Times Person of the Year

This morning, the first thing I heard when I got in the car was a report from NPR about Ben Bernanke being named as Time's Person of the Year. My immediate response was the same as when I had heard that Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. "Really?"

As I sat, listening to the litany of blessings Mr. Bernanke has bestowed upon the whole of Western Civilization -- including navigating one of the most difficult financial eras in history. Okay, I'll admit that Poor Old Ben inherited something of a shit-storm, but in the same token, I don't think that the "landing" of this economy has been as well as it could have been. Moreover, the whole "bailout" is counter to everything we hold sacred as a free-market/enterprise society.

If I were the Bernanke, how would I have done it? From the bottom-up.

There are an estimated 308,000,000 people in America. Statistics have shown that only about a half of those are tax paying persons. So, if you took the $8.5 TRILLION dollars, and distributed it evenly among the 154,000,000 or so tax paying persons... we would have each received a check for $55k, roughly.

So, how is it that giving everyone a check for $55k would solve anything? Well, two points:
1) most people would be depositing that money into their bank accounts. This would bolster the balance sheets of the banks, thus fixing the "corporate paper market" issue.
2) most people would be spending that money straight-away. I don't think I'm unreasonable in speculating that a LOT of people would use said money for one of two purposes: to buy a home, or a car. Either of these would result in solving the problems with the housing and auto industries... except... not enough people would be buying American cars to sufficiently save GM and its various brands.

That brings me to the second half of my diatribe against Bernanke: government taking ownership of what was heretofore privately or publicly (as in stock-market, not Gov't) owned companies is just flat-out wrong. If the company sucks so bad that it can't survive without being on Federal Life-support, then it shouldn't be allowed to persist! Let it die and the void it leaves will be filled by new businesses that are better able to adapt to the changing world, provided that the niche left is genuine!

Long story short, Bernanke deserves the Person of the Year as much as Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize... not one damn bit. If you ask me, the Obama administration is using its media-savvy and clout to effectively buy these designations to bolster their image in the public eye and to gloss-over the fact that they have done basically nothing as we approach the one year anniversary of the administration.

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Awesome WM

Its a well-known fact, among my friends, that I am a UI-bigot. That is, I think roughly 99% of user interfaces are pure garbage. Its not really a transcendent fault of user interfaces as a whole, but rather the awkward puberty they've gone through over the last twenty years. So, it may come as no surprise (to my friends) that I've found my forray into the Awesome Window Manager (heretoafter referred to as simply, "awesome") something of a blessing. Awesome, for those that don't know, is window manager for X11 that defies the conventional wisdom of window managers and forces all windows to one of a few fixed layouts.

Tiling window managers, such as awesome, started out as a joke. Some whit was flaming a news-group about a drug-induced coding frenzy in which the window manager was simply a distraction. Out of that satirical post rose a breed of window managers called "tiling wm's". They are more than a bit obtuse to the average user, and at first blush I think I was even put off by the superficial neanderthal-like clubbing Awesome did to my windows. Having now run Awesome for a week and some days, I have concluded that awesome is in fact probably my favorite window manager of all time.

Granted, I may still be in the honey-moon phase with this thing, but let me tell you why Awesome is awesome:

• No frilly window decorations cluttering my desktop
• No wasted space for panels, widgets and whatsits
• Configurable to a ridiculous degree (more on that in a moment)
• FAST AS HELL
• VERY light weight

Those benefits being what they are, Awesome is not without its foibles. Most notably, Awesome's configuration. There are two reasons Awesome's configuration sucks:

1. the DEFAULT configuration file is over 300 lines.
2. your configuration is written in LUA.

Taking each of those in turn...

No configuration file should be 300 lines. Honestly. Consider that you can configure MySQL, Apache, AND Postfix -- TOGETHER -- in fewer than 300 lines, it is a travesty that Awesome's config is so vast. Proponents of Awesome's configuration system say that its complexity is the price for its flexibility... while that may be, its still unnecessarily complex for anyone short of a supreme power-user.

Who has ever heard of LUA before? Certainly not I. LUA isn't even on the top 20 languages most programmed... more people have used SMALL than LUA. While LUA is fairly trivial to pickup (hell, I learned big chunks of it today) its still unreasonable to require a user to learn a whole programming language and various API's just to configure their window manager.

SO, that said, I think the good out-weighs the bad and Awesome is Awesome.

(P.S. I am afraid Awesome suffers the same plight as Enlightenment in that its principle author(s) are ego-maniacs with little concern for fixing bugs vs. adding features. Oh well, I used E for years despite Rasterman's obtuse and sporadic personality.)

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Remembering 9/11

I remember almost everything about 9/11. I was in Aurora, CO, at the Hampton Inn. I was in Denver for advanced training on the Cisco PIX. I was in the hotel lobby getting breakfast for my wife. I remember walking in to the area where breakfast was being served and was taken by the herd of people standing, silently, watching the television. I saw the first tower burning. I asked someone next to me, "what the hell happened?" He said, "a plane hit one of the Trade Center towers." As I stood there, I watched a second plane fly in to the second tower. I was stunned. I brought some breakfast up to Amanda and told her to turn on the television. I spent the next several hours at the training center with my classmates, trolling the web for information.

That night, Amanda and I took John with us to the 16th St. Mall to walk around and find some food. There were cops in riot gear. Cops in fatigues with machine-guns. Cop cars. Armored personnel carriers. It was surreal.

Now, eight years later, I watched some of the footage that's since become part of our cultural awareness, and had my kids watch it too. I think its important that we all remember that the preservation, and advancement, of Western Civilization is essential not only to ensuring we maintain our current place in the world, but also to ensure that we hand our children a bright future.

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ESXi file transfer woes

SO, I recently built an ESXi server. Its nothing special, but she's got it where it counts. A comedy of errors has unfolded as I've tried to upload even a single ISO to the system. It shouldn't be this hard.

First, I tried upload images using the built-in function in vSphere. Unfortunately, VirtualBox OSE so grossly underperformed at this task that the uploads wouldn't complete, ever. For example, I began the 650MB upload of the OpenFiler virtual appliance at 2030, woke-up the next day and the session had STILL not completed. This is over my LAN, not the Internet. That's absurd!

Next, I enabled SSH and tried to use SFTP to upload. For some bizarre reason, I couldn't use the CLI sftp client, so I turned again to my VirtualBox XP install. WinSCP is a brilliant piece of code. It really is. And I suspect it would have worked marvelously if I weren't running it on the feable IP stack made available to it via VirtualBox. As it were, it couldn't maintain a session long enough to transfer even the 650MB virtual appliance for OpenFiler. :-(

At this point, I considered throwing in the towel on the whole network transfer gig and using DVD's to get my data up to the ESXi server, but that would've been too easy. SO, I enabled FTP on my ESXi server using the glorious instructions over at vm-help.com. Now, I can FTP files from my native Linux install, and its blazing fast, like it bloody should be!

The real beauty of all of this is that my foray into ESXi was prompted by my efforts to build a virtualized Hackint0sh. I had heard tell that it was possible using VMware Server, but I didn't have a whole lot of luck with that... so I used a Jedi mind-trick to convince myself that the logical choice was to build a full-out ESXi server. I think it was probably just an excuse.

Now that I'm finally able to upload to the box without serious difficulty, I know I'm not going to have the time to tackle the original Hackint0sh project because a friend sent me a pre-installed Hackint0sh! w00t!

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...and this is why I'm Catholic

When I was looking for answers from the Methodist church about all the things I was wondering about as a teenager, I was dismayed to find that their official church doctrine (if you can call it that) would on one hand condemn a thing and on the other bless it. This was true of homosexuality, divorce, abortion, and more. That is what lead me to look elsewhere for spiritual direction... I sought something that was congruent, something consistent both with itself and nature.

When I looked at the Lutheran church and found it to be lacking in congruity, in very much the same way the Methodist church was. Now, the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) has formally acknowledged that homosexuality is not only fine, but its fine to have practicing homosexuals as clergy. This view is inconsistent with Scriputre, Tradition and Nature.

And this is why I'm Catholic -- because there is nothing in the Catholic Church that is in conflict with Scripture, Tradition or Nature.

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Pulse Audio == Pure Fail

I don't know what future gains Canonical hopes to see from deploying Pulse Audio in Ubuntu, but I'll tell you this much: I've removed it and won't re-install it until every comment I see about it is positive. Pulse has been nothing but a pure pain in the ass for the last week. Finally, today, I removed every pulse-related package from my system and switched back to ALSA. `apt-get remove pulseaudio*` DO IT!

And what's more, lets write to Canonical and tell them that Pulse Audio is garbage.

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Three Cheers for Rep. Pete King!!!

I watched this video, and can't agree more with Rep. King. Michael Jackson was a dirt-bag, that he has been deified by the media is a true testament to the state of our society. What a lot of crap. To answer Rep. King's question, "would you leave your child or grandchild alone with Michael Jackson?" I have a resounding, "NO." The man was a pedo and a FREAK. In my opinion, we should have had a national day of celebration that he is no longer preying on the youth of our nation.

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D-Day & Patriotism

You may have noticed on Saturday that there were a lot of flags being flown. You may have even known why they were out. In case you didn't, Saturday was the 65th anniversary of D-Day -- the day that Allied forces landed on the European main land to re-take the continent from Germany. Today I saw an interview with Arthur Seltzer, who was one of the thousands of brave men who landed at Normandy. Arthur's story is compelling beyond words. No words I could write-here would do it justice. Please watch the Interview with Mr. Seltzer here.

When you're done watching, have your kids watch it. Have your parents watch it. Have all your friends watch it. Show it to complete strangers.

We - as a nation - fail, too often, to appreciate the profundity of the sacrifices made for our Freedom. And while I'm seldom the gushing patriotic type I'm damn proud to be an American. For all our cultural foibles and political faults, this is still the greatest nation on the planet. God Bless America!

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OH NOES!!!11 CREDIT FRAUD!!!

I got an email today from Bank of America saying they had detected fraudulent activity on a credit card I have with them. I deleted it. I got THREE MORE. I decided to check in to it. Being the paranoid android that I am, I didn't dare follow any of the links in the emails (all of which went to some subdomain at bankofamerica.com) and instead went directly to the BoA website, logged in, and was greeted with a message that my account couldn't be viewed because it was currently locked. They provided a number to call. I called...

They wanted my social security number, right off the bat. After considerable jockeying (because I wouldn't give them my account number or SSN), we authenticated one another and they informed me that someone had tried to place a $1500 order at mypolicestore.com using my card (the not so subtle irony of fraud at a store for cops is not lost on me.) Fortunately, BoA rejected the transaction, and triggered the current status.

Now, this incident -- alone -- wouldnt' typically be enough to scare me, but earlier today I had gotten a statement for my corporate AmEx card. The problem there is that I don't have a corporate AmEx card. TWO incidents in one day? Uh oh. SO, I promptly went to the Big Three and initiated credit freezes on my credit profile. I've also put a notice in with my other credit card vendors.

I'm worried that my ID may have been jacked. That would suck. This is the last thing I need to be dealing with right now.

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Transformational Thinking

Over the weekend I was talking with Dad about technology. The conversation started with a simple question about my Blackberry, "Is it a phone with the Internet, or the Internet with a phone?" Seems simple enough, and at first blush maybe even a bit trite, banal and irrelevant. However, I would posit that it is a highly relevant question.

Consider it like this: if its the Internet with a phone, who holds control? The people. If its a phone with the Internet, who holds the control? The service providers.

The transformational question is simply this: what would it take to shift the paradigm away from cell phones to truly pocket computers with sip capabilities? The answer, incidentally, is fairly short: a nation-wide wireless network.

How hard would it be to build a nation-wide wireless network? Lets run some simple numbers with some basic assertions. Lets assume that the whole country is flat and that buildings aren't an issue. Lets also assume we'd be building this network on existing technology -- lets use a basic ProCurve 530AP as an example. We have an effective radius of 100m. The effective coverage of a single access-point then is π*100², or 31416m² or 31km². Figuring that the continental US is 8,080,464.25 km²... you'd need about 260,000 access-points. Which, incidentally would only require about $91,000,000 to purchase, but now you've got to get towers, power, and internet connectivity to every one of these guys... figure you can get power to them for $5/mo and Internet for $45/mo, and now we're talking about a monthly cost of $13,000,000... $100 million to setup, $157 million/year to run, and that says nothing about maintenance costs, or the fact that many areas would need more than 1 AP for service. I think a conservative estimate would put this project at the $5 billion mark with little trouble -- we all know how the government can screw up even the simplest projects.

SO, if every man, woman and child kicked in about $15 we could pay for this thing... and everyone would have free broadband... wtf? WHY HAVEN'T WE DONE THIS YET? Imagine everyone having free access to the Internet... everywhere... most smartphones that I've seen are SIP capable (on a blackberry, you can see that it is by dialling ##000000 and scrolling down). I'll tell you why this won't happen: corporate greed.

Its amazing to me that a few pigdogs can halt progress because they want to be richer...

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Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit on an HP nx9420

I had been delaying loading a 64-bit disto on my nx9420 since I wasn't entirely sure it would be kosher, but yesterday I had some time on my hands, so I threw caution to the wind and gave it a whirl. The 64-bit version of 8.10 isn't as solid as the 32-bit version; I say that because I had a couple of issues: 1) NetworkManager is still broken garbage, 2) getting the supplicant drivers to work for wireless encryption was not automatic, 3) goofy issues with xul and firefox, 4) the menu.

I've contributed a couple of posts to my loathing of NetworkManager, so I won't go in to that any further. I'll simply leave it at: INSTALL WICD FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY.

The supplicant drivers not working out of the box really threw me for a loop. It'd been YEARS since I had to manually mangle those, so I'd mostly forgotten. Fortunately, `man` steered me right. The crux of it is that the wpasupplicant package doesn't create the /etc/default/wpasupplicant file. I hand created the file and put in only one line: ENABLE=0 After this, you're 'supposed' to be able to do a `/etc/init.d/dbus restart` and have things work, but I'd suggest you just reboot -- because if you restart dbus, your X session is going to go away anyways (unless you're using something like openbox). Once you've rebooted, just make sure wicd is using the wext supplicant driver (its under preferences) and you should be golden.

The whole xulrunner and firefox pissing match is probably my fault. I was doing an `apt-get dist-upgrade` and I think half the packages were installed but the finish-up scripts hadn't run. SO, when I ran firefox, it crashed because of a suitable GRE interpretor. I was able to get around this by manually running `xulrunner --register-global` before apt-get had finished its thing. So this was really a fairly small issue.

The main menu in Ubuntu is heinous. Really, its the stallwart Windows 95 Start button... but we're 14 years on from that particular 'innovation', so why haven't we made any real progress? Vista -- and dont' get me started on this -- has a fairly good Start Button (except that its painfully slow because its an eye-candy resource hog!) Linux Mint, and several other distros, has an EXCELLENT start button that is very much like Vista's. This is the 'slab' or 'uslab' start-menu. Unfortunately, I don't want to use Mint -- they've over branded the hell out of it, and I find it particularly annoying. (I just stopped myself from raging about Mint, so...) The beauty is, of course, that Mint's menu (a.k.a. mintmenu) is a DEB, so I just downloaded it and installed... added it to the panel, and BOOM! Instant goodness! I had tried a couple of other slab-esque start menus, but they all sucked and weren't as refined as Mint's. The MAJOR downside of this is that mintmenu has a 'dependancy' on two other mint packages, which in turn are dependant on other packages, etc... so if you let apt-get do its thing, you'll basically end-up upgrading to Mint. That's a problem. SO, I hand installed mintmenu. Now, apt-get barfs about unmet dependancies every time I try to do anything. I'm working on a solution to this.

One *MAJOR* bit of niceness about 64-bit ver of 8.10 is that suspend to RAM worked OUT OF THE BOX! I didn't even have to apply the patch from Stephan! W00t!

Anywho, all said and done, I'm very happy with my 64-bit install. There were some bumps in the road, but overall I don't think any of them are sufficiently bad to warrant abandoning the effort.

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GNOME Network Manager STILL 100% FAIL

Almost a year ago I wrote about WICD for the first time. Mostly out of frustration for how badly Network Manager SUCKED. Well, nine months later I'm writing about WICD again, and again its due to Network Manager FAIL. My office uses an WPA+TKIP access point... this is pretty standard stuff... but Network Manager COULD NOT ASSOCIATE ME TO THE AP!!!! O-M-F-G!? So long as that hunk of shit is the default network manager in Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, etc., Linux will not gain widespread acceptance. WICD FTW!!!!!!!!!!

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My New Bumper Sticker

I found my new bumper sticker tonight... I'm bitter.

Mostly, I'm bitter that Initiated Measure 11 was defeated. I had really hoped that South Dakota would be the state to re-kindle the Supreme Court decision about abortion. I guess that plaque I have that says, "if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans," is as accurate now as ever.

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cable modem woes

TCP has a 16-bit port address, which allows for 65535 ports for source and destination ports. That fact appears to be lost on the vendor of my cable modem as they seem to think that 40960 is all that anyone would EVER need, however that fact is not lost on me. I have discovered this limitation "the hard way." I've crashed my cable modem three times this week while trying to conduct a pen-test for a client.

In all fairness, it seems like assuming a home user would not exceed 40960 simultaneous or embryotic connection is reasonable. That said, it still seems assinine not to support either the full-capabilities of the protocol's specifications OR that if it isn't going to handle all 65,535 ports that it at least not just die violently.

Ironically, this is not the first device I have discovered this limitation (which is why I know what is wrong here.) I've discovered this limitation in a variety of firewalls: Novell BorderManager, SonicWall, and various Linksys devices. This is, however, the first layer 2-3 device I've discovered the problem on.

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Encrypt the Entire Internet?

I saw an article on Reddit about members of The Pirate Bay wanting to encrypt all traffic on the Internet, end-to-end. This is an interesting idea on a number of levels that I'd like to explore: the practical, the legal, and the information security.

From a practical perspective, such an endeavor would require hurculean effort, to say the least. At a minimum, you're talking about adding a layer to every IP stack on every server and workstation on the planet (or at least those that "need" to participate in the encrypted Interweb.) This poses a number of challenges, to say the least. Not the least significant of which is how many other applications shim into the IP stack already, e.g. antivirus, intrusion detection, spyware, performance monitoring tools, etc. Interacting with all of these pre-existing shims will likely be hideously problematic. Supposing these obstacles can be navigated successfully, there remains the performance overhead that such a shim would invariably introduce and in turn the end-user satisfaction issue. This, of course, says nothing about the additional hurdles that Vista represents, but that's another matter altogether.

From a legal perspective, there are two-sides: those who want to protect their privacy and those who have a legal RIGHT to infringe on a persons privacy. Now, let me be clear: I'm in the camp of Believers who think that the right to infringe on a persons privacy is both necessary but HORRIBLY abused on a ROUTINE basis... so, my ramblings on this matter may need to be taken with a block of salt. That said, as for those who wish to protect their privacy I have two thoughts: if what you're doing is secretive there are already mechanisms in place to protect you, but if your secretive because what you're doing is illegal (e.g. kiddie pr0n) then you don't deserve privacy. Long-story short, encrypting the transport of data across the interweb will set law enforcement back a DECADE (and its already lagging horribly behind criminals.) I foresee any technology that prohibits law enforcement like this would as being legislated into oblivion, around the globe.

The perspectives from the information security world are slightly different, but they overlap somewhat with those of the perspective from the legal world. The basic issue is parallel to that of the LE world -- we can't do packet captures anymore. That makes our job harder. More than that though, it adds an element to the mix: non-repudiation. That is, if we DO get a capture (i.e. through a backdoor on the host from which we're trying to sniff traffic from), we can prove, with a high degree of certainty, that the traffic did come from the targeted host and that it could not ahve come from any other host -- because the cryptographic private keys would be unique (this is, mathematically, a misnomer, but it plays out in practical terms because of probability. I.e. if you take an infinite set -- all numbers -- and try to represent them in a finite set -- a cryptographic key -- you will have collisions, or instances of duplicate keys.) There is also the matter of "trust", i.e. can you trust a network shim conceived- and implemented-by people who's primary livelihood is on the "other side"? "Nay nay," as the great Jimmy Pardo would say.

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Baseball

Monday night I had the dubious honor of being the home-plate umpire at a little league baseball game... I had a front-row seat to six of the worst innings of baseball EVER played. I'll cut right to the chase: the final score was 22 to... wait for it... wait for it... 2! That's right, there was a TWENTY point spread.

These were 9 and 10 year old kids. The difference between skill-sets was absurd, especially in pitching. The "visiting" team's pitchers had mechanics while the "home" team was just playing catch, badly. Mechanics? I didn't even know what mechanics were when I was ten. For example, the "home" team's last pitcher -- I had to open the strike-zone to the point of where if the batter didn't have to dodge the pitch and it wasn't in the dirt or over the batter's head, it was a strike. It took this last "home" pitcher close to fifty pitches for him to get out of the inning and he didn't get any strike-outs. It was painful.

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Kids Rock!

Amanda (my wife) and I have four kids: we were blessed (so saith the Psalmist in Psalm 126) with three sons first and recently a daughter. Four out of five people that I introduce my family to seem to think in incredibly shallow terms because invariably they say say something to the effect of, "Oh, you finally got your girl!" Like its some sort of "congratulations", or like we had son number three hoping he'd be a girl and that we were disappointed that James is anything but who he is? No.

I realize that some people may find this difficult to believe, but there are those of us out there who view children -- regardless of sex, color or developmental disposition -- to be a precious gift from God. Those of us who do view children in such a light are not so shallow as to be hung-up on having one girl and one boy. We're grateful for any blessing God bestows on us.

SO, the next time you meet someone with lots of kids, don't think you'll be cute and say something ignorant like, "you know what causes that, don't you?" Such comments are not polite, original or funny -- making such comments only proves you to be an idiot and a stooge for the Culture of Death.

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Obama + Hillary == No Vote; McCain + Romney == No Vote

Like many of the Nation's "younger" voters, I find Obama's views on the economy and foreign policy quite appealing... if he weren't pro-abortion, I'd vote for him without hesitation. This presidential election has the potential to build a dynasty out of whoever is elected -- this president will probably get to appoint a chief justice, and will get to appoint new Federal Reserve officers... these are not trivial events. Moreover, we are at a dangerous time in our nation's history: the dollar is declining, oil is skyrocketing, we've done nothing about our dependence on foreign oil, China and India are rising in the East, Europe's influence on the world is ebbing severely (because they have not sufficiently reproduced) and the problems facing the world-over are broader than ever before. How our next president handles this tumultuous politiscape is going to shape -- good or bad -- our future for generations to come.

That said, could I vote for Obama? I don't know. Could I vote for McCain? I don't know. I think a lot of my decisions depend on who either of them select as a running mate. The next couple of weeks will be interesting, because I expect to see both candidates announce their running mate and that will solidify who I'll vote for, regardless of what else transpires on the campaign trail.

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Hillary

On my way home from work tonight I passed Hillary's motorcade. In a rash of impulsiveness, I gave them "the bird", the whole time I could see them. At first I hoped she had seen me. Then it occurred to me that with her four troopers, many Secret Service agents, and over-head F-16's, that that probably wasn't the best move.

After my initial freak-out, I decided I'd do it again if I had the opportunity. Besides, how many people can say -- honestly -- that they've flipped off a presidential candidate and/or former first-lady of the United States? Probably more than you'd think (given its Hillary), but I take some small satisfaction in being one of the very small percentage of humanity that Did The Right Thing.

Hillary == The Whore of Babylon (Revelation 17:4-18) And if you're not into eschatology, I think that label still applies. I know a lot of people -- in all seriousness -- that would build a bunker and prepare for The End if ever she were elected.

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Whacked-out Weather

So, its no mystery to anyone that the weather has been WEIRD this year, but here's just how weird it has been... this evening, on my way home I passed a weather spotter just outside of my home, which lead me to check the NOAA's website for weather warnings. On the NOAA's page, for my particular locale, there was a Tornado Watch and a Blowing Snow Advisory. I'll give that a second to sink-in... okay... tornados and snow.

I realize that I'm not a meteorologist, but I'm pretty-sure I understand the basic physics (in principle) behind how tornados form, so I'm utterly mystified at how a tornado could be formed in a weather system that is also going to drop SNOW!?!?

It turns out, that they aren't the same two systems, but two. However, you can imagine my shock at my initial reading of the warnings.

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