Network traffic obfuscator The Onion Router. I especially like that everything except the last hop is encrypted.
2005/5/14
2005/5/12
Interesting reads
- Should terrorism be reported in the news? by Bruce Schneier.
- National ID battle continues at Wired.
- The New Multiple Personality Disorder at Wired.
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Updates
Ugh. Just powercycled the cable-modem and the Vonage device and apparently something was unhappy there because I seem to have my regular bandwidth back, without the 40% packet loss that I had been seeing recently.
In other news, added some links in the Podcasts category and added a percentage graph to the Spam Statistics page, comparing the number of blocked message attempts to total attempts (blocked and successful ones). There’s a trend visible there. *smirk*
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2005/5/10
Fascinating
Absolutely fascinating read at DrunkenBlog today, for anyone who is interested in software licensing or who is or was wondering about the whole Maui-X Stream & CherryOS vs. PearPC situation.
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Hackety-hack
Keeping in mind that I’m the only one writing here (M officially has an account but has shown no desire to write anything with it yet, plus if she felt that way she might dust off an old blog elsewhere rather than adding here) I added a content filter that enables me to insert little snippets of PHP in my entries. Indeed, I was not foolish enough to enable it for comments! After some experimenting with limited success, I ended up doing this:
function evaluate_this_match($matches) {
ob_start();
eval($matches[2]);
return ob_get_clean();
}
function evaluate_this($text) {
$text = preg_replace_callback('|(\[$PHP$\])(.*)(\[\/$PHP$\])|', "evaluate_this_match", $text);
return trim($text);
}
The current single use is in the Spam Statistics page where I check the modification time of a file at the end of the entry, but when I get around to converting other PHP pages of mine I’ll definitely be putting it to good use then.
Update: Extended the (.*) pattern to ([\t\r\n\x20-\xff]+), to allow for newlines in the text, as I’m sure I’ll be wanting that.
2005/5/9
Poking fun
The funroll-loops.org website pokes fun at somewhat misguided Gentoo advocates (in a few cases more than a little, actually). For the uninformed, Gentoo is one of the many Linux distributions out there, one that encourages its users to (re)compile all software from scratch. If you want to squeeze the absolute most out of the hardware that you have available this is the way to go, but personally I’d rather spend a few dollars more and not worry about that. In the long run it doesn’t matter to me anyway because I always end up running more programs on my desktop than I should, no matter how much CPU/RAM/HD power I throw at it. 
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2005/5/7
Static Pages
I’ve converted one of the pages on my regular homepage into a static page on this blog. I plan to do more of that in the months to come and eventually I’ll either move the blog to that URL or redirect that URL here.
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2005/5/4
Bunch of twits
Very cool initiative by a couple of former TechTV guys, I’ll be sure to keep an eye/ear on that!
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Hello World! (2)
Looks like iTerm was perhaps not to blame for this; I started to lose keystrokes and after some debugging noticed that it wasn’t the keyboard that was to blame for this (trying it with a different one resulted in the same problem). Removing the USB connection and reinserting it did. Hrm. This would be the PS/2-to-USB adapter at fault, then, or something related to USB in OS X. I’m going to assume it’s the adapter, for now, and leave it at that.
Sanity has returned…
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2005/5/3
No can do?
Today Fark listed this article:
Rebecca Polzin walked into a drugstore in Glencoe, Minn., last month to fill a prescription for birth control. A routine request. Or so she thought.
Minutes later, Polzin left furious and empty-handed. She said the pharmacist on duty refused to help her. “She kept repeating the same line: ‘I won’t fill it for moral reasons,’ ” Polzin said.
What business does a pharmacist have being one when you refuse something that is perfectly legal? I asked an online friend who is one and she told me that in Massachusetts and New Hampshire (two states with which she has experience) this is actually illegal and at the very least you need to provide alternatives, whether that is referring you to a colleague, or a different pharmacy, or something else (although I can’t imagine what other options you could provide, in this particular case).
What would be the next step, if you start allowing this kind of behaviour? No more vaccinations because you believe in faith-healing? No more AIDS drugs because you (incorrectly) associate that with homosexuals and that’s against your religion?
Perhaps such pharmacies should be forbidden from using the name pharmacy, since its use raises expectations that they refuse to live up to. Hand it over, or move over.
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