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Hang on, Stevens
Though I like his books, I don’t often listen to Al Franken’s radio show; the show makes him seem more like a balance for Rush Limbaugh. That’s really an overstatement, because Franken isn’t a psychotic drug addict who wants to kill people on the other side of the line, but Republicans these day seem to fit into the moderate (John McCain) or extreme (Rush Limbaugh, Tom DeLay, Ann Coulter, etc.) bins with little in between making it hard to find an analog for Franken. Back to the point, though, I listened to The Al Franken show today (Monday’s show via Autocast; the word podcast is a misnomer) and he had a funny bit, featuring a parody song entitled “Hang on Stevens” admonishing the leftmost of the supreme court justices to not relinquish his seat on the bench until after the 2009 inauguration.
In other news, Virtual Threads posted an article yesterday about understanding Linux memory usage which was featured on Slashdot and Digg. Today, he posted an interesting map of where his web hits came from. Pretty cool to look at; I didn’t realize there were so many technology inclined people in the central US.
illwill on Wikipedia
Last night in #2600 there was talk about illwill, who frequents the channel and is going to jail soon for selling the source code to Windows. This was a big enough story that it has been in the news recently, yet there wasn’t a Wikipedia article for him. I created a quick one (only a couple of sentances and a link) yet within the hour it had gone from a simple stub linking to his site, to a full-fledged article. Today, there are nearly 20 edits.
Have I said how much I love Wikipedia?
In this house
Radio Shows
I listen to a lot handful of radio shows that feature call in segments including, 2600’s Off The Hook and TOTN: Science Friday. Allowing listeners to call in is something of a mixed blessing; you get to hear some interesting questions from different viewpoints than that of the host but said views are spoken by people who seem to be completely new to radio. Callers seem to have never listend to the show in question - or any show, for that matter - nor do they exhibit knowledge of how to use a telephone. More often than not, the caller is flabbergasted by the fact that can hear themselves from their mouth, the telephone and the radio simultaneously and proceed to blabber for some time questioning whether they really are on the air. Thereafter, it is standard practice to have a long, drawn out explination of the problem/question, which could have been summed up in one sentance. The caller shall then utterly mis-interpret the answer they were given and attempt to ask the same question, at which point the astute radio host cuts them off.
In conclusion, if you’re going to call in to a radio show, think about what you are going to say, be prepared to say it when chosen and speak clearly.
crypt(3)
Anyone who has used Unix or a derivative for long enough should know of crypt(3), the basic Unix hashing function. Back In The Day, unices used crypt(3) for hashing passwords and It Was Good; computers were once slow enough that DES was an acceptable encryption algorithm even with a limit of 8 characters. Since about the turn of the century (the latest one), any Unix worth it’s salt (heh, crypto pun) offers other options for password encryption, most often MD5. Furthermore, everything I’ve run into, until today, used MD5 passwords by default, though Debian Potato still offered to use crypt(3) and non-shadowed passwords (knowing that came in useful in a cracking competition my freshman year).
Getting to the point, I logged into a Solaris machine that I set up recently and typed the password wrong, but it let me in. At first I was…quite scared. I logged in again, carefully typing the root password and was granted access. I recalled the crypt(3) function…I logged in, typing the first 8 characters carefully and garbage for the rest. I got in. Long story short, Solaris 10 (SunOS 5.10) still uses crypt(3) as the default password encryption. It’s a simple fix, you just change a line in /etc/security/policy.conf, but still sort of apalling none the less.
GOOG is in for a Downhill Ride
Like many people, since the day Google had it’s IPO I was wishing that I could have gotten in on that action. By the end of the month, when the stock continued to rise, I still sort of wished that I had bought some shortly after the IPO, but the thought of “man, $130 for a volatile internet stock? it can’t keep rising,” and yet, it has continued to rise steadily, until this week when rumors of Google being targeted by the DOJ surfaced and GOOG dropped 8% in just two days. The forever-climbing nature of Google’s stock has made it a seemingly viable short-term investment, despite it’s incredible price (nearly $480 at it’s peak last week). I think that this downturn will be the end, though, simply because it has had such massive gain over such a short period, it’s just too volatile.
Pictures from Breckenridge
I went skiing in Breckenridge, Colorado over winter break and while there I climbed above all of the lifts to the summit of Peak 8, 13,000 feet up. I just added the pictures to my gallery. Here’s a picture of the Baldy (that may just be the local name), though it’s hard to convey just how high up the peaks are.
It’s only a few hundred yard hike to the summit since they put in the Imperial Express lift, but because I’m from sea level, it’s a strenuous hike. It’s quite steep, and involves kicking your toes into the packed snow to ascend because it’s so steep.
GPU Fans are for Sissies
The other night, as I was just getting into bed, the fan on my GeForce 3 started making noise. I know it was my GPU because it had been making noise on and off for the past couple of years and no, I hadn’t replaced the fan. Usually hitting the thing quited it down. Unfortunately, such a barbaric solution was unsuccessful; in my wanting-to-sleep stupor, I just ripped the fan off of the stupid round stock heatsink and went back to bed, hoping the thing wouldn’t overheat. It’s been three days since then and the thing is still working fine.
Hillary on Plantations and Cronyism
Yesterday at a Martin Luther King, Jr. day event, Hillary Clinton mades some egregious remarks, only one of which has drawn attention of the media. Had she refrained from comparing the current political state to a plantation, the more politically important statement that she made would have come through loud and clear. I say that her other major point was more important because it really sums up what many people think about the current administration, but few with a voice have had the courage to say,
We have a culture of corruption, we have cronyism, we have incompetence
I predict to you that this administration will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country.
I really wish this quote hadn’t been so overshadowed by the remark about plantations, as she was right on the mark. Sounds like the sort of thing a vice president would say.
GPS Satellites Affected by Relativity
I was reading a Wikipedia article on GPS which made a very good point: given their immense speed, the clocks GPS satellites are affected by relativity. GPS satellites reside in an intermediate earth orbit such that the difference in the speed versus that of the surface of the Earth is quite significant. Due to this great speed difference, the clocks on-board GPS satellites are affected by special (as well as general) relativity and as such differ from a clock on Earth’s surface by about 38 microseconds per day. For anyone who has ever been interested in relativity or quantum theory, this is an amazing example of relativity in a real-life and thoroughly used system.