TKO - Built for disaster

I was just thinking about why people are so stubborn. When I went, for the first time, to Amsterdam as a teenager my dad said fine, go there, but don't go near the Red Light district, you'll be robbed. So I went down to Amsterdam, and coming out from the central station I walked down the street looking for a cheap place to stay. I found a youth hostel called Bobby's (which I later discovered was quite legendary), checked in, left my back pack behind the reception and asked for the directions to the Red Light District. So much for the good advice from my dad. I didn't get robbed, but I soon discovered that there were ladies sitting in the windows, offering the time of my life for a special price. As I was window shopping a number of guys (always guys) came up to me offering the time of my life with a little help from different substances. Well, I wasn't there for either of those, even if a few of the guys really insisted that I needed what they had to offer and wou...

I found this photo article and it made me sad. I like to think that we, in the western world, have a sane view on most things humanitarian. I know, there are many things and laws and issues we need to change or learn from, but all in all I believe we have pretty fine rulesets to live by. Americans have some hilarious bylaws that we all laugh about, so does a lot of European countries. I have close relations to Australians and sometimes I have to catch my breath when some of their laws become known to me. But still, I get worried when a whole country is degraded and shot back to medieval ages because of religion and beliefs. I can not understand how this can be good for mankind, or the citizens of Afghanistan. I just can't...

Most of you will notice (not that there are so many reading this blog) that the design has changed to a slicker, more sophisticated, design. Thought I would see how I like this, and what blogger new design "engine" has to offer. Just need time to play around with it.

Found a very good blog today. Written by Reach 364 , captain and C-17 pilot in the USAF, and he shows great insight when looking at his own cyberworld and gaining understanding on how it works. He also writes about his findings in a very good way so laymen at all levels can follow. It will be very interesting to follow this guy's path to greater knowledge of the darker side. Also the comments are giving away great links to resources if you want to dive and learn more of computer security.

I don't know what to think about this mail sent out on Ubuntu development list. I have been living in Sparc-land for well over 10 years, mainly running SunOS on servers, hundreds of them. Whatever I think of the development in days gone by I have grown attached to them, kind of a love-hate-affair we have. I run Ubuntu on several PC's on Intel platforms, both stationary and laptops, and I am fairly happy about them. I don't do heavy development anymore so performance is not the main issue, functionality is. All in all I'm pleased with the environment when it's tweaked to please my eye and behavior. What worries me more than anything else is that this might be one outcome of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems. That Larry Ellison decides he wants to keep things close to him and change the fairly open atmosphere Sun started to market in the latter days. Not only Ubuntu will suffer from this, more importantly OpenSolaris will. If OpenSolaris dies Solaris will p...

I believe this is something worth watching. CERN is launching a series of webcasts with experts giving their thoughts and tips on how to secure your computers. They call it CERN Security Day and takes place 10th of June 2010. Due to the location of CERN (border of Switzerland and France) some of the speeches given are in French, but as I understand it these will be subtitled in English at some stage. The full program for the event is to be found here . Note: Times are Zürich local time.

25 years has passed since Hackers was published. Based on true stories he made a significant impact on tech savvy kids, as did the movie . O'Reilly has an interview with the author where he's reflecting on what it all was about and how things ahve come where they are. O'Reilly also published a revised version of the book.

Every once in a blue moon someone comes up with indisputable statistics and presents them in pie-charts leaving very little to the imagination. Here's all you need to know to know that you're not alone doing these every day chores et al.

I've been using Linux since the olden golden days of before 1.0. In the beginning Slackware came on 1.44 floppies and the stack grew on me from approximately 12 of those to over a hundred... tedious work to load all those upon installation. Today it's a bit different with information super highway connections from home and a gazillion of different distros to choose from. My flavor for the day is Ubuntu, mostly because it just works and I like to think I have more interesting stuff to do than fiddle around with libs and compilers more than I do at work. Long gone are the days with building up a 386 from bits and pieces. Today Linux is used for more demanding stuff, like being in top 500 of supercomputers... actually 91% of the top 500 runs on Linux of some kind.