Happy New Year. Here’s a picture of a snowman that someone built in the Grapevine (Tejon Pass in California). So far, 2011 is going great. I wish I had the time and money to go snowboarding this year, the snow is great up in Tahoe. Maybe next year, although I’m keeping my eye out for good package deals.
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This Amazonian wasp is nowhere near as scary as the bugs on the Internet
The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) which manages the Domain Name System (DNS) software that practically everyone uses announced today that practically everyone’s software is vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack. This means that you can expect major interruptions to Internet services for weeks (or months) to come.
DNS is the system by which the name of a place on the Internet gets translated to the address of a place on the Internet. It’s almost exactly like looking up an address on Google Maps, a name goes in, and address comes out. All of this happens behind the scenes in your Web browser or mail client or other Internet software.
The Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND) software has been the vector of some of the worst attacks on the Internet ever. Major portions of the Internet have been disabled due to problems with this software. You may have heard the old adage that the Internet was designed to route around damage to itself, and this is true (thanks to the US Department of Defense being involved in the early days), but the DNS system remains a single point of failure for the general Internet at large.
If you have some places that you absolutely must have connectivity to, you can prepare yourself for the worst:
- Open up a command-line (Start->Run->”cmd” on Windows, Terminal.app on Mac, Linux users need no advice)
- Run the command “nslookup <name>”, where <name> is the hostname, such as “gmail.com”
- Write down all the IP addresses associated with the name (there may be one or more)
- When the shit hits the fan, replace the name of the site with the IP address
Do this for your most importat sites, and that should protect you from losing connectivity if something goes horribly wrong. Do note that these name-to-address mappings change frequently, so it’s not a bad idea to do this every couple of weeks.
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/706148 http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/837744 http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/510208
I’m freshly back from a nice 10-day vacation that included plenty of delicious food. My family was strictly vegan for a long time (after I grew up), and although things have relaxed somewhat, my little sister still insisted on having Tofurkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I didn’t mind. It’s become somewhat of a tradition, and even though it’s not really the best food in the world, the nostalgia more than makes up for it.
I did get a lot of crap from my family for drinking diet sodas. Personally, I don’t see the harm in one or two cans a day, but it did inspire me to seek out some alternatives. I found this great stuff called Zevia soda that is sweetened with stevia and comes in a delicious Ginger Root Beer flavor. Problem solved.
I also really enjoyed spending a little time in New Mexico. Santa Fe is a really nice town, and I could actually imagine myself living there one day. I am totally in love with the chiles.
Now that I’m back at work, I’ll need plenty of protein, so it was turkey for breakfast and roast beef for lunch.
Siri from Twirl and Dip serving up Ice Cream to street food event promoter Matt Cohen, founder of Off the Grid.
My fantastic friend Meg from San Francisco (OK, full disclosure, I actually have two friends named Meg, and they’re BOTH fantastic) recently quit her job and bought a soft-serve ice cream truck with her best friend Siri. They worked incredibly hard to bring the truck up to modern and mostly-working condition, and they’ve recently begun serving homemade, gourmet soft-serve and classic ice cream treats. View full article »
My neighborhood got crazy on Monday night after the World Series win. I had a really hard time finding a place to cross Mission, and so I inched through the crowd at about 1 mile per hour. The crowd beat on my car, yelled at me to honk my horn for the Giants, then someone reached into my window and poured beer on my lap. I wasn’t happy.
To add insult to injury, I was having car troubles (with my clutch), and the careful inching through the crowd burned out the clutch completely and ruined the flywheel. Thanks Giants fans, that’s $2,000 to fix everything.
It could have been worse. A block away from where I went through the crowd, someone drove into the crowd a little fast, and may or may not have hit someone, and the crowd assaulted the driver and his passenger, leaving them bloodied and sending them to the hospital. Someone else I know had her car turned upside-down. I’m really glad I have a garage.