Category: business

No Title

About this time tomorrow, I’ll be getting on a plane out of here. It’s
been fun, although slightly less than I thought it would be. When I
was thinking about this, I had been saying that I had no
responsibilities. That’s not quite right, since I had to meet up with
D every day at 4:30 PM. I couldn’t go quite as hog wild as I had been
thinking I would. Still fun, but not the crazed free for all I had in
mind with my running rampant throughout San Francisco. For example, I
haven’t been really much out of the downtown area. Eating at the
Stinking Rose in North Beach was the farthest north I’ve been, still a
mile from Fisherman’s Wharf and such. It’s a good sized city, so it
takes time to see everything. Last time we were here we went to
Alcatraz and spent a lot of time there and at Ghiradelli Square, etc.

Today will be shopping and such after the responsibilities of the AGU
meeting are met. I think I’ll tote my laptop there (against the advice
of my spouse) and play with the wifi while she attends talks and
poster sessions. I’ll probably fool around there for the afternoon to
kill time.

No Title

OK, turns out that the dumb bastards at Intertrust have managed to
convince Sony to buy them, just a few days after I made an entry about
them decommissioning the system I
and my team built for them. The minor windfall I get from this
will defray the cost of a Tivo. I
really want to do some stuff with it, like hook a wireless card and
use the internet rather than a phone line for the program
information. If I can hack and set up the stuff that lets you stream
video, then I could use either my laptop or our desktops to watch
programs. Yowza, how cool! This is going to take a lot of research,
because the newish series 2 models seem pretty cool, but I’m unsure if
they are less hackable. I’d be plenty fine with an older model with a
hard drive upgrade to have, oh, 120+ hours. If anyone reading this has
advice for me, please e-mail
me your input.

No Title

Not unexpected, but kind of a bummer. I periodically check on Intertrust’s PDF vending system,
mainly to see how many have been dispensed. I had a huge argument that
lasted hours with their head of IT who wanted to not make public the
system because it wouldn’t do 50 transactions a second. Over the first
year, they vended around 4000 documents, something like one every hour
and a half. Way to go, bro. You were only off by 5 orders of magnitude
(and the spec was for 2 anyway, dumbass.) I and the team spent close
to a year on this system, which worked like a charm even when the
company abandoned it like a sack full of drowning kittens. Today I
checked on it and got the message “Thank you for your interest in
Rights|PDF Plug-in. We have discontinued this product.” Of course, it
was discontinued de facto even when it wasn’t discontinued, since no
one was selling it or gave a shit about it. Still, it is sad to see
something you put a lot into go down the crapper, particularly for
reasons unrelated to its merits. We put a lot of really good work into
that system, and ultimately for nothing. Que sera.

Log rolling

One thing I really want to do is to write a script that will parse my
maillog and secure log on my linux box, extract out the IP addresses
that have tried to do suspect things and add them to my hosts.deny
file. I am now getting a few attempts a day to use my SMTP server as a
spam relay. Almost all have the same from address, and they are mostly (entirely?)
coming from Asian countries. I’m also seeing some failures to connect
via SSH, no doubt script kiddies looking for vulnerable openssh
installs. I just want to refuse all IP packets from all these places.

No Title

I didn’t write about my boys, the Atlanta Braves yesterday. The loss
yesterday was heartbreaking. Like all Braves fans, as excited as I am
to have them in the postseason for the eleventh straight time, I also
am dreading the thought of them going home early. It’s looking pretty
good tonight, a five run lead as I type this, with Smoltz taking
over. Smoltz has long been my favorite Braves pitcher, from back when
the rotation was Glavine, Smoltz, Kent Mercker and Steve Avery.