Reading (For Dummies)

Another month disappears

It's been a busy couple of weeks, but time to play catch-up. Over the last month, I've: run every other day, biked almost every other day; lost 10 pounds; seen Greg Mortenson speak in town; paddled down the Palouse River twice; run a leg of a relay race; gotten a raise at work all squared away; started programming in Python and Ruby f'reals (using GTK and all that fun stuff, even); received two death threats from members of Soka Gakkai, International.

The last bit has been one of those 'more amusing things in my life.' Six or so years ago, I posted a picture of SGI's sacred scroll, called the gohonzon, on my blog. I have received many promises of bodily harm and dismemberment from members of SGI since doing so. I'd guesstimate that, on average, I receive two to three legitimate death threats per year, with another two or three ranting emails per month telling me that I'm going to hell for posting the picture. I find it amusing that a group with buddhist aspirations treats a physical object as sacred (and a digital reproduction of a physical object as sacrilege?), so let the Googlers/background researchers on SGI beware. Of course, take my warning with a grain of salt -- I'd hardly call Jerry Falwell a representative of christianity. Similarly I'd like to think that the folks that leave their nice comments to me aren't in the main line of SGI. The whole affair has left a bad taste in my mouth, though -- how could it not?

I do find it interesting that while Wikipedia has angered many Muslims by ruling that pictures of the prophet Mohammed are A-OK in his entry, there is no picture of the gohonzon on SGI's. Perhaps an edit is in order?

We're Hiring

My group is hiring, if any readers are looking for work. We're seeking highly motivated computer security experts, preferably with some decent programming experience. Our job announcement can be found here. If you're a friend and are looking for work, toss me your resumé...

Marathoning

I packed on some pounds over the last year, somehow, and am in serious need of shaking it off. I'm only thankful that our snow base has melted away. For most of the winter, the ground was covered with a few feet of hard-packed icy slushy mess. In that vain, I've been exercising like a madman for the last two weeks: biking and running on alternating days, with no excuses -- even if I'm feeling like crap, or the weather is pelting ice with 20mph winds, I'm going.

I have a goal for my exercise, as well: I'm doing a leg of the WSU 100k relay. I signed up for leg 4, a 7.7 mile flat road run in the absolutely gorgeous Snake River canyon.

I was never much of a runner. Biking has always been more my thang. So I'm up to riding 1.5-2 hours per riding day (Saturday I did a 45 miler in 2:15, w00t). Running is sluggish but coming along, though...I'm doing 40 minutes to an hour on my running days (tonight: 4.5 miles in 41 minutes on the flat), and shaking a newly purchased heart rate monitor all the while. It's like this thing my dad said to me growing up: "Son, when you turn 55 you can either get a new knee, or a new heart." I'd rather go with arthroscopic knee surgery myself...

Time Warner is Breaking DNS

Time Warner, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to go down the path of Verisign. This morning, I accidentally punched in an invalid domain name and was greeted with a Time Warner page saying "lslakjdflskjdflsdjf.com is invalid." Below are some screenshots.

Figure 1: nslookup from the command prompt

Figure 2: the url redirects to Time Warner's page, giving them an opportunity to register the name/make money from advertising

Many people's programs and scripts rely upon ISPs and registrars not doing things like this. Obviously Time-Warner is not a registrar so their redirect doesn't affect as many people as Verisign's did, but I still find it ludicrous. Thoughts?

Update: Apparently someone else has done a thorough analysis on this already. It looks like TW did a bad programming job here. Something that I'm going to play with in my spare time ;-).

Time Capsule Meltdown

Apple has a rather glaring bug in Time Machine, and it's going to give their Time Capsule owners a bit of a headache, starting soon.

I ran into a problem with OS X Server wherein Time Machine doesn't 'free' disk space from backups more than a day old (after making a backup an hour for the last 24 hours, time machine is supposed to zap the earlier backups and only keep one a day or so). A good thread on the subject can be read here.

I did file an Apple Bug Report, # 5696862, on 20-January, which appears to have not even been acknowledged yet. Anyone want to prod the Apple Developer folk for a fix?