The holiday season is over today. I not only managed to survive, but had a fair amount of fun during it, and succeeded in meeting some new folks, as well as renewing ties with others I’ve known for years.
Today it’s time to get back to work. I not only have to catch up with the normal month-end stuff, but also year-end things, plus a bunch of client work that I probably should have been working on last week and wasn’t. I think the next few days will feel extra-busy, and will hopefully manage to do some creative slacking to ease that feeling.
Yesterday, I tried to clear the inch of frozen sleet and snow on the sidewalks. I succeeded on the sidewalk in front of the house, plus the area in front of the garage, which are both mostly clear, and if there’s any sunshine at all today, they should clear up nicely. But the sidewalk on the north side of the house is still covered in snow and ice, and likely to remain so. That’s the section I most wanted to replace over the summer because it’s wildly uneven, and the current coating of ice and snow levels things out and still provides a reasonable amount of traction. Perhaps I’ll be able to just shovel down to that level to clear any future snowfalls. Mark’s getting his first experience with cleaning sidewalks, too.
- So the US is fingrprinting swarthy furriners who come to the country, but because Agencies Clash on Fingerprint DB, it doesn’t actually help catch any bad guys. I feel oh so much safer now. [wired]
- Here are Several approaches to defending against sshd brute force attacks. I’ve noticed some folks trying to brute-force their way into my server with nearly 400 different usernames tried yesterday from one IP address, and guess I should look into hardening things a bit. If nothing else, I want to set my server up so it automatically bans an IP address that’s hammering on the door like that. [openbsd]
- A new paper from the same guy who found problems in the Clipper Chip has written a paper on Safecracking for the Computer Scientist. I haven’t gotten around to reading the whole thing yet, but it sounds good. [slashdot]