Author: Dave Farquhar

They don’t make ’em like Ted Williams anymore

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , ,

The last man to hit .400 in the major leagues died today at 83. But there was a lot more to Ted Williams than carrying a big stick.
Williams was a flawed role model, but he certainly got one thing right, and it’s fitting that he died on July 5. You see, Ted Williams gave up seven of the best years of his career to be a Marine pilot. Can you imagine Barry Bonds going through boot camp to become a Marine? I didn’t think so. Read more

It’s about people

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I’ve been thinking about my mission trip again. I guess that shouldn’t surprise anyone, since I spent six hours yesterday poring over videotape we shot while we were down there. And yeah, I still think it was the best week of my life. But I’m a little disappointed in the leadership.
The leadership’s focus was on prophecy. That makes me uncomfortable.

Don’t get me wrong. It was the best week of my life, and our leadership definitely played a big, indispensable role. But prophecy had nothing to do with it. Read more

Who do you trust the least?

Dave Farquhar Society

A subhead I saw on Wired News:
The case of sex.com is slated to go before a federal appeals court, which will hear arguments from an accused con man, a porn-site operator and the largest domain-name registry [Verisign].

Quick: Which of these three is the most dishonest?

The lawyers have to be loving this one, because they’re absolutely guaranteed not to be the most hated people in the courtroom.

The coolest thing that happened to me, personally, in Belle Glade

Dave Farquhar Christianity

A group of us was prayer walking–walking the streets, talking to people as we see them and offering to pray for them, and praying for situations as we saw them–when we came upon a church.
In Belle Glade, everyone believes in God, but not a lot of people go to church. So when we came upon a small church, our pastor suggested we stop and pray for the church, its pastor, and its staff.

When we finished, someone was watching us. Read more

Update your BIND servers

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , ,

A buffer overflow vulnerability exists in a large number of versions of BIND. CERT released an advisory over the weekend. I haven’t seen this on most news sites yet. Read more

An easy way to get Debian 3.0 before you can buy it

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , ,

Debian 3.0 hasn’t officially been released yet, but that hasn’t stopped people from making unofficial installation floppies and CDs.
I just built a Debian 3.0 system that will be hosting this site and another (I’m not going to talk yet about the other site, but it won’t be hosted by R. Collins Farquhar IV–do I hear cheers?–and it won’t be fiction). I used this 185 MB CD image to do the install. The system used up a whopping 88 megs when I finished initial installation. After I installed Apache, MySQL and PHP4 to make a usable web server, disk usage rocketed to 118 megs. Not shabby at all in this era of multi-gigabyte installs. Read more

How to pray

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I’ve had a number of conversations the past couple of weeks, and the most common theme, by far, has been prayer. Not so much “will you pray for me?” or “should I pray for you,” but more asking how to pray.
People just don’t know how to pray, mostly because nobody ever taught them. Read more

Possibly the first Apache worm

Dave Farquhar Linux , , ,

I just found this article describing a worm that attempts to infect vulnerable Apache servers running on FreeBSD.
This doesn’t have much effect on Linux or other Unix variants (other than probably crashing lots of Apache sessions, which the machine may or may not recover gracefully from) but chances are this is just a harbinger of things to come.

You should upgrade to Apache 1.3.26 or Apache 2.0.39 immediately to avoid any problems, especially if you use FreeBSD. I’ve been running version 1.3.26 on Debian here for about a week without any issues, as I’ve come to expect from Apache.

The craziest thing I’ve read in a long time

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

I thought the craziest story I’d read this year was a UFO enthusiast’s account of his hunt for a wrecked 1960s vintage spyplane so top-secret you’ve probably never heard of it.
Then I found a link to the story of a teenager who had plans to build a nuclear reactor in his backyard. (Click the printer-friendly link at the bottom of the first page if you want to read it.)

I lived such a sheltered life… Read more

Palladium and You

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

There’s been a lot of talk on the Web lately about Palladium. If you don’t have strong feelings about it, it’s probably because you’re not a bleeding-edge computing enthusiast. That’s OK. You’ll hear about it in time.
Basically, Palladium is Microsoft’s initiative to reinvent the PC and make it more secure. There’s a big uproar about it because it reeks of ulterior motives. Some fear Palladium means you will surrender all rights to your PC and cede them to Redmond.

I’m not totally convinced this is a bad thing. Read more