When I was first learning Linux and personal system administration a dozen years ago, I was taught the importance of security. However, at the time it seemed something like the importance of knowing a fire drill. We all agreed that the threat was real, but at the same time it had the air of a bogey-man story: nebulous and unlikely. And so for a ( Read more... )

Yeah so I've totally let LJ slide. This is my first post in like five weeks, after over eight years of nigh-daily use (though my posting frequency started nosediving early this year). I may be done with it. If nothing else, I am almost certainly not going to re-up my paid account when it comes time, later this year ( Read more... )

When an automated software test says "Result: FAIL", my first reaction is to dismiss it as cheap sarcasm.

Planbeast has a twitter feed now, where it jabbers about every new public game event that someone schedules. Sometimes it babbles about other stuff too. I like this.

(FWIW, I've been a lot more active on Twitter lately, myself, though you aren't missing much if you already read my status updates on Facebook; I mirror most of em via ping.fm ( Read more... )

I kind of don't know why I'm bothering to look at Craigslist "computer gigs" posts. Ninety-five percent of them fall into these formats ( Read more... )

[Crossposted from Appleseed Blog]

My friend Noah, a sysadmin at MIT, reports that on October 1 he switched off the info-mac hyperarchive (hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu), one of the oldest websites on the internet. It was a web-accessible version of the info-mac archive, an online repository of Mac freeware and shareware, which before then was mainly ( Read more... )

Because of a new project, I shall endeavor to spend more time haunting Facebook. Feel free to friend me there (if I know who you are)I visited FB for the first time in a long while the other day, and was surprised at how many people I know have taken to hitting it regularly, generating new status updates crawling up my wall. I think the disconnect ( Read more... )

Some young punks have apparently been freely harassing Davis Square residents for some time now. That thread begins with someone describing how he was assaulted and slapped around by them, apparently in broad daylight and with people all around. The many comments that follow form a story about how this same group has been making trouble in the ( Read more... )

I finally got into Pandora Radio because of its free iPhone version. The application isn't flawless - unexpected events make it have a temporary seizure that makes even the phone's hardware controls unresponsive until it times out - but its normal mode is very impressive. You can start listening to music via WiFi, and then wander off into 3G ( Read more... )

Google's launched a 3d social chatty thingy. The avatars in the trailer movie all appear to be either Bratz-esque homunculettes or chubby little squirrelly critters, which tells me that Google is narrowly targeting the service towards the dual core virtual-world markets of

1. Image-conscious youths, primarily teenage girls and young women, eager to ( Read more... )