It's Friday, so it's time for Friday Fun: The High School Edition

1. What was your high school decade?

I went to high school in the Nineties.

2. Are you still friends with your high school friends?

You assume that all people that go to high school make friends there. Yes, I did have a number of acquaintances among my classmates, but no, I've long since lost touch with them.

3. What was your favorite thing about high school?

The teachers.

4. Your least favorite?

The other students.

5. Did you have a high school sweetheart? And how did that work out?!

Yeah, I wish. But it probably would have been a disaster anyway.

6. Would you do the whole high school thing again, or is it better left in the past?!

Yeah, right.
"Are you our substitute teacher?"
"No, I'm a new student."

(scoff) "Ew!"

Let's start this week's Link-O-Rama with a video of “The Luke,” an amazing new prosthetic arm. The Luke's “test pilot” reported that, with the device, he can now do many things he hadn't been able to do for twenty-six years. It's designed to be controlled by whatever method is most applicable, whether that's by foot switch or nervous interface.

Cobra Commander is on the move, according to Thai authorities. He seems only to be in the bank robbery phase of his insane scheme for now, but taking over the world can't be too far off.

A New York museum is featuring a Wall of Condoms as part of a new exhibit. “No one really has time to look at condoms as design objects, so we placed them on internally lighted, um, ‘members’ to show off their ‘inner beauty,’” explains James Biber, designer of the exhibit.

It's Friday, so it's time for Friday Fun: Clotheshound Edition

1. Do you have to dress for work? If so, what is your “uniform”?

A pair of boring cotton slacks or khakis and an equally boring button-down shirt. In other words, your typical tech's outfit.

2. How would you describe your style when dressing for yourself, rather than work?

Blue jeans and a tee-shirt, typically, a black tee-shirt. In other words, your typical hacker's outfit.

3. I have noticed that there seem to be two kinds of dressers in the winter months. Those who love turtlenecks and those that abhor them! Which are you?!

A turtleneck? Here? Are you crazy?

4. It’s lounging time on the couch in the evening. What are you wearing?

Old and soft tee shirt and shorts. In other words, what most of you probably also wear in that situation.

5. Describe your favorite “feel good” outfit!

I don't have a favorite, but I feel pretty good in the answers for #2 and #4, mainly because it means I'm not in #1.

Has it really been three (or more) days since I posted something (that was meaningful?) My dear blog, please accept my apologies for this act of gross negligence. I'll make it up to you. You'll see! I'll tell you funny stories, and draw you funny pictures. I know you're tired of memes and token Link-o-Rama posts. You'll see no more than one of each per week, unless I'm really out of ideas. Will I take a big black marker and draw a big black moustache on my boss and then tell you why I'd be happy to vote for Obama? Yes, and soon. Will I tell you how I ate a piece of toast and then brushed my teeth?

No, but I will definitely tell you if someone throws an octopus at my window.

The other night, I had an unusually vivid dream....

I was aboard the Death Star as an undercover Rebel spy, on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star. I downloaded the plans from the central computer onto a microdot and hid the microdot among some papers. I just had to wait until my accomplices completed their own missions, and then we would all escape together. However, one of them was caught, and the Imperials knew there were spies in their midst.

I was visited by my Imperial boss, a black-uniformed officer, as I was looking for the microdot in preparation to escape. He saw it at the same time I did. "That looks like a Rebel microdot!" He grabbed sheet of paper that the microdot was attached to. I tried to tear the page, so that I could keep the part with the microdot. It didn't work.

"Obviously, I have to knock him out and take the microdot back," I thought. So I swung at him, but he was a little too far away.

"When I punch someone, I do it like this," he said, demonstrating on empty air.

Then I took another swing at him and knocked him out cold. I took the microdot back, disguised myself as a stormtrooper, and escaped.

... It's a litile long, but I think I'll try sending it to Slow Wave.

You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps

Topncal writes:

Why did you choose your blog platform? It is not one of the top 10 or 15 systems. So how did you find it? I checked out the page for it a few weeks ago. Nothing really stood out to me as making it different. So I guess it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on why you chose it.

I don't remember exactly where I discovered Thingamablog, although I do know approximately when I did so. I uncovered a bookmark for Thingamablog in a stratum of bookmarks dating from 2004-5. I suspect that I was combing the likes of linuxlinks.com and icewalkers.com for Wiki software and happened upon Thingamablog by accident. I tried it out, thought I'd make my own template from scratch, got really bored with that, and forgot about it for a while.

A little later, an old classmate of mine started a blog of his own, which encouraged me to do the same. Sure, I could have just joined LiveJournal, etc., but to me that would have just been my account at somebody else's site. A grouchy sysop could capriciously, conceivably, delete my account-- and that would be end of my fun. Also, if I didn't like the service, it wouldn't exactly be easy to move my stuff to elsewhere, as I'm sure you may know.

Anyway, since this was going to be strictly for fun, I had no desire to involve a hosting company, and my ISP had no desire to allow me to run a public Web server in my living room. They were willing to let me upload a few old-fashioned pure-HTML pages to their Personal Web Space.

So, I needed a blogging platform that would not only run client-side and output static HTML, but that could do so on my Linux desktop. As it turned out, Thingamablog fit that requirement pretty well. It's written in Java, so the code's very portable, and since the output is ordinary HTML, that's portable, too. So if, for example, I get annoyed with my current hosting provider, I can pack up and leave in a clap of the hands. And there's no chance of anybody getting cute with stupid SQL injection tricks, PHP inclusion, or parameter fuzzing, because none of that's applicable. This isn't to say it's not possible for someone to deface this site, it's just a little less likely... and if they did, it would be overwritten the next time I published.

Is Thingamablog perfect? No. In fact, the editor in the current version has some sort of memory leak or something that causes it to become decidedly unresponsive. Also, the way it handles the category archives leaves a bit to be desired. I have to contract out commenting and site search to HaloScan and Google, respectively. I don't think I'll trade up to a server-side solution any time soon, but I think that if I did, I'd bypass WordPress and Movable Type altogether in favor of a full-fledged Content Management System such as Joomla, although I hear good things about Drupal, too.

Yesterday:

Today:

"By Wednesday it will be August, and by Thursday it will be the end of existence as we know it!"

Friday is upon us once again. It's time for Friday Fun: Gaming Edition

1. What was your favorite outside childhood game? Kick the Can, Ghost in the Graveyard, etc.?

I've never heard of Ghost in the Graveyard, but if it had rules and/or points, I wasn't interested. I could (and did) skip tag, kickball, tetherball, red rover, hopscotch, and jump-rope. I was more of a Spaceman Spiff sort of boy.

2. How about board games? Do you have a favorite?

I've enjoyed just about every game I've tried from both Cheapass Games and Looney Labs: Fluxx, Witch Trial, Nano-Fictionary, Kill Doctor Lucky, etc. They're fun, and they don't take hours to set up and play. Anybody want to organize a Game Night?

3. Do you play any PC games? Online or offline? If so, what is your favorite? If not, is there one out there you want to try?

Not so much any more. I've tried a few online games, City of Heroes having been my favorite, but I think I'm pretty much over the whole online thing. As for "offline" games, I was a big fan of LucasArts adventures, like Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Mix Hit The Road. That's why I'd like to try Sam and Max, Season One.

4. Gaming stations,… there are so many out there and I know jack about them! Do you have one or more and which ones? XBox, XBox 360, Playstation, etc.?

All of the above, as well as a PS2 and a GBA. I hardly touch any of them, except for the 360, and even that's not very often. It's not that I don't like swarms of goblins, assassinations, and the Dark Side of the Force, it's just that most of my time is now spent in other pursuits. Maybe the situation would be different if the 360 had a game involving giant Anime robots...

Q. I've set up a shiny new SSL server (Apache) but now Firefox keeps saying "could not establish an encrypted connection because the certificate presented has an invalid signature." I know my certificate hasn't expired. So what's up?

A. Check your httpd.conf. If your SSL server is configured in its own Virtual Hosts section, ensure that the ServerName parameter exactly matches the common name listed in the certificate itself. For example, if the certificate is issued to www.example.com, ensure that the line is ServerName www.example.com.

You can't, by the way, use SSL with name-based virtual hosts, only IP-based virtual hosts. This is because the SSL connection is established before the HTTP request is made, and it is the HTTP request that identifies to the server which name-based virtual host the client is attempting to contact. You can continue to serve your non-secure pages from a name-based virtual host, and begin serving your secure pages from an IP-based virtual host, but because these two hosts will need to have different IP addresses, they'll also need to have different hostnames, such as www.example.com and secure.example.com. Of course, this will only work properly if you've had the foresight to issue a certificate to secure.example.com. If not, and all you've got is a certificate issued to www.example.com, then you'll need to serve both secure and non-secure pages from the same IP-based virtual host.

You're The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!

by Douglas Adams

Considered by many to be one of the funniest people around, you are quite an entertainer. You've also traveled to the far reaches of what you deem possible, often confused and unsure of yourself. Life continues to jostle you around like a marble, but it's shown you so much of the world that you don't care. Wacky adventures continue to lie ahead. Your favorite number is 42.

Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Since I'm feeling uninspired, let's do the meme book edition

1. Pick up the nearest book.

It's Shiny Adidas Track Suits And The Death Of Camp by Various.

2. Open it at page 123.

Uhm... Ta-da!

3. Find the fifth sentence/ phrase.

There are only two complete sentences on this page. You'll have to settle for that.

4. Blog the next four sentences/ phrases together with these instructions.

I haven't read this book yet, so I've no idea of the context, myself:

The Yamaha Indians of Bolivia have a word for this kind of thing—pachakuti, the disruption of the universe. But pachakuit also implies the inherent resumption of cosmic order—nayrapachar—which, as the sun rose out of the plane's window, seemed nowhere in sight.

5. Don't you dare dig your shelves for that very special or intellectual book.

You mean Practical UNIX & Internet Security? Wouldn't dream of it...

The shell escape is left over from the days before UNIX had job control.

6. Pass it forward to six friends.

Yeah, that worked so brilliantly the last time I tried it, you'd think I was warning them that the Internet would be down for maintenance for 24 hours between March 30 and April 2. Instead, I'll leave it open for participation by anybody in particular, so long as you leave a comment with a link to your post.

Q: I've seen a lot of the following in my DenyHosts log. What the heck is this?

ERROR    regex pattern ( User (?P<user>.*) not allowed because not listed in AllowUsers ) is missing 'host' group

A: Ah, yes, DenyHosts. This is a Python script that examines your system logs for failed SSH login attempts. It will add the IP addresses of offending systems to your system's hosts.deny file, more or less blacklisting them. While this alone probably won't stop a determined attacker, it will at least stop automated dictionary attacks from cluttering up your system log.

As for the error message, it seems to be complaining that one of the regular expressions that DenyHosts uses to analyze the system logs is missing a little something. Fortunately, you can redefine any of these regexes by appending the appropriate line to your denyhosts.cfg file. For example, to redefine the regex that's causing this message, you could add a line like this:

FAILED_ENTRY_REGEX7=User (?P<user>.*?) from (::ffff:)?(?P<host>\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}) not allowed because not listed in AllowUsers

Welcome to this week's Link-O-Rama!

The first item for consideration is a robot which pantomimes the dreams of the human interfaced with it. It has been trained to recognize patterns of brainwaves which represent "flying," "scared," "moonwalking," etc.

Next, some Dutch scientists think they've figured a way to use roads as solar panels. The energy-absorbing properties of asphalt can be used to generate power for cooling buildings in the summer, and the network of tubing can be used to de-ice roads in winter. The only catch is that a source of cold water is required in summer and a source of hot water is required in winter.

Finally, we have something which some of you have probably seen before. However, it so delights my sense of the absurd that I'm posting it anyway. A woman ordered a wedding cake made in her likeness. Somehow, I don't think the bride thought this completely through, as I'm sure the bizarre symbolism present in the serving of the life-sized pâtisserie proved unsettling to all present.

Now he only eats guitars