Laundry and dishes are done, next up… showers for everyone!

Sunday I (finally) put some seeds in the garden beds for spring veggies.  The usually: spinach, arugula, mesclun, peas, onions and swiss chard.  That’s when things started to go wrong.  I turned the sprinkler on the plants and things looked fine.  I went back into the house to clean up and noticed the water pressure dropping.  Yep.  It seemed like the water pump was off again.  The breaker this time.  I checked the easy places – no obvious signs of a short, so the problem is likely underground.  Hopefully the plumber can fix it this afternoon when he comes by.  He’ll probably have to replace the whole wire set… all 300′ of it.

So we didn’t get to clean up dinner dishes.  Getting the polenta off of the pot is not going to be fun.  Then I couldn’t sleep last night.  When I did fall asleep, I was troubled by some very disturbing dreams that, uncharacteristically, I remembered when I woke up.  Then to top it all off… no shower this morning.  *bleh*

1. One of NC’s representatives, Patrick McHenry (R) has proposed that we put Reagan’s face on the $50 bill.  Maybe for his work on voodoo tinkle on trickle down economics?  Although there is some appropriate irony to giving Reagan the $50… it’s a bill that most people don’t use.  Personally, I’m not rich enough to deal in $50s, $20s maybe.  Hey, if we’re redesigning money, why don’t we give more important presidents more prominent spots.  Jefferson definitely outranks Reagan and he’s on the never used $2 bill.  What about Madison?  The dude practically wrote the Constitution.  Shouldn’t those of who don’t use $5,000 bills get a chance to see him?
2. And closer to home, the newly minted republican majority on the Wake county school board has succeeded in rolling back a nationally recognized program to improve educational outcomes by ensuring socio-economic diversity.  Sure, I was bussed in elementary school.  It wasn’t the most enjoyable experience of my life, but at the same time, I think that it was good for me as a person to be exposed to other socio-economic groups at school.  Moreover, the program in Wake has demonstrated that it reduces the achievement gap between poor/minority students and rich/white students.  That’s gotta be worth a little time on the bus.

<sigh> Music for the evening: Danger Mouse’s and Sparklehorse’s Dark Night of the Soul and Titus Andronicus’s The Airing of Grievances.  They seem to capture the mood.

Now, in fairness, the sheriff claims that the program is not a militia, but:

will provide for self-sufficiency in the event of a manmade or natural disaster or a terrorist attack. Exodus will take local volunteers, train them and use them in response to a catastrophic disaster in the area. These volunteers will work in conjunction with the Bossier Sheriff’s Office to secure and protect viable resources in such an event.

For the record, this is B.S.  The sheriff wants the operation to sound like an adult version of the Boy Scouts where his parish will “always be prepared.”  But I was a cub scout, I’m pretty certain that I would have stayed on for the Boy Scouts if we were going to have access to “the war wagon”  with a .50 caliber  machine gun mounted on top.

Apparently, the militia concerned citizens are mostly past middle age [no!] white [really?!] men [shocked!!].  Women will be given the support roles and apparently, the five black members of the militia operation will be in charge of stepping and fetching [okay, i made that last one up].

The sad part is that things seem worse in Louisiana than they were 16+ years ago when I left.  But maybe I just hear the worst of it from here.  Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention to the social and political environment until after I left.  That last option has a lot of support: hell, I voted for Ross Perot in ‘92

No real observation here, certainly nothing that’s statistically significant (let’s see you construct a double blind study of a man’s activities when his wife is a thousand miles away).  Just amusing myself really.  Next up… the amazing idiocy of George Bush photos captioned with “Miss me yet?”  But right now, it’s Ghetto Pop Life… go ahead, I’ll wait while you cue it up.

Er, actually, a better Festivus miracle is that today the senate democratic caucus reached the 60 votes needed for their final cloture vote and will vote on healthcare reform tomorrow.  FWIW, the vote could have been held today, but Vitter (R-LA) objected.  The bill also could have been held up until 8pm tomorrow, but republicans couldn’t quite bring themselves to wait that long to get out of town.  So instead, the vote (needing only 50 ayes plus Biden) will happen at 7am tomorrow morning.

A quick note on the bill.  Put me in the camp with folks who wanted something better, but regard the senate bill as a significant step forward.  Specifically, I would love to see something like a single payer system.  People seem pretty happy with Medicare (wasn’t a common teabagger cry: “keep the government out of my Medicare!”?), so gradually expanding Medicare eligibility to younger people, eventually allowing a person of any age to buy into Medicare seems like a good idea.   We would still need to fix the republican Medicare Part D prohibition on negotiation with drug companies, but that’s minor.

Failing single payer, what I really would like to see are controls on how hard the insurance companies can screw you (currently hard enough to make you want to scream “green balloons“), and then provide subsidies to allow more people to buy insurance.  Well, that’s what we got.  Sure, there’s a purchasing mandate – you must buy insurance, but that’s pretty reasonable.

So, it’s not a perfect bill, but it’s a good start and will help literally millions of people and will literally save tens of thousands of lives each year.  That’s a good first step.  There’s nothing that says that we can’t improve the bill over the next decade.  That’s what has happened with every other expansion of the social safety net for the past 60+ years, from social security to medicare.  There is no progressive rapture.  We won’t pass a bill and then be taken up to liberal heaven or achieve social nirvana.  There aren’t 72 hippie virgins waiting for us at the signing of any piece of legislation.  And neither mankind nor its societies are perfectible.  But both mankind and society is subject to continuous improvement.  We can make things better and this bill is another step in that process.

Click here to view the embedded video.

into:

into:

and then:

If you look into the article, you find that insurgents are apparently using a $26 piece of software that let takes satellite data and saves parts of it that might not be intended for your computer.  Essentially, it monitors the data that is sent and when it sees a file transferred will save it to your hard drive, regardless of whether or not your computer was the intended destination.

Now, I’ve been doing computer security work for over a decade.  I was the first person at my university to implement anti-virus in email, I was the first to require a department to use all-encrypted communication for transmitting passwords.  I discovered one of the earliest IRC-based botnets.  I’ve found vulnerabilities in financial systems.  I’ve seen … [a]ttack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.  Er, wait, some of that last bit may have been someone else, but you get the idea.

This stuff isn’t that hard.  SSL is over 15 years old, we know how to do encryption.  Hell, back in the 90s when we were developing the Predator, the U.S. was treating encryption as a munition – you had to get the government’s blessing to use decent encryption.  Is it too much to ask that an actual weapon include the munition that was encryption?  And this from the WSJ article strikes me as BS:

Predator drones are built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of San Diego. Some of its communications technology is proprietary, so widely used encryption systems aren’t readily compatible, said people familiar with the matter.

In an email, a spokeswoman said that for security reasons, the company couldn’t comment on “specific data link capabilities and limitations.”

Or more  to the point, entirely irrelevant.  First, the communication system can’t be *that* proprietary, since the commercial (if somewhat sketchy) SkyGrabber software can read the transmissions.  Second, you developed a proprietary communication system in the mid to late 90s and didn’t include encryption?  That’s the sort of thing that makes the baby Bruce Schneier cry.

On the other hand, this from CNN seems far more likely:

A senior defense official who was not authorized to speak about the security breach said, “This was an old issue for us and it has been taken care of,” but he would not elaborate on what specifically had been taken care of.

The official said that many of the UAV feeds need to be sent out live to numerous people at one time, and encryption was found to slow the real-time link. The encryption therefore was removed from many feeds.

Removing the encryption, however, allowed outsiders with the correct tools to gain unauthorized access to these feeds.

I’ll buy that.   There are certainly a few encryption schemes that will send encrypted data to multiple parties, hell at the very least, you could use symmetric encryption with shared keys.  But that kinda sucks.  Most commercial communication encryption technology assumes point to point transfers.  If you wanted to send the same data to many people… you send it multiple times.

Regardless, this is just embarrassing.  These days I’m doing security modelling work and if this is the sort of thing that we’ll have to consider, I’m going to sink into a very deep depression.

So, Tuesday, I’m lying in bed doped up on acetaminophen, acid blockers, caffeine, ibuprofen, and tamaflu, feeling better than I had in quite some time.  I was wishing there was a Phish album playing, but was too lazy to go put one on.  Instead, I laid (diagonal ) in my bed and daydreamed about Bill’s in-place, parallel sorting problem.  I think I’ve got the solution and it seems to hold even now when I’m not so dippy.

It’s a good day for the Allman Brothers: great southern rock without the confederate overtones and segregationist b.s. you put up with in Lynard Skynyrd. I could put “Jessica” on repeat and be happy for the rest of the day

• finished up the door that I installed in August (September?).  There wasn’t much left, I just needed to bore out the hole for the doorbell without tearing up the doorbell wires, with a detour into making the stupid doorbell work again.  I got that finished and put up all of the old screen door (in case we reinstall it) then piled up all the old door frame, etc.  VD:  Victory over the Door!
• built a new, larger, compost area.  We used to have a reasonable sized plastic compost bin, but that has proved difficult to use (hard to turn the pile) and too small.  The new one is much simpler, just a couple of stakes holding some 4 foot tall hardware cloth in place, but it’s much larger and should be easier to access.
• cleaned out the garden for the end of summer.  Yeah, yeah, it’s the middle of the fall, but the plants were still producing.  It was good that I had put the compost area together, because I definitely needed the space.  I felt a little bad about pulling up the peppers and tomatoes which still had flowers on them, but since we don’t have the sun or the warm days left to ripen anything, it was probably for the best.  The amazing thing was how much produce was still out there:  a couple of small eggplants, some peppers, okra, a number of green onions, and a ton of tomatoes.

• started preserving what came out of the garden.  Some of it went into tonight’s dinner:  Orzo with Veggies.  There were enough ripe tomatoes left to turn into roasted tomato sauce (roast tomatoes, garlic, italian seasoning, balsamic vinegar and olive oil for an hour, then puree and can).  I need to get some quart-sized jars tomorrow so that I can pickle all of the green tomatoes… unless someone someone has another good use for 2+ kg of green tomatoes.

Update: I shouldn’t forget, I also

• cleaned, chopped and froze all of the green onions; and
• updated the “title font” on my blog from “renaissance” to “English,”  as well as updated TWRC’s events

Click here to view the embedded video.

and

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Traffic management: I get a call from K around 5:30. She’s stuck behind an accident and the cops on the scene, a) don’t tell people to take a detour until they’ve been there for a half hour; and b) once the ambulance has left the scene, don’t direct traffic around the one remaining open lane. So, after waiting a half hour, K has to take a 20+ minute detour home.
• Memory: Once she gets in, K and I are fixing leftovers for dinner. C: “Hey, where are the mashed potatoes?” K: “Where did you put them?” “In the fridge, but I can’t find them.” “Maybe they’re in the freezer.” “Nope, not there either.” Ten minutes of looking for the potatoes. Did we throw them out on Sunday? Nope, not in the trash. Did C put them in the pantry? Nope. Can’t find ‘em, can’t find ‘em. Finally, K says, “wait, we fixed rice on Sunday.” There weren’t any potatoes. I would attribute it to getting old, but I’ve always been this way.
• FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt): we’re testing some things at the office – will our authentication system (active directory) honor password failure lockouts when using LDAP authentication? I ask our windows consultant to either a) answer the question, or b) enable an account lockout policy so we can test. He responds back that he can do that, but with the warning that “many Linux services aren’t well-designed for this, and repeatedly try a cached or user-provided password, so that users or service accounts may be mysteriously locked out after one attempt or at some future time when passwords change.” Which is complete and utter B.S. Signs that it’s BS? He references Linux services as opposed to open source, i.e. attempted linux dig. And I used to “own” identity management services, including authentication at a large university and if this was the case, things would have blown up within 10 minutes. I thanked him for the advice and noted that I’ve never seen this, but that it’s why we test.
• OS Performance: we’re looking into some new ideas at the office. Things that could be useful as a preprocessor for a host based intrusion detection system. As part of my testing, I told my laptop to audit all syscalls made to the kernel, by all processes on the system. CPU load spiked, system performance went through the floor, the windowing system became almost completely non-responsive. In the two minutes it took to get access to a terminal, I logged 150 MB of audit logs. On the plus side, all of the information we need can be collected. Now I just need to figure out how to keep a usable system.
• Self aggrandizement: talking to my technical manager, we need to write up two journal papers based on our recent work. Cool!

I hope everyone had a good Veteran’s Day and remembered to thank the veterans in their lives.

Wow!  How do the republicans manage to achieve such amazing results?  Simple, what they lack in sense, they make up for in strict adherence to ideology.  Free market principles baby.  Do they regulate insurance companies regarding rescission?  Nope, instead they would create the same sort of race to the bottom that we have for credit cards.  Ever wondered why most credit card companies are based in either Delaware or South Dakota?  Simple, those states have passed laws that screw consumers.  Since the credit card market is deregulated, Delaware and South Dakota can screw the whole country and not just their own citizens.  Under the republican plan, you would be looking at the same thing for health insurance.

Awesome!

[1] In the 80s, lots of things were “awesome” to me, and I was very serious about it.  Sometime in the past decade, I’ve taken to using the word again, but with 100% more sarcasm.  Things are now “awesome” in the same sense as 80s hair metal bands are awesome: think Winger.

h/t hsarik

I love my dogs.  I love my dogs.  Om mani padme hum.  I love my dogs.

When I got the machine home, I spent about a minute trying to decide if I would keep a partition with Windows on it.  But then I remembered that I don’t play video games, so I didn’t really need Vista.  I’ve installed Fedora 11 and moved all my files.