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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) elfs | |
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As it turns out, there is a Linux zombie network. It's called Psyb0t. It infects cable modems and home routers, which you never turn off, and gives whatever nefarious person running the network the capability to hack into your home network, monitor all traffic going through it, and exploit any passwords you send. Nefarious, stealthy, and evil. There's a reason I run a small, home-based, home-made router with my own monitoring software. A layer of security through defensive obsolescence. Almost all home-based routers from Linksys and Netgear are based on an old distro of Linux with a weak password that makes it easy to hack. Sad, but true. Updates are available on Netgear and Linksys's websites, and the latest versions have patched the hole. Here's what annoys me: every report I could find on Psyb0t mentions that it's a "Linux zombie network". Yet nobody calls MyDoom, the five year old virus that makes up the current denial-of-service attack, a "Windows zombie network". Why not? Tags: geek
Current Mood:  annoyed
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serenejournal | |
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Have to have a talk with the Munchkin between now and Monday because she's not doing the things she's supposed to be doing. The Fun Aunt wants to just let her continue to slide, because really, it's not fun to make someone do school when they don't want to, or to enforce that they have to clean up their own messes, or shit like that. It's one reason I avoided the roommate thing for so long. It's one reason there are so few people I'm willing to live with. But I just can't be a flophouse matron for someone who shows up at dinnertime for food, and otherwise does nothing all day. And at this rate, she'll be 27 before she finishes high school. It's not healthy for her, and it's building serious resentment in me. (Plus, if she's not going to take school seriously, she should just go get a job and contribute to the household in that way instead. She's almost 18; no one's going to force her to finish high school if she'd rather work.) I wrote her a letter, because sometimes it helps us to communicate in writing. We'll see how it goes. Tags: wtfpotatoes
Current Location: 94609
Current Mood: sad & frustrated & impotent
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mzrowan | |
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8:30 Wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Excited! 9:30 See my photo on Lens blog. Proud! 10:30 Drop $300 on Zumanity tickets for littlehoudini and me for 10:30 tonight. Anticipatory! 12:15 Set off for subway. Happy! 12:30 Exchange enthusiastic waves with fennel. Joyful! 12:45 Come out of tunnel at Kendall to see mail from United. Flight cancelled; rebooked on flight that lands at 10:25. Anxious! 1:00 Get off at Park to call United. Spend 20 min talking to rep and on hold. Explain that I have to get to Vegas by 9:30 or I'm out $300. He ends up telling me same info I got in email -- that I'm rebooked to get in at 10:30. Suggests I speak to counter reps if that's not good enough. Panic! 1:20 Ask to speak to rep's supervisor. Angry! 1:50 Supervisor tells me I'm confirmed on direct flight leaving at 6, landing at 8:40. Relieved! 2 - 3:30 Wander downtown Boston aimlessly, looking for decent but reasonably-priced food. End up at South Station food court, where I eat food that is neither. Exhausted! 4:15 Check in for flight. Rep is pleasantly surprised that I know my destination. Srsly? 4:30 Post to LJ. Hi! Tags: travel
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elfs | |
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I’m prepping for an interview this afternoon at what is primarily a Perl shop, and so I’m mainlining the O’Reilly Perl in a Nutshell book as a way of reminding myself about the little details of the language. I can write Perl just fine– I just made some major hacks to dailystrips for example, and I write various renaming and text processing scripts all the time in Perl, because it is the language for that kind of thing.
But it’s little corners like, exactly what does bless do, that I’m reminding myself of. I know it’s the OO instance creation operator, and I remember the instantiation procedure but what exactly does it do?
So I go read the source code for Perl, in C, because that’s where the magic is kept, and I discover to my not-so-surprise that bless is a complete and utter hack. It puts a flag in the dereferencer to point to a different function, one that seems added after-the-fact, that instead of handling a procedure one way, instead just handles it another way with the recently dereferenced scalar as the first argument. That’s all it does. OO is so “bolted onto the side” of Perl that it’s amazing how important it seems to have become to the language.
But there’s so much missing from Perl; the whole metaprogramming capabilities of modern languages like Python, Ruby, and Javascript is just gone– done instead with code generation and eval, good grief– and yet the capacity for obfuscation is so terribly great. In many ways, Perl feels more like Bash scripting with a much bigger library of niceties and bolt-ons, which may explain why I use it that way.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.comTags: programming, python
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driftingfocus | |
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Sorry for my relative silence over the last couple days. Between job interviews, errands, and dealing with our small pack of kittens, I haven’t really had much time to sit down and write. I have been brainstorming some future entries though, so don’t worry, this is only temporary. To make up for my absence, I will show you some cute photos of said kittens: 
Left to Right: Simon, Jayne, River, Mal
More Kittens!
Originally published at Teh Blog. You can comment here or there. Tags: firefly kittens, fostering, kittens, photos: cats
Current Mood:  amused
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elfs | |
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At the beginning of this year, I made a New Year's resolution to drink more alcohol and less soda pop. I've cut down on the soda pop, but in an effort to balance things out I've also worked on increasing my appreciation for alcohol. In the past five years, I've learned to like wine, and this past year I've developed a taste for beer, and this summer I put some money into buying some agave tequila and Cointreau and making margaritas, which is the official drink of Floridians and Floridian expats everywhere. As I've gotten older I've developed a tolerance for alcohol: Omaha will tell you that when we were younger, one glass of wine would put me out. Nowadays, I barely notice one glass of wine, or one bottle of beer, or one two-ounce cocktail. At all. And I find that I'm not willing to do any more than that. I read a blog, I can't recall where, in which the writer said he spent an entire month without drinking at all to see what it was like, and he discovered that it was like being in a room with himself all the time, and he learned that, while he generally had high self-esteem, even he couldn't stand himself that much. Well, even though the job search has been rough on me, I guess I don't get that solace. I get my one glass of whatever a day-- it raises my "good" cholesterol, and has other benefits-- but I still have to live with myself day in and day out. I'd apparently make a poor alcoholic. My drugs of choice these days are coffee and information. Still, extra thanks to Rachel Maddow for teaching us all how to mix a drink, as well as being very clear as to what, exactly, constitutes a lime: "If your lime juice comes in plastic, it's not real." Tags: life
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: The Buggles, Johnny On the Monorail, unreleased studio mix
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serenejournal | |
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Seriously? Grown men still think it's hilariously, cringeingly embarrassing to buy tampons??(My comment, which may be removed -- I don't see much but "Har, har, you're totally right, it's embarrassing!" responses there: It’s a health product, like band-aids. Only people who think menstruation is some kind of icky gross thing (aren’t those only fourteen-year-old boys?) should make a big deal about buying them for someone they love. I don’t fuss if I have to buy band-aids or jock-itch cream or an enema for my partner — their health is more important to me than some prurient “ewww” reaction that I outgrew in the fourth grade.
(As to why there are so many absorbencies, it’s to prevent toxic shock syndrome (TSS), which, though relatively rare, is fatal. Fatal is bad. Much worse than someone thinking you might be partnered with someone who — EWW! — menstruates.)
My partner says this when we occasionally have to deal with menstrual issues (say, blood on the sheets because of a surprise onset): “Well, I could solve that by not sleeping with women. I like sleeping with women, so I guess I just accept that a little blood is part of the package.” ) Tags: blog
Current Location: 94609
Current Mood: boggled
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