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Archives for 2011
New PC Setup Steps
There are a few things that are near as matters necessary when getting setting up a new computer. This is the PC version of this article: Linux Tools: install tools so that you can do things like ls and grep without going insane SysInternals Tools: have these available wherever you are in the command line Update your Path:…
New Mac Setup Steps
There are a few things that are near as matters necessary when getting setting up a new computer. This is the Mac version of this article: Install customized shell files Homebrew: get all your opensource packages via the command line RVM: keep your Ruby enviornment up to date and pivot between versions Little Snitch: see where your traffic…
Hitchens vs. Strunk and White
I am quite curious how top tier writers square the circle of Strunk and White’s demand for being concise and avoiding long, complex sentences, and Hitchens’ ability and inclination to do so beautifully. An example from a Hitchens essay: I have heard arguments about whether it was Milton Friedman or Gore Vidal who first came up with this…
An HTML 5 Christmas
It’s Christmas day and I just happened upon a post by the Google Webmaster team talking about removing the HTML, HEAD, and BODY tags from their code, as they are evidently no longer necessary. I started looking at their code (particularly for their 404 pages), and it was very interesting. It’s a few minutes later now and most…
A Collection (of Collections) of Obama’s Accomplishments
This next year is going to yield many debates on what our current President has or has not accomplished in his first term. Here’s a collection (of lists) of what he has accomplished. http://obamaachievements.org/listA seriously comprehensive list of accomplishments, by category. PolitiFact Promises Kept ListingA phenomenally unbiased list of promises and statements made by Obama, with analysis of…
Who Makes the Best Web Security Testers?
There’s been some debate in my circles recently on the topic of what type of person and background makes the best web security tester. The issue is that web testing involves and requires a number of skills. It includes performing a staggering number of monotonous actions according to a methodology, as well as being able to use deduction…
Plane Crashes and Child Molestation
In one of Malcolm Gladwell’s books he talked about how respect for authority has caused a massive number of plane crashes over time. Basically, the relationship between a senior and junior pilot was so severe in many countries that the co-pilot (junior) knew that his effective boss could bury him in an instant, and so he walked extremely…
Why Christopher Hitchens Inspires Me
News of Christopher Hitchens’ death was crushing to me last night. I can think of no other author that is so inspiring to me. Here are a few simple reasons why: Reading, or listening to, his prose makes me a better writer. His skill with language was simply magical. I can listen to him speak for hours upon…
Observations of Japan
I had the opportunity to go to Tokyo, Japan for a week this month for work and while there I kept a running list of observations. I was able to commute to work on the subway, which I found quite fun. First, my observations: the Japanese are extremely orderly; everything is very neat and clean Japanese men are…
Three Proxy Options Every Security Pro Should Consider Using
Working in the information security field it’s frequently handy to be able to browse the web in different configurations. Sometimes you want to be able to see and interact with our traffic we speak with a server, sometimes you want to hide where we’re coming from on the other end, and other times we need to bypass a…
A Potential Issue With Immersive Fantasy Games
I’ve been a role-player since junior high school, and I have been a reader of non-fiction long before that. I have a group of friends from junior high that still game (role-playing), and I noticed over the last couple of years that there was something very negative about it for me. I haven’t been able to capture it…
Stereotypes as a Wisdom Metric
I had a thought this week regarding metrics for gauging overall life wisdom. If you had only one question to ask, what would you ask in order to estimate the overall wisdom of a person? Here’s a possible candidate: What do you think about stereotypes? Are they true, false, or somewhere between? I see clear maturity levels in…
The Worst Way to Waste Time
There are many things to regret as one nears death, but I understand people tend to regret most the things they didn’t do rather than those they did. You may be thinking now of activities, such as jumping out of an airplane, applying to become an astronaut, or moving to Europe to be with an early lover. But…
Mechanical Turk vs. CAPTCHA: An InfoSec Lesson
I’ve always hated the “THING is dead. Long live the THING” cliché, but I’m going to use it here for CAPTCHA. CAPTCHA raises the cost of attacking something, which improves its security. It’s that simple. The question is simply how much you raised the cost vs. the dedication and resources of the attacker. For a random, uninteresting blog,…
Handling Redirects with Varnish and Nginx
[ NOTE: I am now using Nginx for everything, i.e. not using Varnish anymore, and getting the same or better results. ] I run Varnish here on the site, with Nginx as the backend. I’ve written before about my overall setup, and how to improve site performance, so I won’t go into it here. Here I want to…
The Other Half of Online Education
We’re all well aware of the growing list of high-quality universities offering free online classes. It’s remarkable by any measure. But we also know the counter-argument: you don’t receive near the benefit from free online education that you get from attending university because much of the benefit comes from being forced to go to class, to take exams,…
Recording and Replaying Experiences
One of the things I worry about most is not being able to recall the great experiences that have happened to me over time. It’s not about forgetting that I went to the beach in Israel that one time, or any other highlight event. Those types of events should be captured as well, of course, but I am…
A Civilization Manifesto
This will be rough. I’ve always been attracted to the idea of identifying unifying characteristics of desired society, and defining those ideals as sacred to the group that embraces them. The Constitution does this, of course, but it deals with principals where I aim to talk about behaviors. I come to this from decades of observing dissimilar people…
Visualizing Interesting Log Events Using Splunk’s Google Maps Application
I never stop being fascinated by the fact that web admins have boxes online that anyone in the world can reach out and touch. Visualizing this activity is enthralling to me, as visualization often highlights answers to existing questions while exposing new ones. Geolocated firewall drops within the last 4 hours [ Fullsize image. ] Splunk excels at…
10 Ways to Test Your Website Performance
So you’ve replaced Apache with Nginx, or put Varnish out in front of your main webserver. Or maybe you just spent time converting all your main site images to CSS Data URLs. Either way, you’re now ready to taste the fruits of your work via speed tests. Here are some of the best resources for doing that. Google…
How I See Class
I recently read perhaps the best book ever written on the American class system, and it set me to thinking quite a bit about the subject. First, I put this together as a capture location for what I learned. Then I began to process it. The concepts listed there are appealing to me for a very basic reason:…
Time Spent Not Reading Books is Time Wasted
I’m starting to think that most of the time I’m not reading books I’m not spending my time optimally. Naturally, this doesn’t include time spent with friends and such, but rather time that I’m supposedly “gaining information” by other means. So, reading news, feeds, and pretty much anything else I can find on the Internet is all decent,…
Linkclump for Web Testing
Anyone who does web security testing knows that the browser is the most important tool in the arsenal. Scanners are nice and can help save time, but no technology is the equal of manually making requests to a page while passing through a good proxy. Linkclump is a Chrome extension (you are using Chrome, right?) for selecting multiple…
October 2011 Mobile Stats
iOS accounted for approximately 66% of all mobile visits to my site in October. Android had about 30%, and the other four precent were those wishing they were the first two. I can’t wait to see how this plays out over the next 24 months. ::
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