There is a lot of speculation lately on who should buy Sun Microsystems. Personally I think IBM would have been a pretty good choice but evidently Big Blue is no longer interested. The possibility of Oracle or Cisco also sounds interesting. Oracle would love to own a low-end database product (possibly just to control it depending on how cynical you are) and is heavily reliant on Java. Cisco has also been making noises about getting into the server game. What do you think?
Loading ...I am becoming increasingly disappointed in the Obama administration. It seems that on critical liberties issues, the President is caving. Whether it’s at least tacit approval of the warrantless wiretapping of citizens (link) or promises to defend the immunity of the telcos that enabled warrantless spying (link), this is not the “change” I was hoping for.
Now Mother Jones reports (link) that a bill has been introduced in the Senate that not only would grant the President to shutdown any network (public or private) but also give the Secretary of Commerce cart blanche to access any data regardless of any laws or regulations. Hopefully this insane proposal dies before it ever reaches the Oval Office.
There are a host of other troubling stances as well that I may discuss later. Very, very disappointed. I guess it’s just an impossible dream to have an administration that truly believes in the principles of the Constitution and respects The People.
I just read a very interesting feature at the NYT on physicist/thinker Freeman Dyson. We need smart contrarian thinking as a balance to any ideological position and Dyson is happy to contribute.
Link [New York Times]
You have undoubtedly seen it, thousands of lines in your logfiles for repeated brute-force login attempts on ssh and other services. I recently ran across a handy how-to for using a utility/service named fail2ban which can (temporarily) auto-ban the hosts that repeated failures are coming from. Working like a charm for me. Several versions of the directions are available for different Linux distros.
Preventing Brute Force Attacks with Fail2Ban on Fedora 9 [HowtoForge]
Update:Â Here’s a version for CentOS [My-whiteboard]
I have been watching this issue for a while but this Washington Post article does a good job of summarizing it. All your stuff: laptops, cell phones, papers, etc. can be seized at the border with no suspicion of wrongdoing for as long as they feel like keeping them.
Remind me again, which country is the “land of the free”? Even the courts are an epic failure so far on this one.
Travelers’ Laptops May Be Detained At Border (Washington Post)
Well, another WordPress update (2.6) is upon us. I was dreading a manual upgrade again since this site uses a custom template. Looking around on the WordPress site led to an unexpected gem–a link to a “WordPress Automatic Upgrade” plugin.
The plugin automates the whole update to the most current version on wordpress.org including backing up your current site and database. It evens takes care of grabbing the newest release file for you. Very cool and everything went perfectly.
WordPress Automatic Update (Techie Buzz)
Recently I wanted to add an icon to a panel in Gnome to suspend my laptop (to RAM.) Some googling didn’t immediately find a way to do this. Gnome includes a “Shutdown” applet but it brings up the shutdown dialog which I want to skip. There were also some mentions of running pm-suspend but if you do that it will suspend without Gnome knowing about it–with the side effect of no login prompt on being awakened.
So, here is how I did it. Note that these instructions were done on Fedora 9 although it shouldn’t matter except maybe for choosing the icon.
With a little bit of trepidation, I upgraded to the new WordPress 2.5. The upgrade actually went very smoothly. I followed the extended upgrade instructions since I have made customizations to the design but had no glitches.
There have been many updates to the new blogging package. The re-design of the admin section is very nice. Evidently there are significant security upgrades as well. Check out the official announcement at the WordPress blog.
The virtual version of the Newseum in Washington, DC that I mentioned previously is now open. Check out the post by EB Creations who are the very talented designers responsible.
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