Geeking out /dev/car – QR codes and plastic widgets
A few months back, I bought a new car. It’s a 2010 Kia Forte SX. In black. In Phoenix. Hey, pimpin’ ain’t easy! It starts out geeky, with a 6 speaker stereo that supports MP3 CDs, audio input jack, and a USB input (for USB sticks or, less elegantly, iPods). It has Bluetooth speakerphone/voice dial [...]
DNS Hijacking by ISPs (or: How I Learned to Stop Being RFC Compliant and Love the Paycheck)
Disclaimer: I work for a cable provider, but not one of the ones listed. I speak for myself alone here on this blog, from my own view of professional sysadmin ethics, now and always.
Sherman, set the wayback machine! The time? September 15th, 2003. In 2003, Verisign(since monikered as Verislime I might add) decided they had [...]
Solaris tar command… I hate you.
Apparently, the tar command on Solaris does not strip leading slashes. Meaning you can clobber original files if you carelessly untar them, which could be disastrous in some circumstances. Like, say, if you clobbered /etc/ or /var/ or something. Add this to the lack of a z or j option(gunzip and bunzip built in) and [...]
CrunchPad dies at the 11th hour?
The CrunchPad was slated to be a cool, sub-$300, Linux-based tablet PC. It was excitedly anticipated by a lot of geeks, myself included. Apparently Fusion Garage, the manufacturing partner of Tech Crunch in the CrunchPad endeavor, has decided they just going to sell the thing themselves without Tech Crunch being involved:
But the email went on. [...]
Cox cable SpeedBoost irritations
Cox Cable (which I am, unfortunately, a customer of) has a delightful SpeedBoost technology.This technology works by providing a lot of bandwidth at the beginning of a given TCP session, then choking it down as time goes by. While this does not make a difference in many applications, one thing that is killing me is [...]