November, 23, 2002 archives

a new server has been ordered. with luck, it will be colocated by the first of december, but i assume the turkey holiday will interfere with that. i'm still mulling over whether i want to try to eliminate my home server completely. i'll probably wait to see how reliable the colocated server is.

this will hopefully mean the end of the intermittent problems with blo.gs, and push me over the hill in getting motivated to work on it (and various other little projects) some more.

it does mean i'll be leaving pair networks, which is a shame because they've been great. the desire to have my own server to abuse is just too strong. the question now is whether i'll steal more customers by offering to host some of the friends i've referred to them, since i'll have bandwidth to spare.

here is a three part article about setting up ipsec on mac os x (jaguar). since jaguar just uses the networking stack from the kame project, the documentation there is probably also nearly directly applicable.

(here's some thoughts from john gilmore on why you might care.)

this salon premium article about the threat of shoulder-mounted missile attacks on commercial airliners covers a subject that i've mulled in my head while out walking, since i live under one of the flight paths into burbank airport. i'm pretty shocked this hasn't become a common type of terrorist attack, since it seems like it would be nearly impossible to defend against.

anyway, it's worth clicking through the four-part mercedes ad to get the free day of salon premium access to check the article out.

lawrence lessig, in his keynote at the o'reilly open source conference, challenged the audience to give more money to organizations fighting on the side of good in the copyright wars. luke francl is documenting his contributions. my monthly vig to the media/telecommunications goons is higher (about $100 for between my phone, dsl connection, and cable, but i think i'm doing pretty good in rising to the challenge. i've given about $800 to the eff this year (most of that a chunk of the money i got for speaking at oscon), and while that's less than what i'll have spent on phone+dsl+cable+music+movies, that's pure money to fuel the fight (minus some stickers).

in the new year, i'll probably kick some money to digitalconsumer.org as well. epic, the cryptorights foundation, and cpsr also look like worthy causes in the same vein. any other suggestions?

(link to luke via boing boing.)

machack's call for papers is out, with a submission deadline of february 2003. i need to get up to speed with this cocoa stuff.

brent has been working with the blogger and metaweblog apis in implementing the weblog client part of netnewswire. making the interface discoverable via the main weblog page is a good idea.

to get into a little gui programming, i've been thinking about implementing a standalone blogging client, which means i'll be walking down much the same path as brent eventually (since i also have a homegrown weblog system to which i'll have to add api support). but i actually have server-side implementation of the blogger api in php sitting around, so that part shouldn't be a big deal.

i wonder how easy it would be to add a toolbar button to chimera to fire off something (an applescript?) that could pass the current url, path to cached html, and other page particulars to another application. that would be nice for a blog-this button. you could probably do something along those lines with a javascript bookmark/toolbar-button that passed the info to a server-side script that returned a document with the information with a mime content-type that the application was configured to handle. (does that even work with chimera? i've never noticed it firing up any helper applications.)

a related thought i had on my walk today: to avoid sending passwords in the clear, these apis should have used a hash of the password and the blog entry instead of a plain-text password. then the worst someone could do by sniffing the password is post that entry again. (and send a timestamp and include that in the hash, and you could lock out replays after some amount of time.)

as usual, there are problems with the latest atkins diet study. i really like the advice given by dr. stanley rockson (chief of consultative cardiology at stanford university school of medicine): it gets back to what grandmothers said. do everything in moderation.

for me, the key has always been exercise. between my two previous jobs, i lost weight by walking every day. then i got a job, stopped walking, and gained it all back. then i quit that job, started walking again, and lost it all and more. my diet has been lower-fat during the periods i've lost weight vs. when i've gained, but not low-fat.

the new york times reports on the rising foreclosure rate. bad news for investors in those lenders. (and for the rest of us paying taxes that will end up bailing out those lenders.)