Home › Blog ›

It's Just this Little Chromium Switch Here

Weblogging and commentary by Chip Rosenthal

JournalCon Wrap-Up

Submitted by chip on Thu, 23-Oct-2003 - 2:05 pm
in

I've posted my JournalCon wrap-up elsewhere, as a guest entry on somebody else's journal. If you haven't seen it, would like to and can't figure out where it is, drop me an email and I'll tell you.

JournalCon Weekend

Submitted by chip on Fri, 17-Oct-2003 - 6:48 am
in

JournalCon 2003It's hard to believe it was almost three months ago I was fretting about registering for JournalCon. It's finally here and a lot has happened during that time. I've been asked to be a panelist on blog and journal technology. I'm running the conference webcam. Oh, and I fell in love with one of the conference organizers.

My only regret is that the IEEE is having a Globalization and Technology conference today. I really wanted to attend that. Globalization will have to wait for another time. Today, I need to go drink many margaritas with the journal writers.

I'm Ready for my Cam Closeup

Submitted by chip on Wed, 15-Oct-2003 - 3:07 pm
in

sample webcam imageI've been researching USB cams for Linux. I've got a spiffy webcam running now, but a little head scratching and hair pulling occurred along the way. I thought I'd document some of what I learned.

A Tale of Two Auto Shops

Submitted by chip on Fri, 10-Oct-2003 - 6:10 pm
in

The little red brake light was going blinky, blinky. Last time I saw one of those it involved pads and turned rotors and hundreds of dollars. I was getting the cold sweats over this.

Apology to my Spam Victims

Submitted by chip on Tue, 07-Oct-2003 - 3:22 pm
in

Last Friday was not a good day. 72,996 AOL users were spammed from my mail server. I'm not talking about one of those incidents where my domain was forged into spam sent from Korea. I'm talking full frontal stupidity: crappy code and lazy administration allowed a spammer to pirate my mail server. This may be the most embarrassing incident in my professional career.

Verisign: Documenting the Damage

Submitted by chip on Tue, 30-Sep-2003 - 7:00 pm
in

Link: Consequences of Putting Wildcards in .NET and .COM.

Why are so many people pissed that Verisign broke the DNS? The initial anger was that a fundamental assumption of Internet operations was violated. How that manifests itself takes time to show. The linked page documents the wide swarth of damage Verisign has caused. And the list is still growing. I saw a mailing list message earlier today that dicussed the problems Verisign created for some applications that use SOAP.

Restrain Verisign

Submitted by chip on Sun, 28-Sep-2003 - 2:36 pm
in

I wrote previously how Verisign broke the Internet by boinking up the Domain Name System (DNS). The move has been met by universal opposition. ICANN, the organization that oversees the Internet DNS, has asked them to stop. The Internet Architecture Board has published a detailed technical analysis of the problems created by this. The Internet Software Consortium, which publishes the software that operates a significant portion of the DNS, has issued a patch that filters out the Verisign corruption.

NAT Breaks the Net

Submitted by chip on Thu, 25-Sep-2003 - 2:08 pm
in

I'm currently sitting on the back porch of the Bouldin Creek Coffee House (motto: South Austin-style service without the sense of urgency), catching up on some email and work. Using the ssh secure protocol I can tunnel back to the network in my apartment and work as if I was sitting right there in my skivvies and bunny slippers.

Well, almost.

Barf!

Submitted by chip on Wed, 24-Sep-2003 - 12:29 am
in

Late night carousing can wear a person down. I'm not looking for the rarefied atmosphere of some swanky Warehouse District martini bar. I just don't want to be completely grossed out by a night on the town.

I've written before about my support for a no smoking ordinance. I still like that idea, but I'm beginning to think what this town needs more than anything else is a no barfing ordinance. What's the deal with all the Sixth Street and Red River bars that smell like you're sitting in a puddle of stale vomit?

Happy Unwiring Day

Submitted by chip on Fri, 19-Sep-2003 - 3:04 pm
in

Today is the day I finally cast off my Ethernet cables. I got wireless networking running on wiener.

Wiener is an old Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop. It dual-boots Windows 98 and Mandrake Linux 9.1, primarily Mandrake. Everybody kept telling me how easy it is to do wireless networking on Linux: you just plug it in and everything automagically happens. Unfortunately, all that ever happened for me was groans and moans.

Then, thanks to Google, I discovered this was a known problem with the Inspiron. This article pointed me to the fix. Once that was applied, everything fell into place.

I brought up the pcmcia subsystem and prepared for my slog through the manuals to figure out the networking configuration. Turns out the darn thing just configured itself, found a network and connected right up to it. Dare I say that once setup, Linux wireless networking is even easier to manage than Windows XP.