I like NetHack. I'm not very good at it, honestly, but I've played it a lot and generally enjoy myself ( Read more... )

Remember driver's ed? I barely do. I don't remember how far before a railroad crossing I'm supposed to stop, or how far away from an intersection I have to be to change lanes. Probably the only thing I took away from it, the one mantra repeated over and over, is to slow downRaining? Slow down. Low on gas? Slow down. Bumpy road? Slow down. ( Read more... )

But not in the way you think.

I haven't spoken in a while about my core idea for floof, and it's sort of gelled a bit, so I want to try to express it again. It's not about anything technological, really; nor is it just about categorization (though that's always awesome).

What I really want to do is strip out all the contrived areas of private ( Read more... )

Short today.

There's a lot of new Web tech coming down the pipe, and I keep seeing shiny cool demos of it, but they've started to depress me. Not because there's anything wrong with them, or because of any browser squabbling, but because nobody's using this stuff. (I suppose I can blame that on IE, which is browser squabbling. Ehh ( Read more... )

I released my post-FA-debacle list of security vulnerabilities 23 days ago. Since then, only one person on FA staff has approached me about the list; this person is neither a technical contact nor a high-tier administrator, and he only asked vaguely about the admin panel CSRF exploit ( Read more... )

In the beginning, there was OpenID, and you could identify yourself by a URL you owned. And it was good ( Read more... )

As you may know, I spent like all of October migrating stuff from my dying Layered Tech server onto a handful of Linodes.

Here's what they're running. All of them are using Ubuntu.

koiru.veekun.com: System stuff.
IRC daemon: InspIRCdI used to run Unreal. It was, you know, okay. But it's stagnated a bit, and its (already small) dev team seems ( Read more... )

I last did this a while ago, but I've been asked in general terms lately what sort of stuff I use, so here goes:

Window manager: compizIt's kinda janky and does weird things to my desktop at times (slow scrolling in maximized accelerated windows, video card junk when redrawing something, etc.), but it does some useful stuff that I'd rather not ( Read more... )

As distinct from security issues, of course.

Today I went to sign up for some financial site so I could switch from paper bills to email and get automatic payments going. I fed it one of my usual generated passwords, which looked something like:

U5!`i2|8|Gz6+_9W

Here's the response I got.

Your password must be 6-20 characters long and contain ( Read more... )

This was a, um, big topic recently, so I might as well say something about it in general.

There are a handful of really basic security mistakes that tend to crop up everywhere. Before I get to them, here's how you avoid them.

ASSUME DATA IS EVIL.Anything coming from outside your code is potentially hazardous and should be treated as such. It ( Read more... )