cygweb

Luckily, we had a few weeks' warning about the MS RPC vulnerability. I had patched my personal computers weeks ago, and deployed the patch to my servers at work just this last Sunday. Coincidentally, the first widespread worm exploiting the vulnerability started making its way around the Internet on Monday. I think we're lucky we had as much time as we did to plan our patching actions. As the complexity of Microsoft's operating systems continues to rise, so do the number of potential security vulnerabilities. It's too bad that home users are being sold an operating system, Windows XP Home Edition, that's more complex than many of them need.

SCO is set to rebrand SCO Linux Server as SCO OpenWindfall, dubbing it "The legal, licensed Linux solution for paying customers." Darl McBride, SCO CEO, explained, "We've seen great response to our Linux licensing program, but our customers were asking for an up-to-date Linux product from us that they could pay for. Our engineering staff has put together a distribution based on the latest SCO/Linux software for those customers." SCO OpenWindfall is based on Linux kernel version 2.4.21, which SCO insists includes its intellectual property. "The Linux kernel continues to exist because of SCO's IP," said McBride, "and we will continue to remind everyone of that."

Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, is unconcerned. "Anyone ignorant enough to pay SCO for an unwarranted and overpriced, not to mention frivolous, license to run Linux probably doesn't require the latest kernel," Torvalds said. He added, "Darl McBride is misleading people. The homo."

Jeremy Shockey could not be reached for comment.

Ahh, Saturday night - ESPN-HD - Buffalo Bills. Cool. Now they just need to put some points on the board! I'm just about ready for our FF draft tomorrow...

My fantasy football league held our draft today. I think I did pretty well. Here's my team (in the order they were drafted):

• QB Donovan McNabb PHI
• RB Travis Henry BUF
• RB Charlie Garner OAK
• WR Eric Moulds BUF
• RB William Green CLE
• DT Panthers CAR
• WR Troy Brown NE
• K Jay Feely ATL
• TE Stephen Alexander SD
• QB Brad Johnson TB
• WR Marty Booker CHI
• DT Titans TEN
• K Mike Hollis NYG
• TE Kyle Brady JAX
• WR Tai Streets SF
• RB Marcel Shipp ARI

Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has some insight into the company whose negligence may have caused the blackout. (I haven't yet looked for or found "official word" on its cause.) He's still blogging over at Lessig's and has an interesting story to tell. Worth a read no matter what side of the fence you're on.

Amazon has it available for pre-order here. They list a release date of October 21st, which is later than the September 23rd date I've heard for the DVD. But they still don't have the DVD listed. And I can't find it at DVD Planet, either.

I admit it: this is much funnier than my (apparently) lame attempt at SCO humor. Props to Blogdex for the link.

I haven't posted much about coffee here. Today, I was thinking that I want to try to learn to make a greater variety of coffees. I own a Krups Il Cafe Duomo combination espresso/coffee maker, and I probably use the espresso side every month or two. I've gotten into the habit of just making Starbucks' ground Columbian coffee about 4-5 times a week. It's just so easy and tastes so good. I used to grind the Starbucks bean coffee, but I've found I go through a bag of the ground stuff quickly enough for it not to start going bad. I keep it in the freezer. Grinding adds too much time and mess to the weekday coffee ritual.

I decided to Google for some interesting coffee recipes and found some good ones here. I'm going to try and come up with a good weekday latte that isn't too time-consuming. Of course, just using and cleaning the espresso-maker-side of my Duomo eats up time that wouldn't otherwise be required if I just made coffee...

I'm a sucker for both Coke and coffee. If I had to give up one, it would be Coke. Coffee has better personality, and tastes much better with cheesecake.

I'm really hoping the third season of Enterprise is good. I haven't looked for much pre-season info about it, but I came across a link to this Cinescape article and it has a picture of T'pol's new look. Well, the eye candy definitely isn't going away... ;)

I'll be re-watching some of my Enterprise MPEGs to get me set for the season opener on Wednesday, September 10th.

I have a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, but I don't do tons of programming these days. My favorite language is Python, but I haven't had an opportunity to use it at work. However, I've used it for some of my own purposes: prime number generators, playlist generators, and other itch-scratching-type things. But today I coded my first script that generates XML (an RSS 2.0 feed) from a particular web page. Pretty cool. I think that you don't learn much about a programming language until you use it to solve a problem you're interested in. That's how I've come to learn what I know about Python; I wasn't even exposed to object-oriented programming while I was in college.

I don't know how the company whose web page I'm parsing will feel about the feed I'm making, so for now I'm keeping the URL private.

I subscribe to about 30 RSS feeds, split between blogs and news sources. Today I saw the first instance of what I would consider "Feed Spam". It's in this ZDnet feed, and points to this URL. At least the title of the item started with "ADV:"; that's more respect than we get from email spammers.

A phone still set at "Nokia Tune" is the VCR flashing "12:00" of the 2000's.

What I watched of last night's Colts/Broncos game (until early third quarter) seemed like regular-season football to me. Bravo, guys.

People are complaining about all the preseason injuries (like Vick's & Pennington's) but I'm of the mind that the "real-speed" practice that the preseason games provide is a good thing for everyone involved. The practical value of the games to the teams is to evaluate talent and scale down the roster. Getting the starters on the field gets more eyes on the games and also helps us fantasy-football-playing fans see our players in action before determining our Week One starters. You won't see me complaining about more games.

I haven't posted much this week because things have been pretty busy. My wife and I painted, bordered, and rearranged our son's room in preparation for his new bed, which should come in another week or two. That took a heck of a lot of time earlier in the week.

I've rebuilt my Linux server Cosmic with more storage and am currently seeing what it would/will take to move Cygweb over there. I'm interesting in seeing if Linux/Apache will serve the site faster than W2K/IIS (the current combo), even at a 150MHz disadvantage (Cosmic has a 600MHz P3).

I'm about to implement a navbar to better organize this site, which will give me room to add more content. I'm going to improve the default MT archives page and link to it, probably make the GeekCam a pop-up box and take it off the main index page, and maybe put a little more personal info online. We'll see.

Don's fantasy hockey league is starting up now and we're having a draft in a few weeks. I don't know that I'll have much of a draft strategy, but I'm going to try to come up with something better than "use the default Yahoo! player rankings" before it's time. I have my Yahoo! Fantasy Football draft next Tuesday night; you can check out my league here if you'd like. My team is the PA Thunderbolts.

One more week 'til Kickoff Thursday!

I'm posting this from a public terminal at Cafe Fresco, a new restaurant on Paxton Street in Harrisburg. I think they're pretty uncommon in this area (public terminals, not restaurants, that is). The food here is pretty good - sandwiches and the like.

We took our son to see "Bear and the Big Blue House Live" today at the Giant Center in Hershey. One of these types of shows a year is good - and my son's been on his best behavior for them (we saw "Sesame Street Live" last year).

Still playing with moving this site over to Linux. Since I'm currently not concerned with permalinks, the shackles are relatively light. I'm seeing much smoother service from Apache2 than IIS. And I bet the Perl CGI is crunched faster there. I also have more storage on the Linux box.

More updates later.

I'm running the site on Mandrake Linux 9.1 now. I think there is a much greater gap in the performance of Perl CGI (which MT is based on) between Windows 2000 and Linux than there is with Zope on the two platforms.

Please comment if you notice any changes. Thanks.

Two cuts made today struck me oddly, and I think they're going to end up costing the respective teams. The Titans cut Neil O'Donnell, who has been about as skilled and gracious a backup QB can be. With some of McNair's injuries, they've needed him for extended periods. And the Steelers cut Chris Fuamatu-Ma'afala, whom I think they're going to wish they had as a counterpunch to Amos Zereoue. I like The Bus, but I don't think he's going to have a good year.