Monthly Archives: September 2004

Libertarian Presidential Candidate Michael Badnarik Answers Questions on Slashdot

Posted on September 20, 2004 by Kevin

Slashdot readers had the opportunity to submit questions to LP candidate Michael Badnarik:

Last monday, you were given the chance to Ask Questions of the Libertarian Party’s US Presidential nominee, Michael Badnarik. Today we present to you 15 of the most highly rated comments, and the answers from the man himself. Thanks to Mr. Badnarik for taking the time to talk to us.
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Feelin' old…

Posted on September 17, 2004 by Kevin

My oldest son, Tommy, started kindergarden last week. I’m getting old… :-)

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Changes in new Star Wars Trilogy DVDs

Posted on September 17, 2004 by Kevin

The Digital Bits has an interesting page that shows the changes made to the original Star Wars trilogy for its release on DVD.

Update: Ain’t it Cool News also has a good article on the subject.

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A Critique of Port Knocking

Posted on September 16, 2004 by Kevin

NewsForge has an interesting article that critiques port knocking, which is a method of opening and closing service ports on servers via a secret knock sequence. Their conclusion?

In general, port knocking has too many points of potential attack. In particular, anyone with non-root access to the server should be able to trivially break the system. This does not seem to be of concern to the developers.

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Clowns Invade West Bank

Posted on September 16, 2004 by Kevin

Warning – pictures will be disturbing to anyone with enough sense to dislike clowns.

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Finally – Edgar Rice Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars" on the Big Screen

Posted on September 16, 2004 by Kevin

Kerry Conran, director of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, is filming Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars. This is the first book of Burroughs’ excellent Martian Tales series.

Stanley Wiater’s review on Amazon.com describes the books quite well:

Although Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) is justifiably famous as the creator of Tarzan of the Apes, that uprooted Englishman was not his only popular hero. Burroughs’s first sale (in 1912) was A Princess of Mars, opening the floodgates to one of the must successful–and prolific–literary careers in history. This is a wonderful scientific romance that perhaps can be best described as early science fiction melded with an epic dose of romantic adventure. A Princess of Mars is the first adventure of John Carter, a Civil War veteran who unexpectedly find himself transplanted to the planet Mars. Yet this red planet is far more than a dusty, barren place; it’s a fantasy world populated with giant green barbarians, beautiful maidens in distress, and weird flora and monstrous fauna the likes of which could only exist in the author’s boundless imagination. Sheer escapism of the tallest order, the Martian novels are perfect entertainment for those who find Tarzan’s fantastic adventures aren’t, well, fantastic enough. Although this novel can stand alone, there are a total of 11 volumes in this classic series of otherworldly, swashbuckling adventure.

I really hope he does the book justice.

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Want a Gmail account?

Posted on September 16, 2004 by Kevin

I have a few Gmail invites available. If you’d like an invite to use Gmail (Google’s new webmail service with 1 GB storage), just drop me an email at webmaster@jarnot.com.

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Risks of Digital Storage

Posted on September 1, 2004 by Kevin

Think your CDROM backups are safe? So did Tom Gromak at the Detroit News:

After a recent move, I found myself cleaning out boxes that looked like they hadn’t been opened in at least two previous moves – maybe longer. Inside one was a computer magazine trumpeting on its cover (yet again): “The paperless office has arrived.”

Cheap optical storage devices like writeable and rewriteable CDs, it predicted, were going to revolutionize the way we store and share and retrieve everything. Among the casualties: Floppy disks, ZIP drives, file cabinets and folders.

I remember buying into that argument when I shelled out hundreds of dollars years ago for my first rewriteable CD drive. I quickly, and blindly, moved many megabytes of documents — articles I had written, digital photos and scans of photos, audio snippets of my daughter, etc. And all those obsolete printouts went into file 13. My information was safe and sound, and I could sleep better.

So, as I re-read that old magazine, I wondered: Where were all those old documents? It didn’t take long to find the series of rewriteable discs I had used to save them (I had used rewriteable discs so I could update some of the works without ending up with duplicate versions of the files). I popped the CD-RW into my PC with the same expectation one gets when cracking open a time capsule. And I got — I got — nothing but a Windows error message offering to format the unformatted disc in my PC.

Everything I had saved, everything I had disposed of because it was supposedly safe, was gone.

This is why I not only backup important data to CDROM, but also to a dedicated large-capacity hard drive.

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Tips for Naming Computers

Posted on September 1, 2004 by Kevin

Have a bunch of new computers that need names? Here are some handy tips for naming computers and names given to computers.

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