Sensitive ears

As I blogged about before, I used to be a part-time recording engineer. It was a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that I learned some cool things about music production. The curse is that now I can’t help but notice when a song is mixed wrong. Maybe a microphone is too hot, or a vocal is too loud, but I notice and it makes me cringe.

As a photographer I know that little things can make a big difference in a photograph. The same applies to music. Once I learned what to listen for I can’t help but notice the mistakes.

Lybian jet crashes

An Afriqiyah Airlines jet from Johannesburg crashed during landing at the Tripoli airport today, killing 92 people and leaving an 11-year-old boy as the sole survivor. While it’s early in the investigation, with an 8-month-old plane, an otherwise-sterling safety record, and clear conditions at the time of the crash, I’m betting the pilots simply forgot to check their fuel.

System administration by the book

I browsed the computer book section of my local Borders this weekend, looking for something that might make me a better system administrator. Among all the books for applications ranging from web tools, programming languages, and others there was a noticeable lack of books showing how to manage the systems that run these applications. The only book I saw that came close to this was a book devoted to Ubuntu server administration.

Good system administration does not come by accident, it comes by many accidents! It takes years of experience dealing with the headaches that computers can cause before one finds their sysadmin sweet spot. While it takes most of us many years to gain that knowledge, it would be nice if a few books were available that would condense this hard-earned wisdom into helpful advice, independent of the actual platforms involved (bookstores seem to love to group their books based on a popular, high-profile name. System administration, as a concept and philosophy, does not lend itself to this kind of packaging).
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Greenway ride to lunch

Today Kelly wanted to take advantage of the beautiful Mother’s Day weather to ride our bikes someplace for lunch. We opted for the Quizno’s sub place on Six Forks Road. Rather than pile our bikes in the van and haul them to the greenway, this time we let our kids ride with us through the neighborhood to the greenway.

It worked like a champ! We got to Quizno’s within 30 minutes and greatly enjoyed the novelty of getting there without a car. We enjoyed a fun lunch on the restaurant deck before moseying over to Borders to browse books. Then it was back home via the greenway. Easy! The kids didn’t even balk at the long, slow climb up Dennis Avenue: the home stretch.
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The compelled certificate creation attack

My friend Jeff has alerted me to a large hole in the SSL encryption problem: that of the compelled certificate creation attack.

Here’s how it works: your web browser comes pre-programmed to trust a number of certificate authorities. A certificate authority is an organization which vouches for an SSL-certificate being presented by a website. An SSL-certificate is designed to positively identify that a website you’re connecting to is who it says it is.

A national government intent on spying could compel one of these certificate authorities (call it ABC Certificates) to create an imposter SSL certificate (for, say, bankofamerica.com) and bless it with ABC Certificates’s stamp of approval. Because your browser trusts ABC Certificates, it will happily trust this fake certificate from bankofamerica.com. The evil national government could then surreptitiously intercept all traffic bound for the real bankofamerica.com and point it to its fake website so as to collect information. Or, it could surreptitiously insert a proxy into the SSL data stream and capture packets, with you or your browser being none the wiser.

You can read the findings of the two Indiana University researchers, Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm, here [PDF] on Cryptome.Org. You can also read the discussion of the vulnerability here (scroll to lower 2/3rds of the transcript).

Farmville maker raking in the cash

We were in Borders today chatting with one of the staffers. Somehow the conversation veered to Facebook, when mentioned an amazing statistic about the service. He told us the company that makes the (addicting or annoying, depending on your point of view) games Farmville and Mafia Wars on Facebook is on track to make $450 million this year, selling non-existent livestock and guns.

Sure enough, Business Week has the scoop on this three-year-old company named Zynga. Now where can I find a book on the Facebook API?

John Denver: still big in China

I was listening to the Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication as I was mowing the grass today. The B-Boys are Buddhists and their songs often have lyrics about Tibet. They’d never be welcomed with open arms in China, I thought.

Then I remembered someone who was welcomed with open arms in China: John Denver. Denver toured China in October 1992, playing multiple cities, apparently the first Western artist to tour there. I remembered someone telling me during my visit to China that his song Take Me Home, Country Roads was one of the most popular Western songs in China.
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Tough Saturday

Today began with enough promise: a happy family, brilliant blue skies, and some time to enjoy being ourselves. We puttered a bit for breakfast before getting on to our tasks for the day. Kelly began to get the house clean for our dinner guests and I began work on getting the yard whipped into shape. Kelly left Travis with me while she and Hallie visited her friend for a chat. While I mowed the lawn Travis spent time inside watching TV.
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Army spy plane tracked Times Square bomber?

Wired is speculating that a secret Army spy plane tracked alleged Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. According to the story, Shahzad called and reserved his plane ticket on his way to the airport.

What I don’t understand is why a plane was needed to track him. His cellphone was being tracked by the cellphone company, potentially within 50 feet of his location. Why put a plane up to suck down all electronic signals if you can already pinpoint his location easily?

And I was wondering how Shahzad got on a plane with the No Fly List supposedly protecting us from harm. Fortunately, CNN covered this part – saying that the list doesn’t get updated in real time but every 24 hours. Airlines are now being urged to refresh their databases within 2 hours.