David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I saw this on Slashdot today: A computer science student was expelled from a Canadian university for practicing what most people would call white-hat hacking.
Their reasoning: “Schools are supposed to teach best practice, which includes ethics and adherence to reasonable laws.” But there is such thing as ethical hacking. Read more
I’ve been absolutely getting pounded lately with spam comments from spambots–to the tune of one spam comment per minute. That’s filling up and slowing down my database and consuming CPU resources that I want for human readers.
So I resorted to installing Botblocker. All I can report right now is that it seems to be working–no spam comments for several hours.
I can’t guarantee it will work forever, and I’ve got Akismet to hide whatever spam gets through, but so far my server seems less busy and more happy, which is good. Things had gotten so bad for a while that I was getting timeouts when trying to post, which is ridiculous.
I’ve been seeing the same question over and over in my search logs lately: Is Java safe to run in 2013?
Generally speaking, the answer is no.
I have little choice but to run Java right now, though. I’m studying for a certification exam, and the best quiz program that I know of is written in Java. Its user interface is in Polish, a language I don’t speak, but that bothers me less than it being written in Java. Google Translate can help me with the Polish, but it can’t make Java safe. That’s up to me.
So here’s what I did.
Read more
When I was a toddler, I played in Stan Musial’s swimming pool.
Yes, I really did.
Read more
The kitchen cabinets in the house we live in have seen better days. They were reasonably well-built, but 50 years of raising families–mine is the third family raised in this house–took their toll on them. A couple of years back we painted them, to cover the scars of the years. It was an improvement, but the color dated itself pretty quickly, and we didn’t use the highest-quality paint, so the finish wore fairly quickly.
This time, we repainted them white. We used an expensive Benjamin Moore Decorator White in semi-gloss, because it looks good, but also because we’ve found it to be durable in other projects. And you’d be surprised how many half-million-dollar houses have white-painted cabinets. I’m an estate sale junkie, so I’ve seen a lot of half-million-dollar houses over the years, and I would estimate 40% of them have simple, white cabinets in their kitchens. It’s a look that doesn’t date itself, and is cheap and easy to take care of. (As a point of reference, a modest three-bedroom ranch house in the same county costs around $125,000.)
I’ve also seen people do this to improve the appearance of a house prior to flipping it.
I’m still waiting for someone I know to tell me they like Windows 8. I’ve seen some strangers online say they like it, but not a lot of them, and many of them appear to be astroturfers because they just like it too much. I’m sure Apple loves it, because, like my boss told me, a lot of older apps (like anything older than Office 2010) won’t run on Windows 8. So, if you have to re-buy all your software anyway, what advantage is there to buying a Windows 8 machine over a Macintosh?
In fact, that’s exactly what his parents did. They gave up on Windows entirely and bought a Mac Mini.
The other approach, of course, is to buy a Chromebook. A lot of people seem to be doing that too, seeing as it’s the best-selling laptop on Amazon–so much so that they don’t have any stock, and third-party sellers are scalping them for $80 above retail like they used to do with Nintendo Wii consoles. Read more
My wife and I trekked out to Wright City this weekend for a surprise anniversary party for one of her uncles. It was in a park in Wright City. Wright City is a small town roughly an hour west of St. Louis on I-70. It’s most famous for Big Boy’s, a roadside hole-in-the-wall restaurant that predated the national chain by a couple of decades, and for the defunct Elvis Is Alive Museum, an old laundromat that a Baptist preacher converted into a tribute to the other Elvis (Presley, not Costello), where he spun theories about what Elvis did after faking his death.
I’ve driven through Wright City more times than I can count, since it’s along I-70 in between St. Louis and Kansas City, but up until this weekend, I’ve never stopped there, even for gas.
More on all that in a minute.
After about a month with an Insignia NS20EM50A13 monitor, I still mostly like it, but can note one annoyance. When booting up a system, the monitor sometimes likes to switch from the DVI input to VGA, without warning. If you happen to be sitting there when it happens, you notice it and can switch it back. But more than once I’ve rebooted, walked away, come back a few minutes later and wondered why I have a weird black screen in front of me instead of a logon screen. Read more
I decided to dig into what the low-end Android chipmakers like Mediatek and Rockchip are up to, since they’re the ones who are likely to drive prices down.