I'm in ur base belonging ur votes to us

Florida.

Ah jeez not this shit again.

/Diebold just switched to the Cell processor to enable real-time vote changing.

In other words, thanks for handing Iraq to Iran, George.

Iraq, Iran reach agreement on security - Yahoo! News

It's a sad state of affairs when the President of Iran makes more sense than the President of the United States of America.

Feck off George.

Sully's Underwear Flap

Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish: Underwear, Again:

"But I am not sorry for publishing a visual of them. My response is the same to Mormons as it was to Muslims who were offended by my publishing images of Muhammad. This is your taboo, not mine. And this is a free country. If you cannot handle some inspection of your religious practices, then you need to find some other place to live."

Sully's right as usual. In case you wonder what's got some Mormon panties in a wad, it's this.



A picture of LDS "temple garment" that many Mormons wear at all times.

Playing with GarageBand3

Nice start Jim Webb

In Following His Own Script, Webb May Test Senate's Limits - washingtonpost.com:

"At a recent White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia's newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn't long before Bush found him.

'How's your boy?' Bush asked, referring to Webb's son, a Marine serving in Iraq.

'I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,' Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

'That's not what I asked you,' Bush said. 'How's your boy?'

'That's between me and my boy, Mr. President,' Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House."

Webb is a Bush Democrat. In other words a Republican who got fed up with the GOP for following Bush and the neocons' radical agendas. Webb has a strong libertarian streak that appeals to me. He got a perfect score on the NRA's candidate questionnaire. He supports civil unions for same sex couple and is pro choice. He's also anti-Iraq-war without being antiwar. He fought in Vietnam as Marine and served as Reagan's Sec. of the Navy. He is, hopefully, gonna raise hell on bringing our troops home. He's off to a good start.



Thank you Macaca.

I find it deliciously ironic that the end of the "War on Terror Made by Brown People in Iraq (TM)" might have started with a racial slur.

Ok so I get told to be the porno police by my boss. That's cool. It's all ready my job, and I all ready have a system that I understand to check for it. Basically I've got a content filter that emails me when a blocked site is attempted to be accessed. One block I ignore, but if I get 10 in a row from the same IP address, I check out what they're trying to get to and then take appropriate action.

Now, to find out who is actually trying to get to the "banned" material, I have to match up the IP to the machine that had that IP at the time of the block. That's in one log. After that I have to match up who was logged into that machine at the time of the block. That's in another log. It's a bit of a bear, but considering I've had to investigate this type of thing maybe ten times in 3 years, it's no biggie.

Now my boss had the bright idea to order me to make user level blockage reports for all staff on a monthly basis. I tell him I think that I can do that, but it will probably cost him some money. I get to fiddling around inside the Sonic Wall Pro 300 content filter and see that while it won't take LDAP authentication directly from my LDAP server, it does have the capability of doing RADIUS lookups.

"AHA!" says I, and couple of hours later I have a working RADIUS test server that passes the auth request off to my LDAP server and returns to my content filter a yes/no on the user/pass entered. I know this because my content filter has a RADIUS test thingee in its RADIUS config. Just plug a u/p in and it tests it and says it works. I can also see my RADIUS and LDAP logs that show a successful transaction in both services. "Hunky dorry gee whiz," I think, "I can do this thing for free." All it requires is one entry of the u/p when a user fires up his/her browser. This tells the Sonic Wall who's browsing and what username to log it under. Basically I've got usernames and IPs in my logs now.

So far so good. Now it's time to set the reporting end up. Sonic Wall makes reporting software called Viewpoint. It just so happens that buying the Pro 300 gave us free access to Viewpoint. Viewpoint is basically a glorified front-end to a syslogd service. It parses logs and generates reports on things like "Web Usage" and "Blocks Per User". Blammo! Exactly what I'm looking for. I d/l the latest version of the (Windows only) program, install it, and follow the directions for configuring my Sonic Wall to talk to the Viewpoint server. (Basically this is just setting up one syslogd to talk to another).

I triple check everything to make sure all is good, backup my Sonic Walls config, and turn that shit on. BOOM GOES THE DYNAMITE! All hell breaks loose and the network slows to a crawl. No problem, I think to myself, login to the Sonic Wall and turn that shit off. So I pop in the content filter's IP to login... timeout. I try to get on the web, no problem. I try to get to a blocked site, blocked. I check the Viewpoint server. It was connected to the Sonic Wall at first, but now its not. I portscan the firewall. 443 is open but I can't get a connection via https. 80 is open but I can't get a connection via http.

Finally, I physically walk down to the content filter, and its activity meter is pegged. I hook up a laptop and fire up Ethereal. The thing is spewing syslogd data so fast that its poor processor can't keep up and other services aren't fielding requests. I go check my system requirements for my userload to insure that I read what I thought I read. I read what I thought read and this box should be able to handle a network about 10 times the size of mine with reporting on.

Ok says, I, I can't get in via the web but there has to be a command line interface or at the very least some sort of emergency serial interface that I can login with on a Mac. No nada nunca. Sonic Wall's official "fix" of this problem is to do a firmware reset, !but! not only does this screw my configuration back to zero, but also it uses a "dual-bios" trick to rewrite my firmware back to what shipped from the factory so that my "backup" is basically useless. In the time it takes to get all the settings needed to get the firmware back to where it needs to be, I can just reconfigure the box from scratch...* of course intarwebs access is down the whole time I'm doing this without that I reconfigure my whole network to ignore the content filter (which all other machines see as their gateway router).

So to sum up -- Fuck You Sonic Wall. I'm buying another Barracuda filter.

/and don't get me started about having to pay for security firmware updates. Features I can see, but when you have a bug in your product that allows me to be attacked, that update should be free./

*Not true, you just have to have a Windows machine to restore the mofo. Still getting another cuda.

A one sentence solution to the war in Iraq

An Attytood commenter named No W NOW wrote:

"The best solution politically might be for us to impeach Bush and put the entire administration up before world court for war crimes, apologize as a nation to the Iraqis and leave."

Works for me.

Chris Rock predicts the future

From the Chris Rock Show circa 1997

Soon

The software is here. The machine is not.

Warning Label Generator

Warning Label Generator

Pay Drew!!!

Unclaimed Property Search - Property Details

Ok, so I'm joking, Drew has $83 coming to her when she decides to pick it up. I'm sure she'll get right on that.

Daily Drew

Wow

This guy can't play drums or piano, but he can sure edit the hell out of video

The Phone Guy

Link via Boingboing

Let's Play Eschaton's Game

You know "Simple Answers for Simple Questions"

Boing Boing: Advice for a torn and lovelorn BoingBoing reader: "

Mike asks, 'If you meet a cute girl at a Democratic Victory party, but she QAs DRM for Microsoft, is asking for her email address evil?'"

Yes.

Both parties have no clue on DRM.

Great day.

House Democrats eager to clash with Bush

All this morning when people have said "Good morning" to me I've responded, "Yes, it is!"

Dashboard widget test?

I dunno... that's funny

nice

Build a solar iPod charger

Don't let them bite. Seriously.

A Socialite's Life:

"Maya Rudolph and her family moved into their new apartment happy and excited to be home. A $13,500-a-month dream home turned into a disgusting nightmare as the place was infested with bed bugs. Furious, they have filed suit for $450,000. Court paper stated:"

Been there done that, it really sucks. It's not a cliche. Well it is, but actual bed bugs suck.

Go read Pearl Fang

Pearl Fang has your number. Its 4 - by Pearl

This post is NOT about the Rod Bryan campaign, HOWEVER, I do think he's
awesome, I know him personally, and I have stood many a nights just
picking his brain about what he would really do if he were governor,
and I believe in him.

powered by performancing firefox

Say what?

The Complete Bushisms - Compiled By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine

"You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war President. No President wants to be a war President, but I am one."—Des Moines, Iowa, Oct. 26, 2006

Scott Adams on Electronic Voting

The Dilbert Blog: Electronic Voting Machines:

"Years ago when I worked at a big bank, one of the hot issues was that many customers didn%u2019t trust our new-fangled ATM machines. Amazingly, this fear had almost nothing to do with the fact that I worked in the ATM department. Indeed, my suggestion to include a paper shredder hole right next to the deposit hole was barely even considered. In the end, ATMs rarely stole anyone%u2019s money and kept it for long. Now most people trust ATMs.

I think about the history of ATMs when I hear all the nervous Nellies wetting their pants over electronic voting machines. I believe those worries are totally misplaced. Now don%u2019t get me wrong %u2013 there%u2019s a 100% chance that the voting machines will get hacked and all future elections will be rigged.? But that doesn%u2019t mean we%u2019ll get a worse government. It probably means that the choice of the next American president will be taken out of the hands of deep-pocket, autofellating, corporate shitbags and put it into the hands of some teenager in Finland. How is that not an improvement?

Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let's say for example, science. Compare that to the current method where big money interests buy political ads that confuse snake-dancing simpletons until they vote for the guy who scares them the least. Then during the period between the election and the impending Rapture, that traditionally elected President will get busy protecting the lives of stem cells while finding creative ways to blow the living crap out of anything that has the audacity to grow up and turn brownish.

The important thing with democracy-- and this has always been the case -- is that the citizens a) Believe the election result is based on the common sense and voting rights of the citizens, and b) Have enough handguns to wax any politicians who gets too seriously out of line (also known as a "check and balance").

And here the definition of "seriously out of line" would not include humping interns and stealing from taxpayers. Those things should be allowed, even encouraged, so we can attract the most capable candidates from private industry.?

Call me an optimist, but electronic voting machines make me feel good about my country.

Is it too late to start selling bumper stickers that say "I think I voted"