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    Note on SwANH Registrations

    by  • 2008/06/10 • Uncategorized

    I went to a SwANH seminar a few weeks back which was quite good. One thing I didn’t realize was that SwANH was going to give my e-mail address to the event sponsor as part of the deal. I just found this out as I received a product advertisement from them to the address...

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    Google, Target Me!

    by  • 2008/05/29 • Uncategorized

    There’s some grumbling about that Google is going to start targeting media ads to people based on their search preferences. There’s only one thing to say about that: bring it on! Having just sat through a Clairol hair coloring commercial to view a short news clip, I can’t think of any less efficient use...

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    Flash Vulnerabilty In The Wild

    by  • 2008/05/27 • Uncategorized

    Ouch. Every flash-enabled web browser without a Flash-blocking feature (ala NoScript) is vulnerable to remote compromise. Having this much exposure completely controlled by one proprietary 3rd-party closed-source vendor is bad for the ecosystem. There’s a Free Flash clone underway, but it’s not good enough to replace Flash for many sites that require Flash, and...

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    ZFS/Linux Summit Meeting

    by  • 2008/05/19 • Uncategorized

    Photos of Jeff Bonwick of ZFS fame and Linus Torvalds of Linux fame. Turns out that they’re neighbors and Jeff was just helping Linus hook up a new gas grill. (j/k) ZFS is the ‘one filesystem to rule them all’ but it can’t be brought into the Linux kernel because of patents and licenses....

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    Architectures Scale

    by  • 2008/05/19 • Uncategorized

    Blaine Cook, formerly of Twitter, reminds folks that architectures scale, not languages. Some folks have been complaining recently that RoR doesn’t scale, yet sites like Yellowpages.com know how to do architecture and do just fine with it. This isn’t to say that Ruby and Rails both couldn’t be faster and better optimized for scaling,...

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    Note on Security Update Coverage

    by  • 2008/05/17 • Uncategorized

    In the past I’ve covered security problems in various software packages I don’t use or recommend, and I haven’t been doing that for some time, but I don’t think I wrote a note to that effect. Going forward I’ll try not to replicate the work US-CERT is doing and avoid pointing out anything less...

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    How Gartner Works

    by  • 2008/05/17 • Uncategorized

    I attempted to summarize what Gartner’s Research unit does based on their own webpage. I failed. Check it out here. So, the other day I was thinking about what Gartner actually does. In a former life as an IT drone we had a love/hate relationship with Gartner, which was really just whether we agreed...

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