Though historically I've not read many blogs, I've been poking around looking for good news sources to add to my news feeds in the new Mozilla Firefox pr1. My slumming has turned an interesting piece on the future of cold fusion over at Popular Science.
As a child I watched Elroy Jetson with a certain bemusement, flitting about in his jet pack, popping food pills, and relying on Rosy the Robot to keep his room clean. Likewise in Disney World's Tomorrowland I gazed in amazement at what was once envisione d for our future. Monorails and jet packs were just the optimistic incarnations of that Cold war futurism — but in science fiction particularly we find the more sinister predictions. Luminaries such as Bradbury, Roddenberry, and Gibson penned tales of continuing exploitation of all that humanity might invent. While their tales were scoffed at or ignored by the masses, especially when the Cold War ended with fall-out-free winters, the days of past present may be returning to the present future.
In the next day or two Microsoft will come out with its long-heralded, major updates to WindowsXP, known as Security Pack 2. The updates for SP2 take care of usability, default settings, and security bugs/holes. A new security pack from Microsoft is always a major step forward… but in my experience always comes with a few bugs itself.
I've been enjoying the use of OpenSSH in Windows lately but ran into a small problem today: "fork: Permission denied".
I find that Red Hat Linux (dead link removed; SF 2025) is fairly secure by default, but could use a bit of tweaking. This is the first of a series of notes on optimizing and improving security in Linux. Some items may be specific to Red Hat, but most of these notes will be applicable to all systems. In part 1, we look at runlevel services.
Okay, so this is a slight tangent from my intentions with this site, but I must share the following quote from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, neatly summarizing (with only slight exaggeration to reality) my experience as a graduate student in physics.
I finally got DSL again a few months ago, after 2 years of dial-up. Worked like a charm on my iBook, but not so on the Linux box. Actually, it wasn't so bad at first, but the DNS lookups were taking forever. Then it started dropping carrier. Often. To the point where, after a few minutes of using the computer, it was dropping every few seconds. Here's how I fixed it.
