• Natalia Dmytruk

    Via [www.worldchanging.com] – a warming tale: [www.sun-sentinel.com] Dmytruk, 48, made sign language her vocation and today interprets for Ukraine’s state-run television. Her face and hands appear in a little box at the bottom of the screen as she sends out the news on the mid-morning and early afternoon telecasts to the hearing-impaired. During the tense

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  • Blog meme: five people you’d like to blog with

    Geoff Arnold poses me the following challenge: Name five people you’d like to blog with. I interpret this as “name five people, living or dead, whose blogs you’d like to read and link to”; only a supreme egotist would expect mutual blogrolling from a superstar. […deletia…] The blogs where I read about this said something

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  • Solaris 10 Security Feature Checklist

    So this is something I created and have been editor of for some while, and which has been used often as a quick reference for security features of Solaris; I don’t consider it definitive, nor complete, nor error-free, but I do try and keep it up to date and accurate on a best-efforts basis, and

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  • “Three-Strikes” Password Security Considered Antiquated, Hazardous, Stupid and Wrong.

    Native “three strikes” password lockout is something that has only recently been added to Solaris 10, and that only in response to customer demand. This is because modern security geeks (myself included) tend to view “three-strikes” as a horrible, complicated, messy, stupid security risk, irrespective of the number of stuck-in-the-1980s VAX-VMS-based / IBM-mainframe-based customer security

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  • New Bike Bits! Happy New Toy!

    In the mail today, I received a new Secdem Screen and a pair of Fastway F3 pegs for fitting to the 12GS at soonest opportunity! More details, and a review, to follow.

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  • ‘Extinct’ woodpecker found alive

    This is superb – every American bird book I have, the ones of the coffee-table variety at least – cites this creature as a tragic example of extinction, along with the Passenger Pigeon and others: [news.bbc.co.uk] The spectacular ivory-billed woodpecker, which was declared extinct in 1920, has been found alive in North America, Science magazine

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  • uptime

    They’re powering-off the lab at the weekend, but having achieved 365.2422+ days of uptime, I felt that that our firewall’s achievement was worth recording: fox $ uname -a SunOS fox 5.8 Generic_108528-11 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraSPARC-IIi-cEngine fox $ uptime   3:20pm up 365 day(s), 4 hr(s), 2 users, load average: 0.04, 0.05, 0.05 …I’ve seen higher,

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  • Emilio Scotto’s Website

    [emilioscotto.com] When Emilio Scotto (Argentina) was nine years old, he told his mother, tomorrow, I am going to travel around the world. She laughed, and replied, tomorrow, you are going to school, but from that day on, he set his mind on wandering the planet, he bought atlases and maps and was certain that one

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  • Webservers that still have a Sun logo for their favicon.ico

    Here’s a silliness that I’ve meant to publish/collate for some time; a lot of webservers – post installation – never get their favicon.ico file updated; from my perspective this manifests itself as visiting a (usually commercial) URL and being surprised to see a small Sun Microsystems logo pop-up in the URL bar of my browser

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  • Spider attack chef saved by mobile phone snap

    A Somerset chef who was bitten twice by a highly-venemous Brazilian spider was saved thanks to a snap he took of the beast on his mobile phone, the Times reports. Matthew Stevens, 23, disturbed the Brazilian Wandering Spider (Phoneutria fera) which had stowed away in a crate of bananas and found its way to the

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  • Charming discovery of the Week

    There exists a town in Germany named Poing – and I know someone who lives there.

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  • Mystery of German exploding toads

    Via Found comes [news.bbc.co.uk] Toads in an area of northern Germany are being killed off by a mysterious disease – they are exploding. Thousands of the amphibians have died in recent days in a pond in Hamburg’s Altona district, with their bodies swelling to bursting point. The toads’ entrails are propelled for up to a

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