SEC is an amazingly powerful yet simple tool. It works best when coupled with centralized logging, such as a syslog server. It lets you correlate events from multiple hosts and take actions based on those events.

This is a copy pasta from my email to the debian-user mailing list.

Because Adobe left us high and dry (and vulnerable) by dropping beta support for 64-bit flash, I cobbled together a solution that seemed simpler to me (at first glance) than the official Debian solution of running chrooted 32-bit browsers with 32-bit flash (howto). Reason being, I need to be able to easily roll out flash 10.1 to multiple systems, and any changes should be transparent to my users. schroot looks like it also fits the bill, but I have not tried it yet. schroot is probably a better solution in the longrun since you can use apt to upgrade all the dependencies without repackaging flash. Hopefully Adobe adds 64-bit linux support soon so that doesn't become an issue.

Michael Duvall (R), former California Assemblyman and bad girl spanker

Accepting a Right Wing award, California Assemblyman Michael Duvall remarked in a press release that as long as he is in office, he would work to protect "California families" from "constant assault in Sacramento."¹

But yet another Family Values Republican® was not simply caught cheating on his wife. Arguably more important than this all too predictable hypocrisy is that while he was Vice Chairman of the California Utilities & Commerce Committee, he was shtooping an energy corporation's lobbyist - in his own words "a lot".

Or why the Democrats are losing this fight. And what they can do, if anything, to win.

I went to a local town-hall meeting run by Susan Davis (D-CA) to show my support for Health Insurance / Health Care reform and what I learned about the vast majority of the opposition was surprising.

Update: March 9, 2010

Somehow I failed to notice that since 10.5 ssh agent is automatically started by OS X. My script just duplicated work that was already built-in to the OS.

To add a passphrase for a private key just type:

After this, ssh-agent is started automatically whenever ssh needs it. No extra work needed.

I help run a medium-sized scientific conference annually. We have an internet cafe / registration room where our attendees may pay for the conference or just surf the web. We used to run WinXP with the hive cleanup tool and a lockdown utility probably created by a Microsoft intern. It worked fairly well. Then Windows released SteadyState, which we tried last year. SteadyState worked as advertised on my test machine, but failed spectacularly at the conference on 80% of the kiosk machines - I'm still not sure why. So on the spot we developed a Kubuntu alternative, which turned out to be better.

Send Obama a Blank Void Check

At work I was tasked with upgrading our tape backup system, from old hardware running Veritas 5 to new hardware running Symantec (Veritas) NetBackup 6.5. The new server is running RedHat EL 4 and we bought it a QLogic QLE2460 Fibre Channel card for the tape drive communication. This was a horribly long, drawn out, unnecessarily complicated project. Symantec tech support is mostly outsourced to India, and mostly useless. It's nothing against Indians, it's just that they were obviously working from a script and poorly trained.

Buddhism is a very old and expansive religion - there are many teachings and behavior prescriptions. It's also one of the few religions that doesn't give me the heeby geebies because the main tenents tend to be along the lines of being nice to everyone and leaving a small environmental footprint (in my limited exposure). The ultimate goal of every Buddhist is to become a Buddha.

There has been a debate about browser version targeting for some time. Browser version targeting is a scheme devised by Microsoft whereby a website declares which browser it is designed for, and it's then the browser's job to display the page in the appropriate way. If Microsoft proposing a new standard doesn't make you at least mildly suspicious, you must not have handled Microsoft and non-MS interoperability.

My ballot picks and reasoning thereof for the February 5, 2008 election in California:

This article from Lifehacker: Access Your Computer Anytime and Save Energy with Wake-on-LAN reminded me that I've been meaning to write this up for a long time.

Over a dinner conversation tonight I started to come up with various reforms to make this country a better place. These are in no particular order and there are undoubtedly many others which I haven't though of yet. Feel free to post your wishlist in the comments.

I watched many clips of the youtube Republican Debate. It amazed me - the debate was a scramble for the Crown of Crazy.

Watch them for yourself:  http://youtube.com/republicandebate

Do you really want another 4 years living under loonies? Then make sure you vote.  Not only that, but make sure everyone you know votes too.

I've been a member of the ACLU for a while and while I believe they are vital to our nation's future, I can't stand all the spam (snail mail) that I get from them; usually asking for more money. I understand that paying lots of lawyer's salaries gets expensive - but come on! I've already donated. Please don't ask for more money than I've donated (for an annual membership) more than once or twice per year! I hate to imagine just how much of my donation is going towards spamming people and filling landfills with wasted paper.

The USA lost the War on Terror the day it started. The fact that there is a "War on Terror" means that we lose. It bears repeating that Terrorism is a tactic. This so-called "War on Terror" is just an excuse for an endless war entailing increased government powers, spending, opaqueness, and tabling other "less important" issues.

Listening to the Point of Inquiry podcast with Francis Collins was a little bit frustrating. Francis Collins is a world renowned researcher - one might say one of the most important scientists in the world - yet he's a Theist. I'm convinced that having the skepticism and critical thinking skills that make a good scientist leads to agnosticism/atheism. When Dr. Joe Shmoe preaches something crazy about God, it's easy to think, "Anyone can get a PhD these days!" But when it's a top scientist it makes you wonder what's going on.

After attempting to configure pureftp, I gave up. The configuration is ridiculous and even after hours of monkeying I could not get it to behave as I wanted.

Then I tried vsftpd. After 20 minutes, the server is up and running just the way I want it. From what I can tell (no debian security advisories in the recent past) vsftpd lives up to its name, very secure.

Agnosticism is the same thing as Atheism. If you don't believe me please read on.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said today that his country will have nuclear power by February. In a related story, the IAEA has found traces of plutonium and uranium in a nuclear waste plant in Iran. Ahmandinejad is naturally a thorn in the side of the Bush Administration - which tries to enforce its worldview through intimidation.

Amazing things happened yesterday in the polls. Most of all, and I hope I'm not being naive, some hope has been restored in me. After the 2004 election I lost all faith in the American voter. The idea that Bush could be re-elected after all the havoc he caused (not even including the Iraq war) was unfathomable to me. The day after election day 2004 was the most depressing day of my life.

This post is to show you naysayers that when you speak your mind to politicians, your voice is heard. If you are lucky your voice resonates strongly with the politician as it did in my case. Was it my articulate prose, or my concise argument that moved Diane Feinstein to such a response? I may never know, but I am proud to show the world that my political concerns matter, and that Diane Feinstein truly cares about Californians. My emphasis has been added.

Dimmeria is back online after a hiatus because I was switching ISPs from dslextreme to SBC (now ATT). ATT offers this slick deal where it's $18/month for 3Mbps down and 512Kbps up - dynamic IP and no ports blocked (so it will work for a server, like this one).

I was told by a sales lady, Beth, at the end of January that I could transfer my DSL without losing connectivity. That turned out to be a complete lie.

When you interpret it that way. For the past few years the Right-wing, with the help of Bill O' Reilly and other pundits have been waging a "War for Christmas" by trying to force people to say "Merry Christmas" as opposed to "Happy Holidays".

Personally, I've always celebrated Christmas, albeit secularly. I don't celebrate Hanukah, unless I happen to be invited to a Hanukah party. Not only do people celebrate Christmas, but we also celebrate Thanksgiving at the end of November and New Years. Last I checked, New Years and Thanksgiving didn't have much to do with Christmas, but most American Christians celebrate them. If you say "Happy Holidays" you can include all 3 of the holidays instead of just one. Therefore the term "happy holidays" just makes more sense. This whole time of year is just a string of holidays where you have to spend time with family and friends, get fat, and drink lots of booze. When I was younger, I celebrated time off of school. In my old age I get paid time off work. This whole time of year is an entire season of holiday.