http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine Stuff I Decided to Write Sun, 13 Jan 2008 01:07:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en USA Today carried this story on the front page, Tuesday, (2007/12/04). It's interesting that the headline for this story in the print edition and the online version are not identical. The crux of the story is that the major U.S. airlines are shifting their schedules a little so that there will ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/12/04/airlines-scaling-back-us-capcity/ I just read an article from The New York Times website about Eve Online. I have been a player of Eve since March, 2007. Obligatory quote: At the strategic level, coalitions involving tens of thousands of players struggle for months over strategic objectives or simply to wipe out their enemies. For at ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/12/03/eve-continues-where-others-fail/ I finally got all of the blogs I manage updated to WordPress 2.3.1, today. Several friends who also use WordPress had experienced some difficulties upgrading to 2.3.0, so I had held off on the updates on some of the blogs until these past 3 days. There were two of them ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/11/16/wordpress-231-upgrade/ In dealing with nVidia and ATI drivers for Linux (both a kernel and X driver are needed), I've been using the Livna YUM repositories for Fedora to easily install them as RPMs using YUM. I've run into trouble here and there as the Livna folks keep pulling RPMs from their repos ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/11/15/livna-please-keep-drivers-in-the-repo/ A few minutes ago, I installed the kdebluetooth package. I was already logged in, so I had to launch the kbluetooth applet myself. I then clicked K Menu -> System -> KInputWizard, pressed the "reset" button on the bottom of my mouse and clicked "Add" in the Input Devices dialog. ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/11/14/easy-bluetooth-mouse-setup-in-kde/ The fact that Fedora (and by extension, RHEL, CentOS, etc.), supports bi-arch platforms is a great thing. However, it does get to be very irritating when YUM decides that it should just pull in 32bit versions on a system with no other 32 bit packages. I've experienced this problem during ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/11/13/yum-irritations-in-f7-and-f8/ So, is anyone else experiencing troubles with the proprietary ATI driver on Fedora 8? How about on an updated F7 system? My HP Compaq 6715b notebook comes with ATI Radeon X1270 video 128MB RAM dedicated plus 192MB RAM shared) and a 1680x1050 resolution 15.4 inch LCD (at 61Hz, it would seem). ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/11/12/ati-driver-trouble-under-fedora-8/ Last night, while flying from Salt Lake (SLC) to Kansas City (MCI), I used a Fedora 8 x86_64 DVD I had burned earlier in the day to reinstall my notebook. Probably not the smartest way (that is, on an airplane without an Internet connection available) to do such an installation. First, ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/11/12/installing-fedora-8-on-the-hp-compaq-6715b-notebook/ I've been playing Eve Online, a space MMO for many months now. Today, they released their Linux and MacOS X clients as part of the version 2.3 update. Though I haven't had a chance to try it out, yet, this is exciting news. It's wonderful to see a game like this ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/11/06/eve-online-for-linux-and-mac/ I'll thank Tene for pointing me at this one: Take a look at http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/926-is-petrov-d.html. This was probably one of the most important moments and one of the best decisions anyone ever made in the entirety of the 20th century. Petrov decided to not destroy the world just because a bunch of flashing ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/09/26/ptrov-day/ On the last day of the Utah Open Source Conference 2007 (UTOSC), there was a PGP/GPG key signing party, hosted by Scott Paul Robertson. It was good to be able to get set up to properly sign so many keys, but it did give me a little problem; I needed ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/09/11/sign-lots-o-keys/ Last week, some IBM ThinkPad T61p notebooks showed up at Guru Labs offices. There were 2 of them on Monday and another on Tuesday. I also know that there are 2 more coming and perhaps a couple of other co-workers will be ordering them, too. I've been needing to get a ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/08/25/linux-on-an-hp-compaq-6715b-notebook/ On August 5th, 2007, President Bush signed S.1927 into law, after it passed a Senate vote (60 for, 28 against, 12 present but not voting) on the 3rd, and a House vote (227 for, 183 against, 23 present but not voting). The new law amends the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/08/19/new-us-wiretapping-law/ Poor Ben Forta. The fact that he's actually struggled to get through airports for a while before figuring this out seems rather strange to me. How could he be the only one? Why have none of my co-workers (at least, to my knowledge) not had similar troubles with their ThinkPad ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/08/18/gun-shapped-notebook-battery/ The Brennan Center for Justice has published a report titled, "Post-Election Audits: Restoring Trust in Elections," which is well worth a read to anyone who cares about liberty and election security. http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/08/17/post-election-auditing-report/ Simply, un-excusably Amazing. The recent MSNBC story, "Computer security problems found at IRS," discusses security problems found at the IRS. One of the more interesting items: Sixty-one of the 102 people who got the test calls, including managers and a contractor, complied with a request that the employee provide his or her ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/08/16/irs-security-troubles/ Recently, California's Secretary of State was required to perform a security screening of the eVoting systems that the State of California is thinking of/planning to use. The California Secretary of State appears to have been highly opposed to this outside audit process, according to information found within the official reports ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/08/15/commercial-evoting-security-problems-abound/ For those who might balk at the configuration work found in Christer's recent post, Turning Off The System (hardware) Beep : Linux Tutorial, I have a solution for you. You can order this simple device and reuse again and again after modifying that pesky, noise-making computer speaker. Simply go to ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/07/28/144/ After reading Dave Winer's comments on blogging, in particular the parts where he discusses comments and their negative effects on a blog, I've decided to disable commenting in this blog. TrackBacks are still there. Let's see how this goes. If you would like to comment, you can't post it on my ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/07/28/no-more-comments/ I wrote this Haiku earlier this evening: It's not very good And, most certainly, is not Quality Haiku It was a piece of testing text that I placed in a text editor for an admin piece of a webapp I'm helping a friend meet a deadline for. http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/07/28/haiku/ Well, I've been running with WrodPress 2.2.1 for a while now. This was another update that screwed up the blogroll (I patched this in my code for 2.1 and 2.2). But a new problem has surfaced with 2.2.1 in the admin interface; when loading the Dashboard or the Write or other ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/07/28/wordpress-221/ The last book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released, today. My wife and I picked up a copy in Ontario, Oregon on our way back from a month spent with my parents in Weiser, Idaho (my hometown). Actually, my wife and daughter spent ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/07/21/harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hallows-year-7-available-today/ Thanks go to Christer Edwards for encouraging me to deploy OpenID support on this blog. If you have an OpenID account, you can now use it to comment and to register on this blog, without having to register on this blog. I haven't required logins to commont on this blog since ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/07/13/openid-enabled/ This article is in reference to "Correspondent Inference Theory" by Bruce Schneier. I have previously written about terrorism and the true goals & motivations of terrorists (see my article, "What the Terrorists Want"). This latest article on the subject from Bruce takes the discussion a very important and valuable step further. ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/07/12/why-terrorism-doesnt-work/ Flight cancellations are never fun, but when they force over a dozen other people's plans to change, a canceled flight can spell real trouble for a business traveler. When I arrived at the airport on Sunday (2007/06/24) to board my flight (BOI to MSP to BWI) with Northwest Airlines, I ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/06/29/massive-flight-cancellations/ You might not know what DNSSEC is. That's fine, most people don't know either. The basic idea is to implement a replacement for the horribly flawed security model of standard DNS while not breaking backward compatibility. That's what DNSSEC is, in a nutshell. It works by using methods similar ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/04/09/dhs-wants-dnssec-keys/ In the UK, some parents are buying body armour for their children. This seems to be mostly into response to a couple of recent murders of London teenagers. I can understand parents wanting to protect their children. Security isn't always about the actual security. Sometimes, the perception of security is ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/03/28/body-armour-for-children/ Back in 1995, I started working for a mobile DJ company in Denver & Colorado Springs, Colorado. We used 3 MiniDisc decks with each set of equipment for all our music. MiniDisc is an awesome technology. It holds just as much music as a CD on a 2-inch recordable magneto-optical disk ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/03/08/my-minidisc-is-back/ I been using SpamAssassin for a while to help identify SPAM. About a week ago, I started seeing all messages that were being flagged as SPAM by SpamAssassin show up in my Inbox instead of in my SPAM folder. Well, it irritated me enough a moment ago to actually take a ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/02/28/sorting-spam/ There were a few minor difficulties updating this blog to WordPress 2.1 Ella (reffering to Ella Fitzgerald). Over the past couple of weeks, I've slowly worked on fixing things. It looks like everything is the way it should be now. There were some databases changes that weren't handled very cleanly by ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/02/10/wordpress-21-upgrade/ I have to agree with Fozz in his recent post about global warming. I remember (vaguely) when Mt. St. Hellens blew its top (we even have a jar of ash from our front yard that we kept). That one event released more "greenhouse gases" than all industrial and automotive emissions since ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/02/04/on-global-warming/ I came across this article at Microsoft today. A Google search for vista networking stack shows several commentaries about the Microsoft article. One writen commented about how bugs that were erradicated 15-20 years ago in TCP/IP stacks are back in Microsoft's new stack. Taking a look at the bullet points in ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/01/30/vistas-new-tcpip-stack/ Enjoy not just one, but two great Dilbert cartoons. http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/01/25/dogberts-password-recovery-service-for-morons/ Yesterday, I decided to burn the openSUSE 10.2 DVD for x86-64 so that I can install it on the new system. Fedora Core 6 is having lots of trouble getting the graphics working correctly on the new box (we'll have to see if it's any better after I update the ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2007/01/05/burning-opensuse-102-dvd/ Last night, our daughter Nadia woke up from a 3+ hour sleep at about 11:30pm. She was asleep again (changed, fed, cuddled) by 12:30am and she didn't wake up until about 8:10am this morning. We really shouldn't have let her go so long without waking her to feed, but we ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/12/25/merry-christmas/ Believe it or not, there's a company (immi) that is giving away "special" cell phones with free service. The catch? The phone is also a room bug: The IMMI phone randomly samples 10 seconds of room audio every 30 seconds. These samples are reduced to digital signatures, which are uploaded continuously ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/12/19/marketing-a-room-bug/ Researchers at the University of Washington have demonstrated a frighteningly easy way to track anyone who uses the Nike+IPod Sports Kit One of them built the tracker hardware (for only $250) which they interfaced with Google Maps. Their paper has the details. This is a great example of how even without any personal ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/12/12/joggers-accessories-make-you-trackable/ One of my sisters forwarded an email to me regarding a "new" scam: Well, the crooks have found a way to rob you of your gift card balance. If you buy Gift Cards from a display rack that has various store cards you may become a victim of theft. Crooks are ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/11/30/gift-card-fraud/ A man in Quincy, Massachusetts was refused service at the local IHOP restaurant when he refused to turn over his driver's license before being seated. Hilarious. But there's a great security point here, too. They wanted to reduce the incidence of "dine-n-dash" events, where people skip out without paying. Holding ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/11/29/no-shirt-no-shoes-no-id-no-service/ If you care about security issues and/or your privacy at all, you should be concerned about the deployments (and pending deployments) of passports with RFID chips embedded in them. Bruce Schneier, CTO of BT Counterpane, author and world-renowned security expert & privacy advocate gave an interview regarding RFID passports. It is ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/11/23/podcast-with-bruce-about-rfid-passports/ I spent about 30 minutes earlier today getting a few more photos up. I also edited the photos that were already there (rotate & crop) and created thumbnails for each photo. BTW, the high resolution versions chould look better than 35mm film when printing on 4x6 photo paper. However, as ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/11/23/more-baby-photos/ Last night, Charlotte & I settled on the name for our first baby. Her name is Nadia Marie Peterson. She is in excellent health. Charlotte has been recovering very well. The staples were taken out this morning and both mother and child will be coming home this afternoon. P.S. I will edit ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/11/21/update-on-mother-and-child/ Now for the news we've been waiting months for. She has arrived. I have posted photos. http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/11/19/shes-here/ The "Budapest Declaration on Machine Readable Travel Documents" is an interesting and informative read: Abstract: By failing to implement an appropriate security architecture, European governments have effectively forced citizens to adopt new international Machine Readable Travel Documents which dramatically decrease their security and privacy and increases risk of identity theft. Simply put, ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/11/09/fidis-on-rfid-passports/ Russel Coker recently posted an article to his blog titled, "A Good Security Design for an Office". It's a very good read. There's nothing earth-shattering in there, but plenty of gems that most people either forget about or never figure out. There are a couple of things that I wanted to ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/11/09/response-a-good-security-design-for-an-office/ I am not a very overtly political person. Take a look at the list of categories on this blog and you'll notice how little I write about politics. Sure, some of the subjects I broach here are politically charged topics (like Privacy issues, for example. Today is Election Day throughout the ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/11/07/election-day/ The gist of the Salt Lake Tribune's endorsement of incumbant U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch is that seniority overrides all. Among Utah politicians, Orrin Hatch is a towering evergreen who, every six years since his election to the U.S. Senate in 1976, has been returned to Congress by voters who have seen ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/11/06/vote-pete-ashdown-for-utahs-us-senator/ No surprise here. Since the electronic voting equipment manufacturers are completely incompetent when it comes to security, I and any other person with a working brain (when it comes to security, that is) have been expecting that we would be hearing an awful lot about machines "malfunctioning" in this year's election. If ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/11/01/electronic-voting-machines-malfunction/ While reading some things today, I stumbled across this MSDN Mag article titled, "8 Simple Rules For Developing More Secure Code". There is nothing groundbreaking in this article, but it is a good collection and summary of these important and truly basic, programming principles. Some are easier to implement in an ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/10/31/writing-secure-code-8-basic-microsoft-rules/ I have known Marc Christiensen for years and have a lot of respect for him. He does a great job of keeping on top of things, which is why I was surprised that he didn't catch the problems found in the Oracle press release he quotes in his recent post. I'll ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/10/25/response-oracle-announces-the-same-enterprise-class-support-for-linux-as-for-its-database/ This very well written article describes (in very easily understood terms) how the centralization and industrialization of food processing in the U.S. has lead to the point where contamination can easily occur and is very hard to track down. It also points out how we could easily make the problem ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/10/20/centralized-food-processing-puts-us-at-risk/ According to a TSA press release, the existing ban on an entire state of matter (liquids) and gels is partially lifted, effective as of today. Many (including myself) have previously written about how this particular move was useless security theater. It's about time! Too bad they are trying to tiptoe their ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/09/25/tsa-gets-part-of-their-brain-back/ Clint Savage and I got lunch together today. While ordering, we saw a guy with a T-shirt that read: Heck is where people go who don't believe in Gosh We're still laughing. http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/09/19/t-shirt-quote/ A few days ago, Peter Abilla published a post about TrackMeNot. I had read about TrackMeNot a little more than a week before on Bruce Schneier's blog, and so I already knew TrackMeNot was a flawed idea. Peter also makes some very good points in his post, but, unfortunately, it falls ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/09/15/trackmenot/ One thing that really irritates me to no end is how the mainstream media keeps demonizing the term "Hacker". I often get questions about the term and sometimes end up spending time explaining that the term "Hacker" has been around since long before it came to be used in the ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/09/14/hacker-is-a-good-word/ This morning, this story was brought to my attention. When I read it, my first reaction was, "Wow." and that was about it. I hope and pray that those childrens' mother will be found soon and that she is all right. For those who may not be familiar with the Reiser's, Hans ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/09/14/nina-reiser-missing-hans-home-searched/ I just read this story by Bruce Schneier on Wired. You really should read the whole article,even though I summarize it here. The folks at FairUse4WM cracked Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM software in Microsoft Windows Media Player. If you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don't look ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/09/07/quickest-microsoft-patch-ever/ For the past 20+ years, Charlotte's family have traveled to Blackfoot, Idaho for the annual East Idaho State Fair. The fair "officially" begins on Labor day, but all the judging and setup is done by the end of the Friday before, so they have always gone up for the weekend ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/09/06/another-fair-weekend/ While we're on the subject of browser safety, please, everyone follow this advice: turn off SSL v2 support in every web browser you use. The default configurations of almost all web browsers still leave SSL2 support on for backwards compatibility. There is no such thing as a legitimate encrypted website ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/09/01/web-browsers-and-encryption/ You might have heard of the new Browzar web browser. Their website claims: "With Browzar you can search and surf the web without leaving any visible trace on the computer you are using." Well, it's just not true. It's only a thin wrapper around Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 5.5 (or later). Since ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/09/01/new-anonymous-browser-is-unsafe/ CNN published this story about the capture of Warren Jeffs. It's an interesting read. However, what I think is a more important part might go unnoticed by most people. A paper license tag, a salad and stories that didn't make sense pricked the suspicions of a state trooper who stopped the ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/08/31/smart-state-trooper-captures-fugitive-polygamist/ Today, I decided to take a look at a couple of the links that blog spammers have been trying to put up in my blogs' comments. Most of it actually led to "anti-spam" websites that are actually spam list phishers. This is, of course, very clever of the spammers. First, ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/08/30/blog-spam-as-phishing-bait/ Wow. This story even includes a WoW reference. Yet another example of security by overreaction. Although I'm not a lawyer in Canada or anywhere else, but it sure feels like this guys rights were ignored. It is especially disturbing to me that his notebook was riffled after he was already cleared; ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/08/28/more-security-by-overreaction/ I'm going to provide a couple of quotes from one of Bruce Schneier's latest blog articles titled, "What the Terrorists Want." The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/08/24/what-the-terrorists-want/ In today's issue of USA Today, there is a story about how the surge in quantity of checked lunggage to be processed in U.S. airports is overwhelming the TSA baggage screening systems. I am not the least bit surprised; I (and many others) predicted that this overload would result from the ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/08/24/too-many-checked-bags/ It hasn't been very long since I upgraded the storage on my home file server. One evening last week while I was in Los Angeles, my wife told me that there was a "funny" sound coming from the "server room". Her description made me think it was a fan. Oh, ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/08/14/new-hard-drive-rip/ As I am sure everyone has heard by now, on Monday, Brittish authorities arrested nearly 2 dozen suspected terrorists and raided their homes. It is believed that this action foiled an Al Qaeda plot to blow up as many as 6-12 trans-Atlantic airliners as they reached U.S. soil. Because of the ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/08/12/travel-challenges/ Recently, Migueal de Icazza wrote this as part of a blog post: X applications do not open sometimes: this is caused because DHCP is set to "change hostname on DHCP" requests. For some reason X applications are not happy with changes in the hostname. I have no idea why. I personally ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/08/09/x-and-your-hostname/ This morning, I flew from Salt Lake City (SLC) to Los Angeles (LAX). I arrived before 9am PDT and was driving off in my rental car by 9:30. It only took me about 12 minutes to drive to my hotel in Manhattan Beach, California. Unfortunately, 9:45am is a little early ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/08/06/lazy-travels/ My youngest sister and her husband, Garry & Kayla Perza, phoned and told us that she is pregnant. She has not been to her first doctor's appointment, yet, so she doesn't have a "firm" due date, however, it should probably be somewhere in the later half of April, 2007. We're not ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/08/04/start-of-the-second-baby-boom/ This evening, for the first time, I was able to feel our baby girl kicking. My wife, Charlotte, has been able to feel the baby kicking for a few weeks now. Several times, she thought the kicks might be just hard enough to feel on the outside of her belly, but ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/08/03/baby-kicks/ I've just come across this post by Steve Yegge. It's quite an enjoyable read and I think he's quite right about Java's attitude towards verbs. Overall, I like Steve's writting style and I think I'll be reading more of his stuff in the future, even though he seems to be suffering ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/08/01/javas-battle-against-non-nouns/ Four days ago, a new release of WordPress, the blogging software that runs OpenBrainstem blogs was made available. It's now up to version 2.0.4, which all OpenBrainstem blogs are now using. There were several security fixes and over 50 bug fixes, according to the announcement on the WordPress website. However, I've ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/08/01/wordpress-204/ This story about a group of 30 some odd European businessmen who just announced that they are developing software to be installed on passenger aircraft. This new system is intended to give a ground control station (apparently, the remote control software won't work on airborn computers) the ability to thwart ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/07/28/passenger-aircraft-remote-override-software/ The same student who was here last week is also taking this week's class. It would seem that whenever this particular student takes a class that I am teaching, the fates conspire to make us play golf together. I don't know why that is, but it's a pattern that I ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/07/20/forced-to-play-golf-again/ This week I have been teaching one of Guru Labs' courses at our offices in Bountiful, Utah. One of my students flew out from Washington, D.C., Maryland (i.e., just a couple of miles north of D.C.). He had brought his clubs out with him and had been asking for recommendations ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/07/13/when-you-have-to-hit-the-links/ Richard K. Miller wrote about the new .mobi top level domain (a.k.a. TLD). Here's a quote from the post: Here are my 9 reasons why .mobi is a bad idea: You can already serve mobile content from any subdomain or folder, like mobi.example.com or example.com/mobi You can already use content negotiation. If ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/07/11/response-will-mobi-get-any-traction/ Reading this newly issued patent, it sure seems like they are talking about a firewall to me. I first read about this on Bruce Schneier's blog. http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/07/07/us-navy-gets-patent-on-firewall/ This evening, Clint Savage and I met up with John Taber and Richard K. Miller at a little place in Provo called Pudding on the Rice, which sells only rice pudding in various flavors. The restaurant looks like it would fit in perfectly on Rodeo Drive or in Manhattan and ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/07/06/php-dinner/ Yesterday, we went to the appointment for the first ultrasound of our upcoming little girl just off of 5300 South in Salt Lake. Everything looks great; healthy, normal, developing well. We saw her wriggling around a bit, too. Oh what a fun time it was getting in for the ultrasound. We ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/07/04/first-ultrasound/ Today, my wife and I decided to get out of the house and take in a movie. We saw the new Superman film, "Superman Returns." (Ed. It now looks like the site is being redirected to http://supermanreturns.warnerbros.com/ and the new site now requires Flash 8 to view anything.) I would recommend ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/07/01/review-superman-returns/ NOTE: I have not seen Scott's code. This means that my conclusions about his method could be wrong, depending on whether or not he has already dealt with the issues. In a recent post by Scott Paul Robertson on his blog titled, Django with HTTP Authentication, he builds a workaround for ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/30/response-django-with-http-authentication/ Apparently, the British citizens who are in Germany for the World Cup are celebrating so hard because of their victory last night, that German pubs are in serious danger of running out of Beer. Said one German pub owner, "Never have I seen so few [drink] so much in so little ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/29/english-invade-german-pubs/ According to the Corporation for National and Community Service, Utah has the highest rate of of volunteer work from 2003 to 2005. Here's the top 5: Utah: 48% Nebraska: 43% Minnesota: 41% Iowa: 39% Alaska: 39% http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/26/utah-1-volunteer/ In my recent post, I said that I would try to get better pictures of the commemorative plaques at the U.S. Patent & Tradmark Office's training rooms. When I went to start making the attempt, the camera reported to me that there was insufficient power remaining to take pictures. Unfortunately, ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/24/camera-batteries-didnt-last/ In yet another interesting article in today's issue of USA Today, I read about AT&T's latest move regarding it's privacy policy. Oh, and the EFF gets mentioned in the article, starting from the second paragraph. http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/22/att-announces-new-privacy-policy/ Also in today's issue of USA Today was this story about the ill conceived, so-called "SecureFlight" program that the U.S. Congres suggested following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Oh, yeah, the House of Representatives is just the place to find a plethora of individuals who you would want designing security ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/22/trusted-traveler-program-knocked/ Today's USA Today caries a cover story titled, "Frequent business travelers pack guilt". Some of it is common sense, but as the author, Gary Stoller, points out, almost no studies have been done to show the impact of frequent business travel. As a frequent business traveler myself, I can relate to ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/22/frequent-business-travelers-pack-guilt/ I recently posted about a nice little bit of historical information that I had found while traveling for work. Since then, I purchased a digital photo camera. This week, since I'm back at the same location where I found "The Real McCoy" factoid and since I brought my new camera, ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/21/patent-history/ As most of you know by now, I'm spending this week on the road. One thing that makes a big difference in how you feel throughout the day is to have a good breakfast. That doesn't mean a huge feast, just something to get your body energized for the day. ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/20/free-meals-for-going-hungry/ Try visiting Hilton Hotels' website with any browser other than IE, Netscape 7 or Firefox 1.0. Argh! It dumps you on a "Web Standards" page and you can't leave it unless you use one of the "approved" browsers. I haven't tried it with any handheld browsers, so if you do, please, ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/19/stupid-web-sites/ This week, I'm again in Alexandria, Virginia. I arrived yesterday afternoon, flying in at Ronald Reagan National Airport. I took the Metro train into Old Town Alexandria where my hotel is. The work this week is to teach one of Guru Labs' many Linux courses for (and at) the U.S. Patent ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/19/an-evening-with-frank-and-the-rain/ On May 25th, I was reading The Wall Street Journal. The cover story was titled, "Credit-Card Issuers' Problem: People Are Paying Their Bills". Why would this be a problem for them? After all, they are in business to make money, right? http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/17/good-news-about-credit-cards/ Well, it finally happened: This morning, I had a couple of SPAM comments on my blog for the first time. I love WordPress; it's just so easy to deal with the SPAM. Still, it will be nice when open-source people finally create software that fully neuters all SPAM. http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/16/awe-nuts/ I just read this great article by Bruce Schneier. Privacy is a very important matter. Privacy is a central, core component to liberty and true freedom. If we (US Citizens) don't pay attention to it, there are forces who would like to take it away. Most of the time, we ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/15/the-value-of-privacy/ Tonight, my wife Charlotte and I went to the Utah Bloggers Conference. I recognized a few faces of people that I had not met before, since they have their faces on the Utah Open Source Planet. As for those of you who don't have your photos up there, yet: some of ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/13/headless-bloggers-escaped-once-again/ In case you haven't heard, Google recently made available a beta for the next version of Google Earth. The big buzz is because there is now a native Linux version. I've seen people talking about the Linux version of Google Earth on the SLLUG Members mailing list. I found an entry ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/13/next-version-of-google-earth-is-already-creating-a-buzz/ Well, as many of you have noticed, my blog started causing those who were viewing the Utah Open Source Planet to get an SSL Certificate Authorization dialog, again. For the time being, I have turned off the convert smileies to graphics option. It turned out, that I had to also pull up ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/12/wordpress-smileys-url-bug-take-2/ Gabe Gunderson wrote this post in response to my previouse entry, OpenBrainstem Mailman Configuration Fixed. His first sentance was: I post this on my blog cause Peregrine doesn’t take comments unless I’m “logged on” and I had it all typed up. Sorry for the inconvenience, Gabe. You'll be happy to know that I ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/08/login-not-required-to-comment/ I figured out how to get mailman working with my Postfix/maildrop/Dovecot setup. http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/07/openbrainstem-mailman-configuration-fixed/ This morning, my wife received a phone call from the Hospital where she had the amniocentesis. Although we had already received the preliminary results at last week's "doctor's" visit, the final results confirmed that everything is looking great. The one piece of "news" she got, was that according to the chemical ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/07/itll-be-a-girl-99/ I just stumbled across this gem on Google's Official Google Research Blog. For those non-software engineering types in the audience, perhaps a good "advertisement" (yes, it's a bit of a spoof on Apple's ads from a couple of years ago). http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/06/nearly-all-binary-searches-and-mergesorts-are-broken/ The May 26-29, 2006 issue of USA Today ran this story. Basically, the Federal Excise Tax was introduced in 1898 to help pay for the Spanish-American War. At that time, a tax on phone service was a tax on only the wealthy. The US Department of the Treasury is finally ending ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/05/108-year-old-phone-tax-ending/ This is in response to Christer Edwards recent post about starting to try out the Dvorak keyboard layout. I haven't used Dvorak layout for a few years now. This is not because I don't want to, but simply because I don't have any convenient keyboards for it at this time. By ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/03/response-the-dvorak-keyboard-layout/ First, I have to thank Jayce^ for his recent post about Synergy. I've been wanting to set it up for a long time now, but could never remember what it was called. As you might know from reading my recent post, this past week, my wife Charlotte and I have cleared ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/03/new-desk-new-synergy/ Charlotte and I have wonderful news. We are expecting our first child. As this is her first pregnancy, Charlotte wanted to keep it under our hats until we were through the first trimester. You just never know, especially with the first one, as I'm sure those of you with children understand. The ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/01/announcement-baby-en-route/ For a little over three years, my wife and I have maintained a 10x15 foot storage unit a couple of miles from our house. We were storing our washer & dryer, a very nice microwave oven, a complete set of kitchen wares plus some spare bits, 10 boxes of dry ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/06/01/how-to-breed-cardboard-boxes-for-fun-and-profit/ My wife and I drove up to my hometown of Weiser, Idaho for my baby sister Kayla's High School graduation. On the way north, we stopped at Best Buy and took a look at the HP Photosmart E317 digital photo camera. I bought one on sale for only $89 (plus ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/05/27/finally-a-digital-photo-camera/ This week, I'm working at the United State Patent & Trademark Office. On Monday, I had some time to myself during lunch and walked around the halls of their classrooms floor. Outside the door of each is a display mounted on the wall, talking about a different inventor (or inventors), ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/05/23/the-real-mccoy/ Tonight, my wife and I went to see a movie. We didn't know what we were going to see before we got to the theater. We decided on the third installment in the Mission: Impossible series of films. It was good. Charlotte & I both liked it. ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/05/13/movie-review-mi3/ If you think you already know what I'm going to say, please, don't stop reading here; I may surprise you. Most of those who will read this already know the dangers of trusting the kinds of email messages like the one I just recently received with the subject line "Your account ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/05/09/warning-high-quality-phishing-spam-ahead/ To all of those who read my last post on the Utah Open Source Planet and saw a request to make a decision regarding an OpenBrainstem SSL certificate, I'm sorry. It turns out that WordPress, the blogging software we use for OpenBrainstem Member Blogs, had a bug in it. In ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/05/04/wordpress-url-bug-fixed/ Today, I've spent almost the whole day getting OpenSUSE 10.0 burned onto CDs for some students here at Guru Labs. I've run into one weird thing after another, all day long. 1. I burned a complete set of bad discs. It looks like the burner in that box ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/04/28/adventures-in-burning-opensuse-100/ I was browsing through some older emails and came across this. It still makes me laugh, so I thought I should share it. The quoted part is from a SPAM message and the commentary is from Bryan Croft. "...including, obviously, your so much coherent, logical, mandatory and ultra-rational advices, criteria, demands, desires, ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/04/27/sometimes-spam-can-have-entertainment-value/ Last week, I found out I would be spending this week in San Francisco, California. I've never been here, before. I came home and asked Charlotte if she wanted to go with me. That put a really big smile on her face. We had to go to Idaho ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/04/11/how-to-plan-a-vacation-in-just-two-days/ On Wednesday, March 29th, 2006, while I was teaching a class in Phoenix, Arizona, I received a phone call from my Mother. She knows not to call during the day when I am traveling unless there is something very important. I got a strange, somewhat unsettled feeling when ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2006/04/07/unexpected-death-grandma-peterson/ My little sister said this in an email, today: -- I would make some suggestions but seeing as how my brain is fried at the moment I will enlighten you all later. http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2005/11/15/great-quote/ Yesterday, in Loa, Utah, the Oyler family reunion took place. Unfortunately, I was unable to make it in time. This past week was spent on a business trip in Seattle, Washington. I was unable to make a flight home on Friday evening. I tried to change from the ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2005/08/07/oyler-family-reunion/ Today, the newest installment in the Harry Potter book series, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", was released. My wife had previously reserved a copy at Barnes & Nobel, which we picked up, this afternoon. However, since she will be leaving town tomorrow evening an a road trip with ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2005/07/16/harry-potter-and-the-half-blood-prince-year-6-available-today/ With a little help from my friend, Fozz, the last Perl module has been installed. RT is now running. However, it is not yet ready for use. The configuration of RT will take me a bit of time (especially since this is my first time using it). Take a ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2005/07/13/rtopenbrainstemnet-working/ As you may or may not have noticed the main OpenBrainstem website is still not up. I have been busier at work over the past four weeks than I had anticipated (what else is new, eh? :) and have not been able to put as much time into it's ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2005/07/01/progress-report-openbrainstem-main-website/ One of the first services being created for OpenBrainstem Members, is their own individual WordPress blog. The blogs can be found at http://blog.openbrainstem.net/. That page merely holds an index (with link) to each Member's blog. Enjoy! http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2005/06/19/first-member-bogs-are-now-online/ After coming home from work (I didn't leave the office until 7pm) I started writing the first pages for this site. So far, I have just described some of the projects that I am working on. I also created categories. My wife was involved with a small party in our backyard ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2005/06/16/blog-site-content-started/ OpenBrainstem is starting to come to life. This is very exciting for me. Not sure what all the excitement is about? Well, then, I guess I should give you a little information about OpenBrainstem, and this blog. OpenBrainstem provides resources for "Intelligent Open Source Software Engineering." More ... http://blog.openbrainstem.net/peregrine/2005/06/13/welcome-aboard/