if i get bored sometime, perhaps i’ll write a program that monitors things and keeps track of how often i screw up when typing in my passwords or passphrases. i bet it would be a pretty good indicator of my overall stress level — higher the percentage of mistyped passwords, the more stressed out i must be. i could put it as a little meter on /dev/random and people could tell by looking at it that they should just leave me alone for a while.
i don’t think i typed in a single password right the first time all day today…
the Potassium Hydroxide virus is definately the coolest computer virus i’ve ever heard of. when it infects a drive, it politely asks if you would like the data on the drive IDEA encrypted. it’s entirely beneficial and sounds like a really convenient way to encrypt your data if you’re using windows (i know linux already has support for encrypted filesystems but i’m not so sure if windows does).
i really like the idea of beneficial viruses. what someone really needs to write is a virus that secures your system and patches the most common security holes, perhaps also with the capability to watch for and automatically download security updates. hell, maybe even just a vb script virus that when it infects someone, it changes their settings in Outlook so they won’t get infected with anything else. if that one went around once, it would probably catch 90% of the people who would be susceptible to email viruses and would just nip that whole problem in the bud. i’ll stop just short of advocating the linux installation virus…
today, one of my coworkers informed me that if i were an animal, i’d be a chameleon. i guess that makes sense. anyone who has known me for a while can vouch for the fact that i’m basically invisible (people in the service industry in particular seem to have a hard time seeing me. roughly 30% of the time when eating out, the waitress will go around the table taking orders and just completely skip over me). i can also move my eyes indepentantly of each other. however, i don’t yet have a prehensile tail. sure would come in useful.
Broadcast message from anders (pts/2) Tue Aug 8 23:31:40 2000…
on saturday i have to move out of my current room and into my fall room (hopefully. there’s a slim chance that i won’t have anywhere to stay for the next two weeks in which case my stuff goes into storage and i get an enforced vacation in maine). that means the familiar ritual of a new IP address and the days of being disconnected while the network people get their shit together. this time around though, instead of suffering downtime, i’m going to temporarily move things to my linux machine at work while my home machine gets moved all over the place. please just continue to use thraxil.dhs.org, a-nders.dhs.org, etc. with any luck it should be entirely transparent to everyone but me. however, don’t be surprised if things are a little weird for the next few days as i adjust settings and change dns entries. just be patient and let me know if you notice any problems that i should probably fix.
some things i will never understand. i’m sure it’s all some terribly funny inside joke that i’m just not in on but columbia has coke and pepsi accounts. if you finger the cocacola or pepsi accounts, you get what is at least supposed to look like inventory information for soda machines on the 7th and 8th floor of Watson (the building on campus that houses ACIS) respectively. you will also see that pepsi hasn’t logged in since 1995, but cocacola has logged on fairly recently. remind me not to drink anything from the pepsi machine in Watson.
i generally keep java turned off in netscape because it makes it crash too much, but now there’s a really good reason to keep it off. as far as i know, this is the first real exploitable hole in the java security model; there have been lots of holes found before but they were always along the lines of “well, this part doesn’t work quite how it should although we can’t figure out how anyone would actually exploit it; we’ll fix it anyway though.” it should be interesting to see how sun reacts; hopefully they’ll come up with an intelligent fix rather copy microsoft’s “ignore it and it will go away” attitude towards security holes coughback orificecough.
i haven’t even heard of the “Cow Parade” in new york, but apparently, David Lynch is just too weird to be allowed to participate. i just really like Lynch’s quote in the article: “Don’t you think when people tell you you’re allowed to do whatever you want as long as it’s not sexually X-rated that they should stand behind their word and show your cow?”
i’d also like to know why i wasn’t given a cow to decorate? oh well, i’m sure they wouldn’t have shown my cow either.