I dunno where my wife finds this stuff

Money quote.

Black Jesus: "You ever hear of Steve Jobs?"

Sophocles, Soldiers, PTSD

Heard In Ancient Dramas, Vital Words For Today's Warriors on NPR this evening:

It's a three-day gathering designed to help military personnel — from enlisted men and women to generals — deal with war's emotional toll.

Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, who runs the Pentagon division behind the conference, says that despite the graphic horrors depicted in Sophocles' tragedies, today's warriors can find comfort in them.

The plays can reassure a soldier, she says, "that I am not alone, that I am not going crazy, that I am joined by the ages of warriors and their loved ones who've gone before me, and who have done what most in society have no idea our warriors do."

Why Manual Whitelisting works for Kids

As I've blogged previously a few times, I use squid with a simple white list

acl goodsites dstdomain "/etc/squid/goodsites"
http_access allow goodsites our_networks

for blocking access to my kids subnet. I have a very small list of sites, mostly .gov, because after all the government would never post anything inappropriate right?

(I initially allowed the entire TLD but my son started looking up crime statistics on the FBI web site, so made it more restrictive.)

My son has spent hours on the NASA sight downloading pictures, adding them to his GNOME backgrounds (yes his desktop is Ubuntu) editing them with gimp, creating OpenOffice presentations and during hurricane Ike I added weather.com so he's become obsessed with weather. but I was looking for something new.

My wife suggested adding one site at a time so he could take his time with each site.

One of the really cool things about the national geographic website is that topic areas have distinct hostnames, so I could be more granular in terms of blocking access.

1226102204.230     54 192.168.10.33 TCP_MISS/200 735 GET http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Science/SiteAssets/img/backgrounds/fact-486-footer.gif - DIRECT/208.59.201.138 image/gif
1226102204.253     73 192.168.10.33 TCP_MISS/200 521 GET http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Science/SiteAssets/img/backgrounds/feature-486-body.gif - DIRECT/208.59.201.138 image/gif
1226102204.268     81 192.168.10.33 TCP_MISS/200 686 GET http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Science/SiteAssets/img/backgrounds/feature-486-footer.gif - DIRECT/208.59.201.137 image/gif
1226102204.438    170 192.168.10.33 TCP_MISS/200 1276 GET http://science.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Global/ApplicationAssets/flash/dl-loader.swf - DIRECT/208.59.201.137 application/x-shockwave-flash

There is actually a pretty good music there, too. Lot's of world music My son is playing the Ben Harper song above over and over again.

What he doesn't remember is that he listened to a lot of Ben Harper on KGSR back in Austin. That and a lot of Lucinda Williams.

Good stuff. Good times.

We will see

Heady stuff, we'll will know in a week about the youth vote.



Was down in DC at Children's National today for my daughter's eye surgery. Lots of Obama ads on the TV in the waiting room, a bunch of nervous parents watching his PA speech live while their kids were in surgery. Nodding heads. A couple of middle-aged white women talking about how Palin scared them. A handful of African-America. A granola-looking white woman with an African-American husband. She said she was a Christian (responding to a spot on CNN) and was voting for Obama. A handful of Spanish-speaking families and Asians.

Good to be back in Real America. Real 21st Center America where whites hardly break 50% of the population (think California and Texas or even NOVA) vs. the racist hinterlands feeling sorry for themselves. Went pheasant hunting up in Western. Once again am struck how the most beautiful plasses in the land are often the most backwards.

After a decade and half in Texas and a year in Skokie, these racist, low-class xenophobic, anti-immigrant, white f***s that seem to be everywhere here in Maryland -- talking about "Mexicans." Please.

It is difficult to take. Nobody would dare make those comments in Texas, even if they thought them. God, I'm turning into a reactionary.

I'm with Joe on SCADASEC

Not like I care anymore (or even bothered to check out what he was referring to,) but I guess it was an an interesting week on SCADASEC which I unsubscribed from a while back since I view control systems security as a quaint museum artifact and the lack of adult supervision and recycled discussions on the list were far too frustrating.

Maybe after campaign season I'll resubscribe. Or perhaps by then we'll be in the midst of the Second Great Depression (25% unemployment they say?) and I will have packed up my family in our Honda minivan to go pick fruit back in Texas. And the memory of SCADA security will be a relic of more prosperous times.

Yeah, that's an allusion to the Grapes of Wrath if you didn't get it. And contrary to what they said after 9/11, we will still have irony.

Are you a contractor?

From a Wire episode I haven't seen yet. My wife sure knows how to find the best YouTube videos.

Best Omar Caper So Far

So we finally started on Season 3 (switched back to Netflix from Blockbuster Online, yes there is a reason Blockbuster is in trouble) of The Wire and its always a pleasure to watch how Omar and crew trick various drug dealers. In this episode one of his ladies (dressed like a nurse) wheels (as in chair) Omar into one of Avon's stash houses pretending to be a "brother Earl" from a VA hospital..

- Yo, all due respect, but this right here is a Barksdale joint, man.
- Do tell,

Only 2-3 Weeks from Cyberattack to Cannibalism?

So there's been an amusing thread over on the SCADA mailing list about the interdependencies of various critical infrastructure sectors

Fact is, Los Angeles, Chicago, SFO, Detroit, NYNJ, Boston, WaDC, etc. are two to three weeks away from cannibalism. Any large city will devolve into rioting and block warfare if the power stays off for longer than about 48 to 72 hours. As soon as the stored food is gone, people will die, or other people will kill and eat them.

Maybe Walt has recently read Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road or perhaps he is just tapping into that little voice inside all of us that wants to stock water, food, and ammunition in preparation for the "big one." I wonder if kids that are old enough to appreciate 9/11 have the same fears those of us who grew up during the cold war did?

How many rounds of .223 is enough for your Mini-14? How many plastic milk jugs full of rice will last you until food shows up on the shelves again? Can you ever prepare enough? As for myself, I put my faith in martial law and I have enough real problems (and real madness close at hand) rather than preparing these sorts of fantasies. But if you want to go there, definitely check out this amazingly haunting, spiritual, Pulitzer-prize winning book, which I read in nearly one sitting a few months back:

The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the window glass. He dropped to one knee and raided the lever to stop the tub and then turned on the both taps as far as they would go. She was standing in the doorway in her nightwear, clutching the jamb, cradling her belly in one hand. What is it? she said. What is happening?

I dont know.

Why are you talking a bath.

I'm not.

However, it is not what you think. You will not get a linear description of what happened that led the father and son to wander across a ash covered America of the future and encounter various characters out of Mad Max. But there is cannibalism. And infanticide. And it is definitely good read.

Kulturkampf 2.0

Believe it or not, I'm actually glad that I had so little exposure to the Internet while I was in college. It was only my last year (in 1993, as a struggled to complete the inane requirements for teacher certification in Texas) that I ran across gopher, usenet, and lynx (that was what I would telnet up to in Kansas from my VAX account at Texas A&M, right?)

Most of my friends (including my soon to be wife) were grad students in the A&M English Department. Many were embroiled in debates about the Culture Wars of late 80s and early 90s. Critical theory, multiculturalism, Post-Modernism, Post-Colonial Literature, Foucault, Derrida, the Canon, the Body, The Border. Critical Pedagogy. The flattening of hierarchy, the collapse of high and low culture, the end of the authority, the decimation of institutions, the horrific lack of standards, decent into moral chaos, etc. ad nauseum.

This is what I was exposed to in my upper level English and History classes. This is what we debated and argued. I remember attending a speech Dinesh D'Souza who was denounced (yes, denounced in the Maoist sense) by several African-American students in the shrill terms as a racist. But as a white male, middle class, Liberal Arts major in at an majority engineering school (adding insult to injury the English department shared the same building with the business school, the horror!) who no clue what I wanted "to do" let alone "how to do it" -- I felt like a persecuted minority. Put off reality by going to grad school. In what? Apply for the that MFA program in creative writing? Could I get into the Iowa Writer's work shop. Probably not.

It all seems so trite now (ah, to return to the naivety of age 22, although I remain a reactionary still) as does an Interview with Andrew Keen (the author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture) spurred this nostalgic blog entry.

The review in Academic Commons was the most compelling and begins with:

Andrew Keen insists he is neither anti-technology nor anti-progress. Yet this veteran of the dot com era begins his recent book, The Cult of the Amateur (Doubleday/Currency, 2007), sounding much like a high-culture snob pooh-poohing the vulgar masses for having appropriated the Web as their own and, in the process, wreaking potential destruction on our economy, culture and values. Keen's polemic hints less at neo-Luddite dissent than at an underlying bitterness and resentment--at his own gullibility at having been so easily sucked into the Internet dream, and also at those who have taken the technology out of the hands of professionals like himself ("I almost became rich" [p. 11], he confesses in the beginning of the first chapter). Drawing on 19th-century evolutionary biologist T. H. Huxley's "infinite monkey theory," Keen fears what lies ahead when the masses are empowered with far-reaching technology. As the author describes it, Huxley's theorem asserts that if infinite monkeys are provided with infinite typewriters, one of these monkeys will eventually create a masterpiece. Keen updates and reverses the theorem, replacing monkeys with humans and typewriters with networked personal computers; and "instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys--many with no more talent than our primate cousins--are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity" (pp. 2-3). By the end of the introduction, a reader would have just cause to feel a bit insulted

And definitely better than the one in the NY Times

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

Whether or not this depiction is true (and there certainly have been critiques of his facts) which is different question from whether or not this development (some of which is obviously the case) is a bad thing -- this critique seems strangely naive, ignorant of history and recent philosophy.

How many times in past cultural changes/wars have we heard these same arguments?

However it is curious, that the most interesting technological trends (and many such as Free/Open Source software, the ultimate amateur endeavor) of the day seem to be an ultimate fulfillment the prophecies of the postmodern theory I was reading 15 years ago.

If only I had known.

KGSR Online: Required Listening for Austin Refugees

Of course there is nothing like KGSR in Chicagoland. Hell, there is probably nothing that plays the eclectic mix of Texas and Foreign music anywhere else. One more reason to work from home more often.

Tim Fite: Fun Angry Music for Coding

So this post might have been a candidate for Angry Ruby (which is dedicated to whining about using Ruby) except that Ruby is delightful (in all sincerity) compared to dealing with several thousand lines of Bourne shell scripts that use every known flavor of grep and awk known to man. And you'd think porting them from OpenBSD to FreeBSD would be trivial. Sure. So driving home on Thursday I swore to not port another line of shell and begin the long needed port to language a not invented in the 1970s.

So besides doing a lot late night coding for the 4 days (discovering that Trader Joes energy drinks are as effective as they are economical, 99 cents!) I've started listening to Over the Counter Culture which was mentioned on the Sound Opinions Mid Year Best of 2007 sow I believe It's All Right Here got some play on NPR because my son was signing from the PG-13 version after only hearing it twice. It is quite catchy.

So besides buying Run DMC's Raising Hell (when I was a junior in high school, on a school trip to Manilla, Philippines, no doubt) and casually like some of the Beastie Boys songs that made it onto KROX over the years, I've never been a rap/hip hope listener. Just not me. However, I've really taken to this album. There are 4-5 solid tracks, which is pretty high.

Probably my favorite is In Your Hair which starts (and finishes) with these two stanzas.

A king is not a president
A roof is not a resident
The truth is not self evident
When youth is on the line

The Boss is not the boss of them
The cross is on the cross again
The crim is not a government
A crime is just a crime
The rhymes in

Hay Man are not the predictable sort you'd expect from pop hip hop:

...
Break these palms
Break these pines
Break these laws (?)
Break these lines
Break these looks
Break these lease
Break these hooks
Break this heat
Break these rocks
Break this concrete
...
Without no fuel the fire don't burn bright
Without no mule the car can't turn right
Did you hear that shit?
Let's play more Fite
Because somethings fit to change
in the furnace tonight.

Good stuff. Camouflage and I've been shot are both fairly amusing.

These songs are fairly political (predictably anti-corporate, anti-consumerism, anti-Bush-era America, etc.) but these music, rhymes, lyrics, and far from that ("stop faking butter, start faking lard!") and I figure they'll

Oh yeah the complete album is free to to download. So you have no excuse not to check it out.

My Next Laptop

Believe or not Hello Kitty has a dark side, so I would definitely not be ashamed to bring one of these of up to a podium at security conference although probably wouldn't appropriate if I were still a consultant. Of course my 3 year old daughter wants one and she said, "Mom will say yes or no?" Of less importance after a number of difficulties my T61 supposedly shipped today. I would have loved to get a T60, but the new models were $400-500 cheaper due to a recent sale, so I couldn't pass it up. This will be the first bleeding edge fully-Linux laptop (I may actually keep a tiny XP Pro partition on, in case I were to ever need to use WWAN card). I have only found one page on running (Debian Etch) Linux on a T61. I know already the wireless won't work. But at least it has a PC-CARD slot so I can go Aironet until the Intel 4965 cards get native (non-ndiswrapper) support.

Chain vs. Independent Coffeeshops (and Austin vs. Skokie) Epiphany

For the year plus, I was at Digital Bond I spent a lot of time working in small independent coffee shops close to Burnet Road. Pacha (not so much) Genuine Joe (quite a lot) and Russells (when I really needed to code, because they had no Wifi) and the place in the strip mall right close to 183 in between the Chilis and the Benihana whose name I can't remember (quite a lot, sometimes at the south location on Guadalupe).

It is probably more something about the true sense of community here in humble Skokie (with its authentic diversity, not the fake Whole Foods diversity, and no your tattoos don't make you any less white) compared to the segregated, self-congratulatory hippie-yuppie-vibe of Central Austin that a Panera bread (of all places, yes, I've got in the bad habit of stopping for coffee before I get on the Edens to make the trek up to Lincolnshire) can be such a warmer place to work. It probably also because the median age is not 25.

Yesterday the young African man working behind the counter saw my Cisco corporate polo and asked about "Cisco Network Engineer" jobs in America and this morning, always energetic manager (with some Eastern European accent, but not Russian) who greets most customers by first name after swiping my debit card asked if she should call me Matthew or David.

I guess I'm a regular now.