I Disappoint Myself Sometimes

For some reason people love to gawk at train wrecks. Sometimes those train wrecks involve real rail cars and sometimes they are more metaphorical train wrecks. I know we all have the tendency to stop what we're doing and pay attention to these train wrecks, especially the metaphorical ones. In fact, I'd say the majority of the US media is dependent upon metaphorical train wrecks for their daily copy. for some reason fascination with metaphorical train wrecks bug me and I try to ignore them as much as possible. I failed in that effort this morning.

The Metaphorical Rail Car du Jour is Brittney Spears being carted off to the hospital in the middle of the night. I saw the headline on CNN and clicked the link before I could do anything about it. DAMNIT!!!!

I hate when I do that.


Technorati Tags: train wreck, brittney spears

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A Novel Way to Test Passwords

I ran across this an interesting way to check the strength of your passwords this morning. Put them into Google and see how many matches you get. If you get less than 10 results, you have a strong password.

I'm not sure if this is insanely stupid or utterly brilliant. The more I think about it, the more I lean toward the brilliant end of the spectrum. If a password candidate only gets 10 hits on Google, the chances of it being in a password dictionary are probably low. The biggest danger I see is if you have a search history enabled. That could give a local attacker an edge, but then again to see the search they would have to be logged on as the victim already anyway. If you're using the Google toolbar, your searches are recorded and that's a risk but in that context your password search is a grain of sand on a beach. You would have to have access to the Google system storing that data and you'd have to be able to develop search terms to find what you're looking for. A good place to start might be searches returning 10 items or less. I suspect that is still a large number of searches in absolute terms.

The biggest challenge I find in the security business is making security easy for non-security people. I could give these instructions to my Mom and she would understand them and would probably have a decent password at the end of the day. I'm still leaning towards brilliant on this one. Are there any other thoughts?

Tip 'o the Hat to the Sunbelt BLOG for this idea.


Technorati Tags: passwords, security

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I Knew I was on to Something

Here's a link to an article in Time Magazine documenting the fact that a half hour of exercise and a drink or two a day is good for you. Specifically, it will help your heart by increasing your good Cholesterol. Even better, if you don't want to exercise a drink or two a day can still increase your good cholesterol. The study found that moderate alcohol consumption and exercise had "an independent beneficial effect on the heart and a compounded effect when practiced together."

On the downside for me, the benefits don't really take effect until you hit 45 or 50. I figure it won't hurt to start good habits early though.


Work Out and Drink Up - TIME

Technorati Tags: medicine, research, drinking, exercise

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One Seriously Cool Coffee Pot

The Bialetti Moka Express coffee pot is awesome. There are three things that make it awesome. First, it doesn't just make coffee, it makes espresso. Second, it works on the stove top. You just put the water and coffee basket in the bottom and screw on the kettle top. Put it on the back burner and let the magic happen. The third and final reason this is cool is that is costs a mere $24.99. Find another espresso machine for that much.


Technorati Tags: Bialetti, coffee, espresso

Researching Apple in the Field

EDITOR'S NOTE: I originally published this over on my Photoblog by mistake. That's what I get for blogging while watching Ohio State get beat.

I've been looking into switching to a Mac for the past couple of months. Most of my research has been online but that will only go so far. With that in mind, I made a trip to the Apple Store to check out MacBook Pros in their natural habitat.

I poked around on a 15 inch MBP for about thirty minutes to see what it was like. Leopard seemed to be able to keep up with all the standard things and even performed reasonably well with Safari, iTunes, PhotoShop, and iWork running simultaneously on different virtual desktops. I continued to poke around and discovered a shell prompt, which was really exciting. It looks just like a FreeBSD prompt so that should provide some additional flexibility.

The presence of the shell prompt was especially comforting considering the reports of the OS X firewall is not configured well by default and that it doesn't perform as expected when it runs. I would be able to configure PF or whatever BSD firewall lurks beneath the Leopard eye candy.

Just after I finished poking around with the shell prompt and sales guys approached me and asked if I had any questions. I asked him if there was any difference between a Windows machine and an Apple machine when using Adobe Photoshop. The immediate answer was "Of course there is. All the artsy people use Macs." After reminding him that wasn't my question, he conceded that there wasn't much difference between the two platforms. However he did point out that Macs are more secure than Windows machines.

I countered that Macs are not more secure, but rather are just more ignored than Windows machines. Essentially the hackers get more bang for their buck with Windows exploits and that Macs just were not worth their time. However, as Mac's market share increases that will change and they will be hacked more.

Imagine telling a born again Southern Baptist that reports of Jesus walking on water might have been exaggerated slightly to improve his public image. That is about how this Apple sales guy responded to the notion that Macs were not more secure than Windows, but rather not worth the effort. It was an interesting experience.

At the end of the day, my estimation of the situation is that Macs are not better or worse than Windows machines they are just different. Some people say that Macs are more expensive than Windows machines. On the surface that is true, but as far as I can tell that extra cash gets you software that you would have to purchase separately on a Windows machine. Specifically, I'm talking about iLife. To purchase comparable software for a Windows machine you would probably spend somewhere around $400 to $500 dollars. That and iWork is $85 dollars as compared to MS Office Basic, which runs around $250.

That and Macs are just pretty. I thik that the minimalist style is awesome. Using two fingers to scroll on the touchpad is a great idea. The more I look at them, the more I like them

Drifting in a Half Million Dollar Car

It is downright impressive to watch this guy flog a Porsche Carrera GT up the side of a mountain. Even if you don't speak German, this is still impressive to watch.

Tip 'o the hat to Autoblog.