There’s a pile of snow outside.
In other news, Georgia is still having a drought.
Business idea of the day? Charge New Englanders for snow disposal. For about the cost of plowing, I’ll take the snow for you. You don’t have to worry about snowbanks.
I’ll then fill trains with it and ship it to Georgia and others in need of water, who will buy it from me.
Make ringers “polite.” If a phone ‘rings out’ (e.g., rings non-stop until voicemail kicks in), switch to silent mode automatically.
Yes, this has flaws, like missing multiple calls because you missed one call.
But sit here with my as my suitemate’s phone rings time and time again, with a really irritating ringtone while he’s gone, and hold back the tears long enough to tell me that this feature isn’t necessary.
If nothing else, come up with a universal, unobtrusive means of switching a phone to silent. My Treo’s got a slide on the top, and I think all phones should have something like that. Every time I try to use someone else’s phone I end up getting into strange menus or, more often than seems statistically probable, ending up inside a web browser. So I’m pretty averse to opening up people’s phones and changing settings. I could cope with sliding a hard switch on the outside, though.
Seriously, please implement this. I’m begging.
This is my tenth consecutive post. Someone else post something!
I’ve always like the idea of rewarding douchebaggery with more douchebaggery. And one bit of douchebaggery that really bugs me is that, running a webserver, it’s always getting requests for pages that have never existed. What’s going on is that people are probing for common vulnerabilities. I don’t have a /phpmyadmin, but I get multiple requests a day for it. (I do have PHPMyAdmin, but it’s up to date, secure, and at an obscure URL.) Same goes for awstats.
What I’ve always wanted to do is respond to these requests with complete garbage. Unending garbage. My long-time dream was to link a page to /dev/random, a “file” in Linux that’s just, well, random. (It’s actually a device, a software random number generator.) The problem is that linking it is full of problems, and, when you finally get it working, you’ll realize that it’s smart enough to view it as a device and not a file.
So I took the lazy route and just created a 500MB file. You use dd to copy data from a disk, with /dev/urandom as the input and a file with a .html extension as output. I had it read 500 “blocks” of 1MB. Granted, this is a total waste of disk space, but right now I have some spare space.
Of course, I was left with a few resources I was concerned about: namely, RAM, CPU time, and network activity. I use thttpd for this idiotic venture, which lets me throttle network activity. I’ve got it at 16 KB/sec right now. (Which is an effective 128 kbps.) This ensures that if it gets hit a lot it won’t put me over my (1,000 GB!) bandwidth allocation.
Apparently, though, this throttling solves the problem: at first glance, it looks like it’s smart enough to just read 16KB chunks of the file and send them out, as opposed to trying to read it into memory, which would kill me on CPU time and RAM. So the net result is relatively minimal resource utilization.
Currently, it’s just sitting there at an obscure URL. But my eventual plan is to setup a /awstats and a /phpmyadmin and a /admin and a /drupal and have them all throw a redirect to this file.
The other bonus is that, at 16KB/sec, if a human gets there, they can just hit “stop” in their browser long before a crash is imminent. But, if it works as intended, infected systems looking to spread their worms/viruses won’t be smart enough to think, “This is complete gibberish and I’ve been downloading it for 30 minutes now” and will derail their attempts at propagating.
It’s not in motion yet, though… But I’ll keep you posted.
M/S Explorer has crashed.
For added irony, they were in penguin territory at the time.
(One wonders the view out the Windows now that the ship is on its side–they’re most likely blue screens! No Word on whether that is the case, of course, but I will say that the ship’s Outlook isn’t so good. Fortunately, because the rescuers Excel at what they do, passengers were able to Exchange their rooms for ones on a stable ship. Because there were no fatalities, this was not FrontPage news, except on Digg.)
Things I care 0% about:
News that I care about >5% that seems to have received <5% of the news’ attention:
Now that I’ve gone over how to defend yourself against zombies, I have a shorter list. As always seems to happen with zombies, you’re going to have a couple times when you fight a huge wave of them. And, well, everything is better with music. If you’re taking over a Costco in the event of a zombie invasion, it might be neat to play the music over the PA system. Keep a playlist on your iPod or whatever dedicated to the occasion. Here’s what I recommend for the playlist:
I’m pretty much an expert on zombies. I beat Dead Rising, and watched Shawn of the Dead the other day. (By the way, the catchy tune that is their themesong is The Blue Wrath by I Monster.)
So a few comments:
The more important thing, though, is the topic of what to do if there’s a big zombie infestation. There are three important considerations in selecting a location:
Anyone who’s seen Shawn of the Dead knows that a pub is a terrible place to go. There aren’t that many weapons (I guess you have plenty of bottles, corkscrews, and a Winchester with 29 shots, but that’s not really enough), it’s not at all secure, and there’s not much to live off of. (Just peanuts!)
Dead Rising takes place in a mall. That’s not bad. But I’ve found something even better: Costco. They have big huge gates (like garage doors) that they close at the end of the day, so it’s hard to get in. There are a ton of skylights on the roof, but they’re so high up that if zombies come through them, they’ll plummet to their death. There’s an ample supply of weapons, and, of course, a ridiculous amount of food. There are also beds. (Though if you’re alone, you might not want to sleep, lest you wake up and find your brain being munched on.) And plenty of little rooms like coolers and a kitchen where you can hide out.
It’s best to be with others, but beware the apparent tendency for them to become psychopaths and try to kill you. It’s best, then, to keep the best weapons for yourself and to sleep with one eye open.
If you’re not a Costco member, I’d imagine that a BJ’s or Sam’s Club could work. Heck, even a Wal-mart would probably do. But if you want to stick with my recommendation, you can sign up for Costco here. Note that it’s possible that, in the event of a zombie invasion, the lady checking membership cards at the door may be absent, so if you’re near a Costco but aren’t a member, you may be able to get in.
Do be warned, though, that if I beat you there, I’m shutting the gates. So when the zombies come, rush to Costco. Coincidentally, there’s one in Nashua and one in Waltham, so I’m always near a Costco. (Why do you think I picked Bentley?)
You may want to print this guide out and keep it in your glovebox, by the way. Internet access can’t be guaranteed in a large-scale zombie attack.
Don’t forget to get your free taco from Taco Bell, conveniently scheduled to be given away on Tuesday from 2 to 5.
For those in the area, here is a gameplan. You may want to focus on the Boston area and skip Western Mass. (Unless, of course, you are in Western Mass.) You get more bang for your buck. Or, more accurately, you get more taco for your free.
Unfortunately, collecting my tacos due will require that I skip two classes in a row. While I argue that it’s a sunk cost, it’s been pointed out that the opportunity cost of my tacos will be about $300. And you should include the cost of complementary goods, too.
So it seems that I’m going to class on Tuesday from 2 to 5. But, in return for my roadmap, if you’re collecting tacos, remember who did the laborious research of typing “Taco Bell” into Google Maps for you.
I feel like no one in politics can ever agree, and that if a bill were introduced to, say, ban child abuse, someone would come out against it. But still, I feel like this is something everyone should support. There’s a strong correlation between kids whose families aren’t there for them and kids who end up in jail. And there’s a strong correlation between kids who can’t finish high school and kids who end up in jail. Or selling drugs. Or homeless. Or shot by peers. Take a wild gander at how much keeping children locked up costs us each year. An estimated $1 billion. Why do we make it so hard for these kids to get help? Why don’t we offer GEDs and the like to people in jail? (And not just the kids, although they need it most.) Why are we not doing more job training? We spoke tonight with someone who runs a bookstore. It’s run entirely by kids who were referred there by the Department of Social Services and by probation officers. They learn job skills. “It takes them a long time to see that they matter,” she told us. Soon they come to realize that, and she praised their work ethic after that. One kid came in to talk to us. He didn’t want to speak about his past, so I don’t know the story, but he’s 17 and in this program. He’s working on finishing up high school, and is not just working in this business, but is one of the people helping to run it. After a while, the kids “graduate” out of the program and get real jobs, or go to college. It’s impressive, but it gets exponentially more impressive when you realize that every single person in this program is someone who would be in jail, committing crimes, homeless, or some other miserable fate that’s not just bad for them, but a drain on society as a whole. Why is this program an anomaly? Why are we not trying to place every kid who’s in jail in programs like this? It’s costing us $1 billion to keep them in jail. They’re wasting their lives away there and, when they get out, they’re almost certainly not going to be any different. The recidivism rate in the US is at about 60%. That is to say that 2 out of 3 people release from jail will end up in jail again. It sounds like the system is very broken. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t lock violent criminals up. If you commit a crime you should go to jail. But it seems incredibly short-sighted to not educate these people and help them get jobs. If you come out of jail with the help of drug crime defense attorneys from Missouri and the government helps place you in a job, you’re going to have less incentive to sell drugs or hold up convenience stores. And if you get an education and/or job training? Even better! Of course it’s not a cure-all. People will always do stupid things because they’re drunk, or stab someone because they’re angry. But when two-thirds of people who go to jail get trapped in a downward spiral of crime, I think it’s time that we do something to try to help. By all means, we need other stuff too. But I’m fed up with people giving the ax to plans for petty reasons like, “There would still be some criminals.” Of course there will. But let’s at least start to do something!
