dimmer's blog

Some people are accused of wearing rose-colored glasses, but you won't be surprised when I say that it's actually a much grander problem than that. I have endless amusement (and sometimes consternation) that an objective event can be interpreted radically differently depending on someone's background. For example, imagine a man telling a woman "Nice ass!". My first reaction to this scenario is that the guy is a douchebag (What does it say about me that that was my first interpretation? And why did I create such a colored scenario to begin with?).

What is Dwolla

Dwolla is a new payment network. From the user perspective it's kind of like Paypal except they intentionally don't support credit cards - only direct bank to bank transfers like ACH. But ACH is slow and sometimes ineffective (ACH accounts can be overdrawn). According to some people, banks slow down ACH transfers on purpose to make money off the "float" (I don't have an authoritative source on this). Dwolla invented their own method to instantly transfer money with fund verification they call FiSync. They are trying to get banks to support FiSync so that their customers can utilize instant transfers. So far, the list of FiSync-capable institutions is relatively small. If you're interested in FiSync, I recommend you ask your bank to adopt it; and if they won't, see if you can switch to a bank or credit union that does.

Congratulations on buying a home. It's an exciting time with thousands of details that need to be worked out. It's easy, even required, to gloss over some details simply because there isn't enough time to manually check everything. I'm here to tell you that termites are not a detail to gloss over.

This method may not work for everyone. If it doesn't I would try Apple's recommended solution of a backup, reinstall (this step may not be necessary, a reformat might be good enough), and restore.

The easy method:

Adding to the growing number of stories concluding that Paypal is evil [1] [2], I finally felt their cold callus fingers myself. But admittedly, I had it way easier than the poor violin seller.

I just wanted to share my experience because I could not find this online and had to learn the hard way. The local Apple Geniuses also did not know this until I brought them this problem.

Have you recently upgraded approx (say from Debian Lenny to Squeeze) and had these errors whenever you apt-get update from multiple systems to an approx server?

The problem is a result of approx switching from an independent daemon to using inetd, which does not support many connections out of the box. The fix is this:

Edit /etc/inetd.conf and change: 9999 stream tcp nowait approx /usr/sbin/approx /usr/sbin/approx
to:
9999 stream tcp nowait.9999 approx /usr/sbin/approx /usr/sbin/approx

The SEC and CFTC finally released the results of their investigation that the 2010 May 6th "Flash Crash" where the Dow lost 1,000 points in 30 minutes. The report lays blame on one errant firm coupled with the effects of Hyper Trading. This is dissappointingly slow since smart people from Nanex figured that out back in June.

This kind of he-said she-said psuedo-journalist drivel annoys me. How about some objective context for once? In an article from CNN about religious response to Stephen Hawking's latest book:

14 days after Adobe released a security upgrade for Windows and OS X Adobe Reader 9.3.2 and 39 days after Adobe announced a vulnerability was being actively exploited, Adobe has released the same security upgrade for 2nd class citizen Linux.

Although this amount of time seems atrociously long to me, to be fair other companies have notoriously taken much, much longer to patch security updates on a single platform (*cough* Microsoft, Apple). Still, this kind of lag is unacceptable when there are known exploits circulating.

Why is it that Obama's latest "black eye", the SEC Inspector General's cleanup of employees surfing porn (aka "redtube gate") has gotten so much more press coverage than when Bush Administration Department of Interior employees were caught having sex with, doing cocaine with, and accepting money from oil industry lobbyists

Most apache (and probably all web server administrators in general) know that they should not allow access to .htaccess or .htpasswd files. Access to these is typically denied by default with: <Files ~ "\.ht"> Order allow,deny Deny from all </Files>

Until recently, you needed a dedicated IP address for each SSL website because TLS did not support named-based virtual hosting. This made hosting SSL websites relatively expensive, and maybe even impossible if you ran out of IP addresses. Although this standard, now elucidated in RFC 4366, has been around since at least 2003, it has been very slow to catch on.

I was pretty stoked when I found this howto for pxe booting a Ubuntu live CD. PXE booting is really handy because it makes diagnosis and installation faster. The Ubuntu Live CD (or any linux boot CD really) is really handy for troubleshooting systems or doing maintenance work.

I could not find anywhere where the nagios documentation specified whether or not service dependencies using hostgroups use hostgroups in an any-host, same-host, or all-host configuration. Specifically, what about when the dependent hostgroup is the same as the hostgroup that is depended on (and services vary)?

Today I decided to drop off all the used motor oil I've been collecting over the years, but have been too lazy to do anything about. I discovered online that our society's way of handling citizen's used motor oil isn't collection centers, but autoparts stores and oil-changing shops. Typically, places have a 5 gallon limit, and I had 7 gallons.

Extramarital affair aside, this is the most popular image of Rielle Hunter on the web, according to google images:

Now the image that CNN chose:

Rielle gets punked here too, of course. But most people are going to think Edwards likes to bang witches after they see this picture.

It's a critical time to stand up for government and corporate accountability. The latest bit of responsibility the Bush Administration is trying to dodge is enforcing rule of law regarding citizen privacy. If the Bush Administration is able to cover their corporate sponsor's backsides by granting telecom corporations immunity, people will never be able to find out if they are being illegally wiretapped.

Lawsuits against telecomm corporations have a few very important purposes:

BRANDON, South Dakota (CNN) -- Sen. Hillary Clinton said Friday that she regretted comments that evoked the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy as part of her explanation for why she was staying in the presidential race late into the primary season.

I don't like to partake in conspiracy theories, but this just scares me.

source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/23/clinton.comments/index.html

I created a 8192 bit SSL key/cert pair for a website. Firefox viewed the website fine. Safari however complained:
the data does not appear to be a valid certificate

4096 bits worked fine. What gives?

Don't ask me why I need an 8192 bit SSL key. I trust/love/fear my government, see I'm wearing my American flag lapel pin right now!