Month: July 2006

is calling for the lynching of Supreme Court Justices actionable?

Glenn Greenwald plumbs the depths of the cesspit that is rightwing thought so you don’t have to, and surfaces with this:

The unelected, black-robed tyrants have a long history of not giving a fig about the Constitution if they don’t like what it says, not to mention a long tradition of usurping the powers of the legislative and executive branch by ruling by judicial fiat. . . .

Try doing anything to those mutilating darlings of the Supremes in order to extract life-saving intel from them, and then wait for the Supreme Whores to decide that you were “humiliating” them in doing so.

Five ropes, five robes, five trees.

Some assembly required.

So much for civility and high-mindedness.

Glenn notes that the site where this appears ranks as 42nd most-linked to but Technorati places it a good deal lower.
Continue reading “is calling for the lynching of Supreme Court Justices actionable?”

is it coincidence that offal rhymes with awful?

Add variety meats to your culinary repertoire:

Looking to add more variety meats to your culinary repertoire? Here’s a list of books dedicated to offal. I was thinking about this the other day as I read a recipe for tripe that sounded good. But then I thought, Do I really want the first tripe I ever eat to be prepared by me? Seems like something I should leave to an experienced offal chef, so as to ensure a not awful experience.

Reluctantly categorized under “food.”

Continue reading “is it coincidence that offal rhymes with awful?”

history lessons

“Asymmetric warfare” and ethics:

Steven Poole, our guest-blogger from last week, has this to say about “asymmetric warfare”:

Asymmetric warfare’ is the term employed by the US military for fighting people who don’t line up properly to be shot at: on the one side you have battalions of American infantry, marines, tanks and aircraft; and on the other you have terrorists, or guerrillas, or militants, or insurgents. [Read the whole thing, as they say. cb]
Of course the reason people don’t line up to be shot at, wearing proper uniforms, distinguishing themselves from the civilian population, and so on, is that it would be suicidal so to do. And here lies a real difficulty for conventional just war theory. If recourse to war is sometimes just—and just war theory says it is—but it may only be justly fought within the jus in bello restrictions, then it looks as if an important means to pursue justice is open to the strong alone and not to the weak. Faced with a professional army equipped with powerful weaponry, people who want to fight back have no chance unless they melt into the civilian population and adopt unconventional tactics.

I suppose it bears mentioning that, in my American history classes, the use of unconventional tactics and non-existent uniforms were cited as examples of defensible tactics by the colonists against the occupiers. Now when these same tactics are used by natives to resist an occupation by US troops, it’s a violation of the Rules of War.

network monkeywork complete

I installed a newer version of the dd-wrt firmware and despite its pre-release status, it seems to work just fine. Port forwarding works (else you wouldn’t be reading this). And all the other features — like boosting the transmit power — are all there and working.

Now that I have successfully broken apart the webserving stuff from the household bandwidth usage, if the server needs to be rebuilt (it does) or craps out (it could), it won’t affect anything else.

they lost me at DRM

Interesting concept but the mention of DRM (how does that work with web documents?) put me off.

Numly Numbers:

Web 2.0 + Copyright = Copyright 2.0
4801 Numly Numbers registered for 1398 authors
Numly.com assigns Numly Numbers (Electronic Serial Numbers / ESNs) for all things digital. These unique identifiers provide digital rights management capabilities as well as third-party, non-repudiation measures for proof of copyright via real-time verifications. Numly Numbers are simple to generate and act as an electronic timestamp. They also allow you to track who is viewing your content and when it is accessed, monitor ratings, and can be used as permalinks!

Join the (R)evolution and (C)opyright your work with (N)umly today!

Unique IDs are interesting but that could be done any number of ways w/out a central clearinghouse.

Anyone know anything about this?

if you can read this, my network migration was successful

tailing the logs to see . . .
posted at 16:10
<time passes>

Hmm, looks like port forwarding needs some work. I actually want to forward a range of 1(?) instead of a single port?

<the next morning>
Well, that took a while.

Note to self: when moving a system inside an existing firewall/perimeter, you need to turn off it’s own firewall if you expect it to see any traffic from a port forward directive.

The network migration included:

  1. Moving the Linksys (hostname bruise [its colors are black and a rich purple: that was what I came up with]) to replace the Airport. That went fine.
  2. Replacing the FreeBSD host (webserver, MySQL server, nat gateway, etc.) with the LinkSys’s routing/port forwarding superpowers. That took longer, as some premature firmware mucking about was involved.
  3. Dragging cables around: the server(s) in are one room and the access point is in a hallway/open area some distance for more central access.

Notes in general:

  • dd-wrt is a work in progress (I tried v.23SP1) but seems quite good. I couldn’t get the port forwarding directives to adhere. Coulda been browser issues.
  • the web UI responds differently, at times indifferently, to different browsers. Sometimes FireFox was the way to go, WebKit (the nightly Safari build) almost never was, the stock Safari worked when FireFox didn’t. Sometimes.
  • the default firmware, while not as complete as the open-source versions, seems to work just fine. I reverted back to it just to see if port forwarding could be made to work at all.
  • Perhaps one of the reasons so many Linksys access points are unsecured is due to how crummy the UI interaction is. It took me several tries to reset the password.
  • If you use an open source variant of the firmware and want to use ssh, the username is root, no matter what you specify in the UI, even though your changes will be reflected in the UI.
  • In the Administration screen in the UI, there is an option to snapshot your configuration. Use it early and often.
  • There may be a way to handle this kind of network-y/routing stuff in the shell (iptables is how all that is done) but I never got anywhere with it. I added some commands that either replicated existing directives or never showed up: a diff of the output of iptables -L showed no changes.

Now, one more time, to see if the open source firmware is worth mucking with. I know the hardware works. And the folks on the dd-wrt project pointed me to some later versions of the firmware. Perhaps that will make a difference.