Nix Bits

So I guess I’ll start at the beginning. Or at least where I perceive that to be. Friday was a normal day for us. Katrina was in the Southeastern Gulf and all indications were that she was heading to the already well-battered Florida panhandle. By late in the workday, some of my coworkers were fearing […]

Denyhosts parses your log files and adds ssh attack automated attack attempts to tcp_wrappers’ /etc/hosts.deny. This is the same concept as this little shell script I cooked up. Of course my little script was derived from another script specific to openbsd and it’s pf firewall. Denyhosts is pretty much the same idea as mine but […]

This interesting article talks about the kernel.org infrastructure used to maintain the Linux kernel. Overall it’s a fascinating little bit of history. It’s also intriguing because it gives an example of running an extremely bandwidth and processor intensive site. This quote is especially interesting regarding an earlier verision of kernel.org hosted on a dual PIII. […]

According to this the MP3 hard drive player I use every day — a PJB 100 — is an antique. O.K. Maybe not an antique, but a collectors item. The PJB was the first hard drive MP3 player. The one I have has a 20G hard drive. It’s about 4 times larger than an ipod, […]

Does Outsourcing Deliver the Goods? Outsourcing seems to be all the rage for businesses. This article is focused on the financial return of such efforts and concludes outsourcing is not the grand panacea it’s often cracked up to be. The conclusion: Either the costs of purchasing outside work are too high for the “losers” — […]

Yikes! New York has decided that a worker employed by a company in NY State can be taxed on 100% of their income in the state. What?! So my question is does the worker now get double-dipped having to pay income taxes in both his state of residence and NY? Be interested to see if […]

The new Knoppix 3.8 has added an interesting feature by incorporating UnionFS into the filesystem. What does this mean? Well it means I can modify a file in /etc without a problem. The underlying unionfs structure writes the mod to /ramdisk and the change is transparent. In fact, any change can be made. Software can […]

This article over at kuro5hin is both satire and unfortunate truth. I’ve worked on enough projects that appear to follow this development model. I have been lucky, however, to work on a few that don’t operate this way.

A fellow nolugger wrote this article about New Orleans. I think much of the same could be said about European countries. Certainly my recent honeymoon to Spain had me thinking in a similar mode. Priorities, perspective, and values….

This is one of those articles I’m just preserving for my own future reference.