First, the article. Check it out before you continue. — To begin, it’s worth nothing that it was a government-run healthcare program that accomplished this. It was smart people looking out for the greater-good of the people, which is what government is supposed to be. I am not a healthcare expert, but I’d say the reason this is…
Archives for 2009
Change Blindness
How to Manage a Cisco Device via Console Using a USB Port in OS X
Problem: you need to manage a Cisco device via console, but the only box you have available is your non-macpro-mac, i.e. you don’t have a console port available. Solution: manage it via USB. Step 1: Procure a USB to Console Cable It should look something like this. You can get them most anywhere. Step 2: Download and Install…
My Only Shot at Immortality
Like my religious friends, I too would like to live forever. The thought of there being an end to my learning–a point at which my lifelong tool sharpening goes to waste–is not a happy one. Here’s the only way I can see it happening (and I don’t think it’s too farfetched, either). We simply have to make it…
Fusion Tables: An Extraordinary Data Sharing and Visualization Tool
This is the type of project you expect to see from Google.
A Few Apache Hardening Basics
Here are a few things you should consider doing immediately after installing and configuring Apache. Not to be confused with an Apache hardening guide, this is just a list of three (3) minimums. Permissions Here’s a script you can run to harden the permissions on your web root. It will make sure ownership is correct (change as needed),…
Installing Apache Modules in Ubuntu
These are the ones I often seem to need. a2enmod headers a2enmod expires a2enmod rewrite Then bounce the service: /etc/init.d/apach2 restart [ If it seems like this post is a note to myself, that’s because it is. 🙂 That’s how the entire site got started, actually. ]
Happiness: Creation vs. Collection
I have an observation that I’ve been mulling for the last few days: unhealthy people collect things. Healthy people create things. Naturally, statements like these always pivot on definitions, so when I say “healthy” here, I mean people who generally like themselves and feel happy about where they are in life. This isn’t to say that all people…
Disk Performance: Slicehost vs. Linode
One of the major performance metrics I looked at when evaluating Linode vs. Slicehost was disk performance. Here are the stats for my two servers as of a few moments ago: [ Performance taken with htparm -tT on both systems at the same time. ] Slicehost Cached Reads: 413.15 MB/sec Buffered Reads: 7.27 MB/sec Linode Cached Reads: 5576.59…
Social Media is Nothing But a Global Interface to You as a Person
The problem newcomers often make when thinking about social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is thinking about it as some sort of additional thing–as if there’s a separation between you, and it. There isn’t. Social media is nothing disparate or foreign. It’s an arbitrary name we’ve assigned to “using technology to provide an interface to ourselves”. Your blog, or…
My Twitter Infosec List
I am really looking forward to the potential of Twitter Lists. Here’s my Information Security list. Ping me if I’ve overlooked you. [ Daniel Miessler’s Twitter Information Security List | twitter.com ] And here’s my complete list of…lists. ::
DANIELMIESSLER.COM Browser Stats
Interesting stats regarding what browsers are used most on my site over the last month–most notably, Chrome passing Safari and almost catching Internet Explorer. I have known since Chrome came out that it would become dominant, but this is a rapid ascent.
Processed Foods and Depression
Interesting information on the correlation between eating trash and being depressed.
The Best Video You’ve Ever Seen of Water Drops
Stunning.
Vitamins
I take vitamins. As with most things I believe in going with the minimum number of additions, each of maximum quality. As such, I’m currently taking just two supplements. 1. Irwin Naturals: Men’s Living Green Liquid-Gel Multi As far as I can tell, both by research and by feel, this is the multi-vitamin. First, it’s plant-based, which sounds…
The Only Class That Matters
To have “class” means different things to different people. Some think it means having money. Others think it means being able to identify and procure expensive, hard to attain things. Another lot think it means appreciating obscure types of art or music. The key to the word’s meaning, however, always hinges on the concept of refinement or advancement.…
Harry Potter and the Extension of Reality
This will be a strange post. I just finished the Harry Potter series, and I’m a bit overwhelmed. I’m quite sure it’s the best series I’ve ever read in many ways. Not in all ways, but in many. Perhaps in most that matter. Anyway, I’ll come back to that later; that’s not the important part. While reading it…
One of Life’s Harshest Realities
There are many harsh things about life. The one people grapple with most is death, of course, but I see another that’s worse in many ways. It’s horribly unfair that we usually cannot live near our friends. When we are children we are stripped from close relationships because our parents had to move, or because their parents had…
SSD is Where it’s At
Like 10 years ago there was a single thing that would help your system most from a performance standpoint–add more memory. This, at the time, meant going from 64MB to 128MB, or maybe from 128MB to 256MB. The analog today, and for the next half decade at least, is switching from disk based storage to SSD based storage.…
Removing Files from a Git Repository Without Actually Deleting Them
Sometimes when you first install git you realize you added a bunch of crap to your repository, which makes it bloated. Or maybe you have junk files like .DS_STORE lying around that you want to keep out of your git goodness. Here’s how to delete from your repository without deleting them from your disk. # git rm -rf…
Scientists Enhance Mice Brains
An interesting story on gene manipulation and potential implications for brain growth. via al fin
An Open Letter on Software Patents
My friend Richard is very passionate about software patents, and he’s in the process socializing an open letter he recently wrote to a number of outlets. He asked if I’d post it here as well, so here it is. — 5 Reasons the US Supreme Court should explicitly deny patent protection to software. Software is simply a solution…
Google Voice on a Verizon Android?
So Verizon and Google just announced a strategic partnership. Verizon also stated that they’re embracing openness, which means (among other things) they’re going to allow Google Voice on Android devices on their network. So this solidifies things for me on the mobile device front. At this point I see the comparison like this between iPhone vs. Android: Apple/AT&T…
Daniel Dennett on Free Will
I find this a highly practical argument, but not an absolute or reality-based one. He’s saying that because humans can see things in the future (such as a coming flood due to an oncoming weather pattern) and then take preventative action, we are exercising free will in the most meaningful way possible (harm avoidance)–even if we are actually…
Will Power in Finite Supply
An interesting study has just been published in Psychology and Health that shows that when you restrain yourself emotionally you deplete what seems to be a finite amount of will power you have for the day. I think this has interesting implications for people in certain fields, like day trading, or professional gambling. But I repeat myself. No,…
Kindness
One particular post from a thread on kind acts on Reddit: So i’m in a bar, about to order a Guinness, and before i can release the words from my mouth the bartender comes up to me with a dark, rich, full glass of irish goodness, telling me it’s on the house. Before i can ask “how did…
Want: A Disease Based in Low Self-Esteem
Here are three related scenarios: You own the DVD of a good movie, but you never watch it. But if that movie happens to come on TV–even mangled by commercials–you’ll see it the whole way through. Your manager thinks consultants, or maybe a prospective hire that’s not on the team yet, know much more than you–even if there…
Some Thoughts on the Future of IT
I see the cloud as a means by which business units will disentangle themselves from internal IT shops, eventually moving to a model where internal IT equates to one primary component, which are high-power IT experts with exemplary communication skills who serve as proxies between the business unit and outsourced IT services. There will be a small shop…
Liberal and Conservative
Conservatives long for the world of Leave it to Beaver, Christmas Story, and Babe Ruth. A world of everyone looking the same, talking the same, eating the same foods, and enjoying the same sports. Everyone loves Jesus, America, Baseball, and tries to work hard so he can be rich and enjoy well-deserved luxury. A core belief of this…
My Political Philosophy in Two Sentences
I’m not a liberal because I believe it is necessary to implement a number of cold and non-liberal policies to achieve the liberal ideal. I am not a conservative because I seek the liberal ideal. ::
The Three IT Roles: The King, the Sage, and the Cog
I observe three basic types of people working in the IT field: kings, sages, and cogs. The King The king is one who has complete control over how they are going to orient a given IT shop. He creates strategy and manages the implementation of that strategy. Most importantly, he can come up with his own ideas and…
Nmap: Use the –top-ports Option for Both TCP and UDP Simultaneously
I’m a big fan of nmap‘s –top-ports option, which gives you the ability to leverage Fyodor’s latest Internet research on open ports on the Internet. Basically, he scanned most of the Internet and determined which ports are usually open, and he built lists of the top ports for use within nmap. So now instead of saying: nmap -p…
Realtime Search with Google
There’s some cool stuff going on with realtime queries at Google. As you may already know, you can use search options within Google results to filter by date. Using this you can get stuff in large time chunks, like within the past week, or month, or year. And it’s possible to tweak those parameters by simply adding numbers…
Be Like Han
So Han’s walking down the halls of Bespin with his old friend Lando. Leia’s there, and lookin’ good. Han thinks he’s off to dinner – maybe some wine, a little flirting, and then back to the ol’ guest quarters with Her Hotness. But the door opens, and there’s Darth Vader. Han doesn’t look incredulously at Lando; he doesn’t…
Free Will vs. Determinism as the Core of Political Disagreement
Ultimately, there are two primary political belief systems, and they are poorly captured by any label such as liberal, conservative, republican, or democrat. These two designations are far more fundamental than any people normally discussed, and are defined by a single fork in philosophical thought: the question of free will vs. determinism. The two, fundamental political belief systems…
How to Have a Good Debate: Definitions
The majority of conflict within any sufficiently complex debate originates from semantics related to the core terms, e.g. atheist, agnostic, liberal, conservative. The primary goal of one wishing to have a productive discussion should be to isolate this problem before beginning. One method of doing this is to identify the loaded concepts, and to decompress them into their…
The Belief in Supernatural Free Will as a Significant Source of Human Suffering
I just had a possibly interesting idea: what is it that makes it possible for religious people to look at a image on TV of starving people dying in Africa and say, Well, that’s what happens when you reject Christ… ? I believe one answer might be the belief in supernatural free will, i.e. the free will given…
A Simple Technique for Successfully Debating the Ignorant
What follows is my new method of addressing someone who doesn’t create sound arguments during a debate, i.e. those backed by fact, data, or some type of objective evidence. Once you suspect that you’re arguing with someone like this, directly probe to see if they have any evidence whatsoever to support themselves. If they can’t offer any–and especially…
No, It’s Not Just “Those People” Who Current Healthcare is Failing
62% of bankruptcies are from medical bills. Most medical debtors are well educated and middle class. Three quarters of those who filed bankruptcy had health insurance. 62% of bankruptcies are from medical bills. Most medical debtors are well educated and middle class. Three quarters of those who filed bankruptcy had health insurance. 62% of bankruptcies are from medical…
Free Will Again (A Response to a Reddit Question)
In response to this thread on Reddit: — Free will is a necessary delusion. The big bang happened, and then we do things. If true randomness does exist it might rule out absolute determinism, but it still wouldn’t give us any more control over our decisions than if true determinism did exist. Nature + nurture + stimuli =…
From Reddit: An Essay on Why It’s So Hard to Leave Religion
What follows is an excellent piece from Reddit on why leaving a religion can be so incredibly difficult. Here is the original thread, which is followed by some excellent discussion. Here is the post in its entirety, written by Ancient09 of Reddit, for those who don’t like to follow links. — It is generally common for atheists to…
Crowdsourcing Traffic Congestion Data
This is just completely sick. Based on how many people are sending Google anonymous data on their location, Google can now give you congestion data on the streets around you. They do this by constantly calculating the that various people are traveling, and since it knows where you are it can overlay that on a map and get…
The Healthcare Debate is Being Lost Due to Poor Communication
My favorite political blog, FiveThirtyEight.com, just posted a great piece about how most people don’t know what the “public option” is. It’s quite sad, and it’s also the reason the Obama administration is completely losing this battle. The public option is simply a government-backed health insurance plan that people can purchase from if they can’t afford other private…
A Wake-up Call for “Moderate Religion” Apologists
I have debated here at great length the degree of benefit or harm offered to society by religion. My position is that religion–even in its so-called moderate forms–causes more harm to modern society than it offers in return. My argument, in summary, is that religion is the direct cause of significant anti-intellectual sentiment in this country, and that…
Password Reset Mechanisms: The Online Security Threat Nobody’s Talking About
Humans are notoriously poor at weighing risk. We use emotion, rather than reason, to judge what’s truly dangerous, which is why most Americans being afraid of handguns in the home more than swimming pools when it comes to child safety. And it’s the same with online security. People worry about scary hackers penetrating through firewalls and stealing passwords…
From Password Reset Mechanisms to OpenID: A Brief Discussion of Online Password Security
For those not familiar, OpenID is a system that allows you to sign in to multiple websites using one identity. So, rather than have a different username and password for each site, you would just sign into each one using your OpenID credentials. In addition to the convenience this offers, there’s a security benefit in that the websites…
Crimespotting: Crime Data Visualization Done Right
So the mayor of San Francisco (who’ll probably become the new governor after Conan leaves) just released a bunch of new city data for SF. It’s phenomenal. No words–just go. [ San Francisco Crimespotting ]
Extracting Meaning from Emptiness
It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that life and existence are eternally justified. — Nietzsche I saw this quote on Reddit recently, and it resonnated with me. It reminded me of my thoughts on meaning, which basically conclude that meaning is not real, but that pleasure, happiness, and beauty are our best (and perhaps only) replacements for…
Chrome Beating Out IE On My Site
I know that my site, and its readers, are not typical, but still–to have Chrome beating out IE already is an indication of how successful Chrome is going to be in the future. ::
The Worst Sickness of All
I’ve noticed an ailment that a few of my male friends from the South have. This isn’t to say it’s a uniquely Southern thing, but I have yet to notice it in any of my friends from California. It’s so unspeakable that I’ve been putting off writing about it for years, but alas, I feel like it should…
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