero errors. This is a good thing, I guess, but of course provides no indication of how long they will last before they also die.
Guess how many of the drives are still under warranty?
So now I have a quandry.
What to do, what to do?
Okay, I have a plan.
Since I don’t really have any spare cash right now, and Christmas is coming, high heating bills, etc., I’m going to do the following:
I’m going to rebuild the Openfiler box using the four WD800 drives. I’ll end up with about 240GB of space in a RAID 5 configuration.
I’m only going to put my MP3s on it for now. If it goes away, well, so be it. I might take some DLT backups of it.
I also might run out and buy one of those cheap 200GB drives to put into my main server – rebuilding it into a busted mirror until I can afford to buy a second one to mirror it onto. CompUSA has one that is $29.95 after rebates, assuming they have any left. The current drive in my main server is a WD800 of unknown vintage – it would be nice to replace that before it cacks.
So that’s my plan.
For now.
Update: Well, of course, by the time I got to CompUSA (admittedly, it was 7:00 PM) they were out of the 200GB drives. The clerk said they ran out about 1:00 PM.
C’est la Vie.
So, just because I didn’t have anything else to do this morning I did the following to my Openfiler box:
So. What else to do?
I’m going to test all the drives with DLGDiags. If even the failed drive passes, then I’ll have to try and test them with something better.
Then I’ll rebuild the filer from scratch. Wheee.
