Losing the luster of Christmas–and something of a cure

Dave Farquhar Careers , , , ,

The Kansas City Star published a forlorn editorial this week about the struggles of many people this Christmas.

I can relate. I’m much better off than many people, but this is the third Christmas in a row where my job has a hard end date attached to it. And this year, for the first time in my career, I made less money than I did the year before. For me, Christmas has been the worst day of the year for a very long time, because I know I can’t live up to everyone’s expectations of me.

But I’m better off than a lot of people. Right now I have a job. Some of my former coworkers took bigger pay cuts than I did this year, or they’re still looking. And, as bad as this year has been, I think everyone needs to go without work for a month or so sometime in their life. I think I have something that can help, but I’m gonna make you read something first. Or at least scroll a lot. Read more

What I’m doing to protect myself after the Target data breach

Dave Farquhar Saving money, security , , , , , , ,

As you’ve probably heard, Target had a bad month. Between the days of 27 November and 15 December, about 40 million credit card numbers were stolen, making it one of the biggest breaches of its kind in history. As far as we know, the card number and security code were stolen, but debit-card PINs and addresses were not.

Target says they have contained the breach and are cooperating with credit card companies and authorities. Cringely has some analysis, but it has more for people like me to think about how we do things at work than it does for consumers.

And, well, as luck would have it, I shopped a lot at Target between the days in question. And I used both my credit and debit card during that time. Here’s what I’m doing, some of which may be counter-intuitive.

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What on Earth is a Mainframe?: A review

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , ,

I’ve been reading David Stephens’ self-published What on Earth is a Mainframe, (also available on Amazon) which is as close to z/OS For Dummies as we’ll ever see.

I deal with mainframes at work from time to time. I interacted with an old IBM mainframe of some sort when I was in college, using it to get on the Internet, do e-mail for classes, and write programs in Pascal. That mainframe has been gone almost 20 years now, but it’s more mainframe experience than most of the people in my department have.

That’s the thing. Mainframes have been on their way out for 20 years–which was why Mizzou retired Mizzou1–but they aren’t any closer to the door now than they were when I was in college. I wouldn’t call it a growth industry, but there are some tasks that haven’t managed to migrate down to smaller iron yet, and if they haven’t by now, maybe they never will. But the universities aren’t producing new mainframe administrators–ahem, IBM calls them system programmers–so while it’s not a growth area from a numbers perspective, it’s a marketable skill that isn’t going away.

That’s where this book helps.

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The NSA’s disaster aversion by keeping BIOSes safe for the free world

Dave Farquhar security , , , , , , , ,

This weekend, CBS ran a story about how the NSA foiled a sinister plot to brick millions of PCs and cause a financial meltdown. At least they didn’t say MELTDOWN.

My opinion is that this is a puff piece. A source managed to scare a journalist with a threat that sounded credible enough, and make something routine sound big and threatening.

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A quick security improvement: Change your IP range

Dave Farquhar security, Servers and Networking ,

As you may know, lots of D-Link routers have serious vulnerabilities. Some are patched, some aren’t, and many are being exploited by Javascript on web pages. (See, routers don’t make you invincible.)

The right thing to do is patch. But most exploits will assume that your router lives in the 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x space, whatever the factory default is. So you can get a degree of protection even against future vulnerabilities by moving your IP space somewhere else. Read more

The ghost in the network

Dave Farquhar War Stories , , ,

My logging system died rather abruptly one week. It started with the Active Directory account some of our servers use locking. I got the account unlocked–someone else has those rights–and the system came back to life for a while, but then we had to repeat, and each time we repeated, “a while” grew shorter and shorter, bottoming out at about 2 minutes, 40 seconds.

The way you troubleshoot problems like this is by looking at logs. The problem is, you can’t collect very many logs in 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

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A $99 tablet that doesn’t stank

Dave Farquhar Android , ,

‘Tis the season for cheapie tablets. They’re everywhere, and they cost $89, $79, even $59. About the only place I haven’t seen one is at a convenience store. But you don’t want them. They’re always underpowered and cheaply built, so they’ll be frustratingly slow to use and the hardware is likely to start failing after a year or so.

But this weekend I saw a budget tablet that hits all of the minimums, for $99, at an unlikely place: Aldi. Yes, the discount grocery store. It’s called the Medion Lifetab. Read more

The safest way yet to clean your train track

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , ,

The subject of the best way to clean train track sure does ruffle some feathers. Everyone, it seems, has their favorite elixir to swab down their tracks and some favorite material to wipe it back up with.

When it comes to Lionel, Marx, and American Flyer track, all of which is tin plated, it’s best to avoid anything abrasive if at all possible. Steel wool is absolutely out, sandpaper is bad news, and even a Scotch Brite-type pad is best to avoid. Scratches attract more dirt, which causes the track to get dirty faster, and eventually the abrasiveness rubs through the tin plating, taking your rust prevention with it.

If the track has already rusted a little, a Scotch Brite pad is about the best bet. But if not, the January 2014 Classic Toy Trains has the best answer I’ve seen yet: microfiber cloth. Read more

Hacker chasing, circa 1987

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing, security , , , , , , , , ,
Hacker chasing, circa 1987

I’m catching up on reading. Next on my reading list is The Cuckoo’s Egg, (Amazon link), Clifford Stoll’s memoir of chasing down a computer hacker in the late 1980s. In it, he describes a very different world, ruled by mainframes and minicomputers, where Unix was something special, IBM still made PCs, but desktop PCs and Macintoshes only received occasional mention, and academia and the military owned the Internet, almost literally. And, oh, by the way, the Cold War was still raging.

The remarkable thing about this book is that it’s an approachable spy thriller, written in 1989, that explains computer security to an audience that had never seen or heard of the Internet. You don’t have to be a security professional to appreciate it, though it’s a classic in the computer security world–many people read it in the late 1980s and early 1990s and decided to get into the field. Read more