[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Plaid's LiveJournal:
- 10:40 @encapsulate I think it's the same reason some vegans get all riled up about meatatarians: Just for something to do. #
| Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 | |
| 9:58 pm | My XBox 360 has started givin' me shit. Afeter just a few minutes of run time, suddenly it looks like somebody ran the output through a posterize filter in Photoshop or something. All of a sudden it looks like about 6-bit color. Really really bad six bit color. Go on a little longer, and it might go away, as suddenly as it came. Or the output might get all streaky, and jittery. (Never loses vertical or horizontal lock. It's strictly in the graphics. I called Microsoft, and they ran me through all the shit I'd already tried (swapping cables, swapping inputs (including from HDMI to component) and concluded that my logic board needs to be replaced. It's out of warranty, though, so it's $100 to repair. With two kids' birthdays this month, Amber's deceased Zune (seriously, what's with Microsoft products in our house?) which is gonna cost $140 to repair, which I realllly don't want to pay, and christmas coming up ... fuck. I need my 360! |
| Monday, September 29th, 2008 | |
| 5:30 pm | An opaque bailout by buying the shitty debt from the floundering creditors isn't a reasonable answer to our current economic difficulty. It doesn't bring any accountability to Wall Street, and it doesn't provide any risk protection for the tax payers. If the market continues to decline after the bailout (and it will), taxpayers will continue to take it in the shorts. I'm more inclined to ask for FDIC seizures, buy-ups of equity (gov buys specially-provisioned stock and bonds in struggling companies) along with the increased oversight that would bring, and increased judicial review powers for bankruptcy courts. This last item would allow debtors to keep their homes at reduced prices, creditors write-down the loss, and the loan is no longer "toxic". The difference in valuation would first eat any equity (or a percentage of it, based on the percentage of devaluation). Everybody loses something, but nobody loses everything. None of these ideas are new or unique. They come from earlier bank failures, from New Deal economics, etc. I do realize it would be time consuming to set up. I don't think a completely opaque infusion of $250B or more into saving a handful of fat, illiquid creditors is a reasonable solution, though. Oh, wait, I already said that. Me, I say, let 'em crash! The fact that the bailout is still up in the air is one of the reasons that credit is essentially frozen right now. No creditor is going to be willing to sell their toxic debts for 20 or 50 cents on the dollar, if they think the gov is right around the corner from buying it at 70 or 80 cents on the dollar. If the bailout fails to pass, though, sure, the securities collapse some more, but the credit industry goes from being "frozen in fear" to merely "illiquid" once again, immediately. I know the typical voter has trouble grasping this, and the big industry execs don't want to lose everything (which they will if the bailout doesn't come), but damn it, the industry needs to pay it's own way, especially since it got itself here out of sheer greed. I've heard the arguments that the government forced the banks into some of the subprime lending with the CRA, but I don't think those arguments hold a lot of weight. There's the people who blame the government for not regulating enough... but should the government really need to tell lenders to invest wisely? Read the last two paragraphs of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_ A fundamental problem is the pervasive cultural idea that credit equals wealth. But even that is arguably at the hands of the financial industry. It leads from booming economy post WWII, followed by decreasing growth, which the financial industry countered by marketing the whole idea that credit = growth! "Why save up? We can loan you the money for your desires now!" We can look at the idea of "predatory lending" which at first sounds like a misnomer... after all, the consumer should know what they're getting into. But there's the whole lemon market thing there.... knowledge of the credit industry is asymmetrical... consumers are much less likely to have a reasonable understand of what they're getting themselves into, and decide to trust the mortgage brokers. Many of whom, turns out, aren't so trustworthy. http://www.dansdata.com/gz086.htm (lemon market and asymmetry) http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081013/s finally: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/2 Ironically, the first is just an article on "don't buy shitty power supplies" with a good summary of lemon markets in the intro. Also, please to be noting, I agree with almost nothing, politically, in that last article. One final thing that I don't like about the bailout... where is the money really coming from? Does the fed have that kind of liquidity on hand? They have cash accounts to the amount of up to $700B? Or is it just paper? Virtual? Are they just leveraging future income into contemporaneous cash? If it's not real, hard cash equivalents, they're monetizing NOTHING. Which will measurably dilute the value of the dollar again. Hello inflation. My brother supposes that they'll issue treasury bonds, "which China will gleefully purchase." Even worse, then! If they sell treasury bonds on this, it's not even taxpayer debt. They're relying on profits from the bailout; and if the bailout doesn't turn a profit in the t-bill spread they issue, the funding will come out of the taxpayers asses in the future... WITH INTEREST. You know who else would buy those T-bills? The same companies that got us in this shit to begin with. Some of the cash resources they have on hand need to be protected in quality low-yield, low-risk instruments. They'll buy T-bills with it. Me, I'd rather they just accrue the debt internally, and pay themselves interest on it over the next four years, and have budgetary repayment schedules for the next four years. At least that way, we're not further indebted to foreign countries... Essentially, the fed loans it to itself! It's crazy! It's just making money out of nothing, with a four year repayment plan, paid out of taxpayer asses! It's like naked short selling: where you sell something that you don't own, and haven't even got in your possession, and don't even actually give it to the buyer! In the case of naked shorting, the shares that you haven't actually sold (but received money for) are called "phantom shares". These phantom shares dilute the value of the real shares while they exist. The government could create $700B out of thin air paid out through the fed, with it being repaid into the fed over a course of four or five years, by a combination of profits on the shitty debts they acquired, and by taxes! It's like virtual particles in quantum mechanics. Normally, phantom particles don't actually provably exist, because they're not there long enough, and don't interact with anything. But in this case, the banking industry is like a black hole. The virtual particles are created in pairs (as always), but some of it gets sucked temporarily into the black hole. The other particle is emitted away from the event horizon. Eventually, via evaporation, the black hole will shrink, and then be too small to be stable, and BANG, all our money comes shooting back out like a huge explosion! (Please to be noting that for large enough black holes, evaporation may take longer than the rest of the universe exists.) |
| Friday, September 19th, 2008 | |
| 5:25 pm | Headline: "Bush says economy stable despite financial crisis." That's true. Because dead is usually pretty stable. |
| 9:38 am | Happy anniversary to my amazing wife, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} kimie, without whom, my life would be incomplete.I love you baby! |
| Thursday, September 18th, 2008 | |
| 8:58 am | According to the Today show this morning, "Plaid is back! Plaid is IN!" Woohoo! I'm relevant again! |
| Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 | |
| 4:40 pm | The latest failures and the nigh-impending demise in the banking and investment industry seems all too familiar. Anybody remember the LDC debt crisis of the early 80s? How about the S&L failures in the late 80s? In the LDC crisis, hundreds of billions of dollars were lent by US commercial banks to the governments of less-developed countries (thus, "LDC"). The interest rates were high, in some cases absurdly high, because the risks were high. It was very possible that the borrowers wouldn't be able to make payments on time, or occasionally... at all. The banks came screaming in from all sides, passing out money in hopes of getting even more back. And when international economies started to feel the crunch, borrowers refused to repay. And banks, unable now, to make their own payments to their depositors and lenders, collapsed. In the late 80s, companies were practicing a new kind of predatory business called "the leveraged buyout." They would issue a fuck-ton of bonds to make enough money to buy a competitor. Investors would buy the bonds, hoping that the buyout would be successful. Because if it wasn't, the bonds were nearly or totally worthless. To attract buyers despite the risk, the bonds had high interest rates. So when big companies found themselves struggling after leveraging themselves to the hilt in order to buy their largest competitor, bonds would fail to get repaid. And investors suffered. You know who bought the majority of those bonds? Savings & Loans. Thus, the S&L crash of the late 80s. Here we are again. It's 2008, and for the last decade or so, bankers have watched as real-estate prices climbed, and everybody wanted their slice. Since everybody wanted their slice, bankers wanted their slice of everybody else's slice. They started offering loans to people who, in their better judgment, perhaps they shouldn't have. Rates could be higher, structures could be less kind to the borrower, etc. Regardless, the profits made the risks seem worthwhile to the banks, would, once again, over-extended themselves. And once again, economic downturn would come along, and down came the house of cards again. |
| Monday, September 15th, 2008 | |
| 4:58 pm | If I were to restart WoW, what should I play? I don't know that I want to continue with my 50-something Druid. After reading the last few patch notes and the current data on the druid, it just reaffirms what I was already thinking: Jack of all trades, master of none. The druid can do a bit of everything, which is nice in a pinch, but you're always picked last for dodgeball and Molten Core, because if they can have an honest to god DPS or tank, they'll always pick that one. On the other hand, that makes the druid fairly good for soloing. Druid: Nerf of all trades. |
| 4:01 pm | God DAMN it! Rick Wright died! |
| Sunday, September 14th, 2008 | |
| 11:15 pm | |
| Monday, September 8th, 2008 | |
| 1:15 pm | Help! I'm having stronger and stronger urges to start playing Warcraft again. |
| Monday, September 1st, 2008 | |
| 2:46 pm | While visiting Home Depot today, I saw the new Audi A4 sitting at the curb near the exit, dressed all in black. Damn, that is a beautiful car. The pictures really don't do it justice. I think some of it may be the sense of scale, that's missing in the pics. |
| Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 | |
| 10:06 pm | Twit this! |
| Monday, August 25th, 2008 | |
| 4:38 pm | A while back, I bought a decent tripod to take with me for shooting the kids' school stuff. (I've got a really nice long zoom, but combine 300mm focal length with the focal length scaling caused by the APS-size sensor, I can get some great zooms and it becomes a pretty fast lens... but not fast enough to counter the huge shake such a big lens brings) But shooting on a tripod from the bleachers and stuff is a huge pain in the ass. Monopods are generally more convenient for moving from place to place, not to mention shooting from vared terrain. So I bought one. I picked up a TrekPod II. It's a remarkable piece of hardware, usable as a hiking staff, monopod and tripod, and was all of $110. Highly recommended. The stability you get from a good monopod rivals an inexpensive tripod, and this is BOTH. Now I just need a nice fast wide zoom. I spotted a gorgeous 10-20mm rectilinear for $600 yesterday. Oh yeah. I also need to find a way to afford my expensive hobby. I turned computers into a well paying job. Maybe I can put photography to work for me too. |
| Monday, August 18th, 2008 | |
| 8:59 pm | Six days in mexico. A four day weekend at home. I'm SO not ready to go back to work tomorrow. Another day or two of sitting around and doing nothing much would be greatly appreciated. I need more video game time. A day to mow the lawn. Install the new gate latch. See about fixing the shed door. Etc. |
| Saturday, August 9th, 2008 | |
| 9:45 pm | Ahahahahaha, awesome! Those of you who read me, but not Kim, do not know that Kim won us an incredible stay at a five star resort in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. We're at the Fairmont Mayakoba, and it's amazing here. It's a huge resort of suites and condos on 300 acres of "reclaimed" mangrove. (I say "reclaimed" because I think there was nothing wrong with the original mangrove...) However, in turning it into a resort, they've re-established mangrove plantings and lagoons on well over half of the territory, and enourage the wildlife to thrive. This means there's plenty of iguanas, geckos, and damnable mosquitos. The facility is gorgeous, and the key point of everything here seems to be relaxation and friendly people. The service is the best I've encountered in the US or abroad. The food is amazing. The rooms... well, Kimie and I will post pictures of the rooms later. It's all amazing marble and mahogany. The beach is a short walk up the path, or an even shorter ride by electric golf-cart, which run constantly up and back during the day. There's four or five pools, four restaurants, three bars, and even a little convenience shop in the center of the resort. No minibars, but they do provide in-room fridges, and you can shop at the store and bring it back. Or they can deliver. The downside, is that since this is a five star resort, in a town of five star resorts, everything is bloody expensive. We paid the equivalent of $160/lb for lamb for dinner last night. It was amazing lamb, but rather expensive, too. It's so beautiful here, though... |
| Friday, August 8th, 2008 | |
| 6:47 am | We're leavin' on a jet plane! |
| Thursday, August 7th, 2008 | |
| 10:47 am | posting from my iPhone! |
| Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 | |
| 4:43 pm | A more geeky, less user-friendly continuation With modern security and technology properly utilized, enterprise and residential wireless networks can be moderately secure. The two predominant forms of encryption are both good, although TKIP does have some well-known weaknesses, and WPA-AES carries some legacy flaws. Use of up-to-date 802.11i is believed to predominantly secure. PSK modes of both WPA and 802.11i are both vulnerable to brute-force attacks on the passcode keyspace, of course, like any other static, shared secret authentication system. 802.1x and RADIUS can be leveraged to significantly increase the validity of authentication and the security of the encryption. With strong enough EAP types, we are given mutual authentication based on cryptographically strong certificates, and higher quality material for the per-device encryption keys. Even this isn't perfect, however. RADIUS and certain EAP types may be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, leaving the possibility of an attacker replacing a trusted AP with a hacked AP. We can reduce this threat by using 802.1x on the port where the AP attaches to the network, requiring the AP itself to authenticate with the network. (Some switch models may not properly support carrying extra EAP traffic over an already-authenticated 802.1x port, though.) We can reduce the threat further by using one of the many light-weight access-point network models currently available. Most LWAP implementations have strong authentication and encryption over the wire between the AP and the controller. This all assumes you can trust your LWAP controllers, though... Can we really trust anyone? I digress, though. There's a relatively unmitigated threat that exists, and tends to be on the mind of most network engineers who work with wireless: rogue APs. As the engineers responsible with taming these security issues, we need to be aware of the two real issues at heart: The hackers, and our users. Hackers may position rogue APs on our wired network, or off our network. If we have the infrastructure, we attempt to mitigate the rogue AP threat through RADIUS, eliminating weak passcodes. But an industrious hacker can place a rogue AP and his own RADIUS server and attempt to snoop some credentials. Will our users properly recognize and handle the radius and/or certificate errors that pop up if it happens? Security really is more than just our problem. It is the systems team's problem, too. It's the manager's problem. It's the user's problem. But very few people outside of networks and systems are prepared to face the problem. We must educate them, whenever possible, about the threats they face; how to identify the breaches when they occur; and the most effective way of mitigating and communicating the breaches when they identify them. Until then, we do what we can with what we've got. |
| 4:18 pm | A geek post, tailored for the non-geeky An open threat exists in the network engineers mind. Wireless security, or more precisely, the lack of it. Wireless networks have become a simple fact of life for most corporate, not to mention home, networks. Because we can't control the spread of the signal that is supposed to be ubiquitous within our facilities (and that we wished was non-existant outside of our facilities), we rely on authentication and encryption to protect our network from hackers and snoopers. When we talk about authentication, we mean the way the network identifies who should or shouldn't be allowed to connect to the wireless network. Authentication also determines who learns the information needed to properly decipher our transmitted data. Encryption is the way data is protected from passive eavesdroppers. By mixing the raw data with secret and ever-changing information, the listeners are left scratching their heads. Without knowing the correct secrets and method to decode the data, they're left with only garbage. Modern home networks use a password to both authenticate and encrypt data. The secret passcode you put into your wireless router and PC acts as the "shared secret" that lets both devices know that the other is trusted. It's also the common ground the two devices use to build the encryption keys to keep your data safe. Most people don't do a very good job of protecting their home networks, though. Simple passcodes can be guessed. And someone with a laptop and some hacking software can do just that in relatively little time, if your passcode isn't long enough or strong enough. Having guessed your passcode, they can then not only listen in on your network data, they may be able to access your PCs. Or... worst of all, they can pretend to be your wireless router. Worst, because if they do that, they can sit between you and the internet, and hoover up all your transactions, guaranteed. Log onto your bank website? They now know your login to your accounts! Cruising for hot singles? They get to see what your "type" is. Chattin' with underage girls and sending them p33nz0r shots? Hopefully they're calling Chris Hanson on your perverted ass. You sick fuck. The point is this... We used to be concerned about eavesdroppers on our unprotected wireless networks. So we encrypted them. Then we were concerned about weak encryption. So we replaced it with strong encryption. But now YOU are the weak link. If your passwords and network passcodes are weak, they can be guessed with little effort. And once they're guessed, everything you do on your computer is compromised. |
| Sunday, June 29th, 2008 | |
| 6:42 pm | We just got back from Wall-E. Best Pixar movie EVAR. You all should know how I feel about Pixar movies, too. So if it's the best Pixar movie, it must be REALLY DAMN GOOD. I will not spoil anything, except to say you MUST SEE IT. |
