Now that you mention it, I haven't seen a firefly in years either. We used to have swarms of them flying around occasionally, in rural nowhere. Living in urban areas, I haven't seen one. I just asked two of my friends who happen to be sitting here while I'm writing this. They said they've seen fireflies in recent years, but only when they've gone out to rural nowhere and seen a few. Not swarms, just the occasional one.
I grew up about 100 miles from the nearest metro area, and we could see the stars beautifully. We could see the glow of two different metro areas on the horizon (each about 100 miles away), but that was it. Since being an adult, I've lived in metro areas.
I was driving, either on I-10 or I-5, in either case I was running almost the full length of it. One trip, my girlfriend's daughter was with us. We stopped in the middle on nowhere at about 3am, where you couldn't even see the glow from any city, most drivers had stopped for the night, and even truckers were stopped and sleeping. We looked up, and saw everything. She was amazed. She grew up between two of the previously mentioned metro areas, so not more than 30 miles from either one, and the light pollution prevented seeing much of anything, even 30 miles out. That was the first time she saw the night's sky the way it's suppose to be seen. I had almost forgotten how amazing it was. We spent an hour stopped, looking at the stars. Sometimes those long drives are worth more than just getting from point A to point B. On I-5 and I-10, there's a whole lot of nothing, but sometimes that's the perfect place to get the most beautiful view.
Another night, I stopped with another friend at the exit in the middle of "Alligator Alley" (the southern most East/West part of I-75) to watch a meteor shower. Even though we were a long way from anything (more than a day's walk from either side), the light pollution still obscured our view slightly. We could see the brighter meteor flashes though, so it was worth it. Of course, Alligator Alley has it's name for a reason. I grew up in rural Florida, and I knew the sound of alligators. When we got out of the car, and stopped talking, I realized there were at least 5 alligators not more than 15 feet away, and it was too dark to see any of them. The mosquitoes felt like someone was throwing ping pong balls at us. We quickly got back in the car, and watched the show from there.
When I lived in the hills north of Porter Ranch, CA (on the edge of Los Angeles), even though we were above the smog cloud, I don't remember a night where we could see many if any stars. Most days we could look down on the smog cloud, and sometimes we could even see through it.:) I can only remember two days were I could see clearly from our hill to the other side of the valley (approx 8 miles). Living in the valley, there was frequently enough light pollution, where you could see at night with no moon, just from the light being reflected in the smog.
The flexing of the wings is interesting. I know that they're designed to do it, so it doesn't bother me.
I never pay full price for a first class seat. I always ask "Are there any first class upgrades available", and about half the time I get one. I make up the difference in the booze and food. Hell, $5 for a shot of anything in coach, and I always drink doubles, I make up for it quick.:)
That, and I get to sit with a classier group of folks in first class. And the fat rolls. I've never had the next passengers fat roll sit in my lap in first class. I can't say the same for coach.
Myself, I enjoy sitting just behind the wings, so I can see the flaps and air brakes deploy, and I can watch the ailerons as we're flying. Boring for most flights, but fun during takeoff and landing.
My other favorite of course is first class. Besides the luxury of being able to get free alcoholic drinks before and during the flight (if I stay awake long enough), it's as close I can get to the front of the ride on a commercial flight.:)
I like riding in the front of a roller coaster so everything is my experience, and everyone behind me is tagging along.:) On some rides, especially the floorless ones, it feels like you're flying without anything around you. I love it.:)
I went through fight school years ago, so I understand the effects that make it happen. I'm still thrilled when they run the engines up, and we start rolling down the runway, and the plane rotates up and woosh, we're in the air. I don't let people see, but I'm like a little kid on a roller coaster.:)
I understand how a helicopter works too, but I've never flown on one, and I won't go out of my way to do it. I joke that they shouldn't be able to fly. "So, you take a perfectly good wing, and instead of bolting it to the sides where it belongs, you bolt it to a vertical shaft, and swing it around really fast." I wouldn't want to be in one.
Who am I lying to. If someone came to me and said "You want to go for a ride in this helicopter? You can have some PIC time once we're off the ground", I'd take it. It wouldn't matter if it was a ratty old piston driven helicopter that should have been retired 50 years before.:)
Well, purely from my own observation, and not from empirical data, a vehicle accident will involve the driver of one or more vehicles, and possibly one or just a very few passengers. Most likely, the individual driving will be directly related to the end result of the accident.
In an airplane accident, only two people are directly related to the cause of the outcome. Hundreds have absolutely no control over the outcome. They're just along for the ride.
And in a mid-air accident, the fatality doesn't always come immediately. It's a long way down from 40,000 feet, where all you can do is wish it wasn't happening.
I've been in a few car accidents, all non-fatalities. I've never been in an aircraft accident.
On a plane...
In the middle of a huge thunderstorm...
The plane gets struck by a meteor...
Which is large enough to cause significant damage...
In a critical place on the plane...
That causes a catastrophic loss in cabin pressure...
And takes out the electrical systems...
And causes a critical airframe failure...
That's a perfectly legitimate method to do it. I've actually seen quite a few older message boards that do exactly that.
The only problem that I'd see you running into is searching posts for a specific post, without doing a lot of greps, or pulling in a lot of files to parse. I haven't looked at the code to see how it does it though, that's just what came to mind.
Doing the flat file method saves a DB overhead, but you can't do spiffy features really gracefully like keeping stats and threading replies. That's where I stopped on mine (for right now) because I'm not done writing the message threading code.
It's partly to show my history, but I've been asked on an unusally high number by the HR person if I have experience with X, where X is the old tech.
The HR people aren't necessarily (or usually) familiar with the technology they're out hunting for candidates for. Some of their lists go from archaic to modern. I know just as well as anyone else, that the list of requirements for a candidate is a wishlist of skills, but if I can match that list in my resume, it saves them from asking silly things like "Do you know how to work DOS?" The blind stare and answering "I know Unix and Windows inside and out, couldn't it be assumed I know how to... ummm... work DOS?"
I trimmed a few things off of the lists, that I just hope to never see again. I'd like to trim Windows off entirely, but almost every *nix admin position I've seen asks for Windows also. Asking the HR person or head hunter "Why are you requiring Windows knowledge when you're hiring for a *nix admin?" always comes back with the same answer. "This is the list we were given by the department head for what they're looking for."
I've never had a complaint from an HR person or head hunter on those. The only real question on my qualifications was by a very technical interviewer at a large company. He was serious and curious, so we did a line item evaluation. Some things I only touch occasionally (like ColdFusion). Some things I'm in daily, like PHP, MySQL, Apache, Bind, and building/rebuilding Linux servers. So we rated each one on "the last 7 days", "the last month" "the last 3 months" or "quite a while". For example, I haven't touched a i386 and amd5x86 in "quite a while", but I have worked in depth on P4, Xeon, AthlonXP, AMD64 and Opteron machines. Within the last week. So, what's the big deal if I have to grab a 386 machine? Nothing really, other than I'll have to find ISA cards to stick in it, and complain that its ungodly slow and it should have been upgraded years ago.:)
I'm out of work right now (as of last Friday), but I keep busy working on my stuff and helping friends out with their clients. And you never know, I may end up working with a retail outlet that is still using DOS on their archaic POS systems. I do know someone who has his own store. The POS software worked on DOS machines, but he finally upgraded to XP, and runs the POS app in a DOS box.:) He tried to upgrade to the newer better POS system, but that failed miserably even with their tech people trying to do it, so he's staying with the ancient version and liking it.
I designed, built, and operated the infrastructure. Servers, network, streaming camera systems, etc, etc.
I've been on camera at live sites, just not naked.:) Of course, that would make me the only person in the room (of maybe 15 people) that wasn't naked. It's all fun and games until you get the billionth call saying "the girls broke a camera again."
That's an effect of overpopulation, overpumping of the aquifer, damns built up, pumping from rivers and lakes for drinking and farm water, etc, etc, etc.
But yes, we've had dry days (tails when Gaia flips the coin, I'm guessing), and enough dry days, without enough wet days, can hurt. Initial rainfalls evaporate pretty quickly. Kinda like dropping a few drops of water on a frying pan.:)
The good soaking rains are great. We just had another one come through this morning, and looking at the sky (and weather map), there'll be more tonight.
That's actually funny. The porn company was actually pleasant to work with the customers. Sure, we'd have the occasional annoying customer. Out of millions of customers, I can only think of maybe one or two. The biggest problem with the adult world was chargebacks. People would pay for an account, use it for a few months, then call their credit card company and say "I never did this", and get 6 months of charges returned.
The funniest one I can remember of those, which in the end didn't turn into a chargeback. I didn't handle the charges, but sometimes I listened in on the calls, and helped trace information for the billing department. This one was a nice lady who called rather upset that we had been charging her card for a year. She didn't recognize the charge. We clarified with her the charge, what site it was for, and that the IP which the charge came from was in her city. She realized exactly what happened, said "hold on", and started screaming at her husband. We got about a minute of the screaming before someone hung up the phone. Guys, if you're going to buy online porn, be sure it's ok with your wife, or make very sure she'll never find out.:)
The cases I mentioned were from a hosting company. Maybe 50,000 customers. It wasn't a terribly large company, but at least 2 coworkers, but maybe more, were harassed like I said. Phone calls, letters, death threats. People get really nutty with CSR's. I don't know that it ever happened to upper staff, but I know it did have some of the CSR's terrified. They're only CSR's. They didn't buy the account for you. They fix problems for you. We were actually very helpful to the customers, but sometimes couldn't help them. If your card doesn't work, and you can't give us a working card, what are we suppose to do, give you your account for free indefinitely? Someone (we never identified who) actually came to the office, and spit all over the front door. It wasn't just a little. They must have spent a good 10 minutes doing it. I know you can't make every customer completely happy, but that was just uncalled for.
I'd rather work for an adult company again. The customers want porn, they get porn, they're happy and don't bother you.:)
I'd rather the option, if they told me, they'd have to hire me, and I'd be locked away at a huge facility with all kinds of interesting equipment and intelligent peers. Light of day? Who needs it.
If I'm a programmer, why would I use someone elses programming. Of course, I won't reinvent the wheel. It will have other parts in the back end that are other people's work (PHP, MySQL, Imagemagick), but something simple like a blog shouldn't be something that I give up and use something else with.
My biggest problem with doing that is the available exploits in other people's code. On my news site, I ran Slashcode. It was big, heavy, and hard to make significant changes to. I switched to PHPNuke, which got exploited twice The second time, I said "screw it", and wrote my own. My own is lighter, faster, and a lot easier to make changes to. I wrote the base of it for functionality in a couple nights (a Christmas holiday at that). I got the rest of the functionality working over the next few weeks, when I had time.
As far as the users knew, we were down for a couple days. It was better than seeing "You've been hax0red by the Chinese Mafia". They had hit me with a 0 day script kiddie exploit, that wasn't fixed for several days after. I don't remember exactly who claimed to have done it, but it was embarrassing. Since then, no exploits.
How would it look if I, as a programmer, had my own blog exploited. Of course, it would coincide with a prospective customer or employer looking at it, and that's the last thing I want to happen. It would look like I know nothing about security, so any programming I did was therefore potentially exploitable.
You know, 4 people including a professional editor read it, and missed that. Thanks. {sigh} Now I have to update the doc, word, odf, and both HTML versions.
That would be part of 50%. Do you always get heads when you flip a coin?
We've been in a "drought" since I was a kid, so say the last 20 years. It's more of the population of Florida are consuming a lot more water than they were, so there's a human induced water shortage.
I'm writing this from my laptop with the wall power unplugged right now, because we're in the middle of a vicious thunderstorm, with so much rain, I can't see 100 feet off of the porch. I guess we got heads this time.
I have an redacted copy of my resume, some tools I use on a regular basis, my portfolio of some of the more unique and complex work I've done (and some lame stuff to fill space).
Under my site, if you know the directory names, you'll find work I did for particular customers that I wanted to make available, some personal projects, and other crap. My full resume is also hidden under an unlinked subdirectory, so I can give out the specific link to the full resume with my full name, address, companies I've worked for, etc. Sometimes I just need to move a file from point A to point B, where I can't FTP or SCP to either one, so it's a good transit point for me. Copy it over, and scp it down.
My site takes up 30Gb, even though the visible part is maybe (just maybe) a few Mb.
So, what do I do with my site? Anything I want. I don't have a blog on there yet, but I'm writing one from scratch. I've picked up a few new paying customers since I was laid off from my full time job, the paying customers take priority over anything I want to do for myself. Since I advertise myself as a sysadmin/programmer/network engineer/security engineer/DBA/etc, it would be silly to put a pre-packaged blog software on there.:) It also has my rate sheet, so if someone asks me, "Can you do this for me?", I can point them directly to it, so they can reference it any time they want.
My other domains, I put whatever is appropriate on them. You'll find my news site linked from my personal site. That makes a little money. You'll also find my cryptography site. It doesn't make any money, but it gets a lot of traffic from various places including universities and government/military facilities. I have to assume some have integrated my open source software into their own applications. It would be nice if they told me, but no one ever does.
I have a couple dozen other domains. Some are almost completely dormant (with Google or Amazon ads). Some got a good Google PR, so I keep them around to help raise my rank on other projects.:)
But, they'll still allow sharpened pencils, and 50+ pound bags. I love their idea of security and protection. I could (and even in high school) swing my book bag and knock someone out cold. Which is more dangerous, a little metal stick, or a 50 pound blunt trauma to the head?:) The only thing I was ever stabbed with in school was a pencil. One of the bully kids decided to mess with me, so he shoved his desk against mine, which had me trapped between him and a file cabinet. He stabbed me, and since I was now braced against the wall (through the file cabinet), I was able to shove him and his desk half way across the room. By the time anyone reacted to it, he was sitting at his desk (now in the middle of a bunch of empty desks all pushed out of order) stunned, with a bloody pencil in his hand. I was silent, with my hand over the stab wound, looking straight forward at the movie the teacher was showing, like nothing had ever happened.
Funny thing about bullies. They like to mess with the quiet kids. When the quiet kids fight back and win in the incident, they stop being bullies. It wasn't a "and we became friends and lived happily ever after" story. He knew (and passed the word) to keep your distance from me. Not only can I take a pencil stabbed in my arm, but I'm strong enough to shove a bigger kid and his desk, half way across a room.:)
When I changed schools, not too long after that (coincidentally), I kinda accidentally started a little trouble with one of the toughest kids in school. We both laughed about it, and became friends. I never had any trouble with people picking on me at that school.
So, who needs an evil miniature sharp object. We have pencils and brute force.:) I guess those are two things they can't take away though.
When I fly, I'm satisfied in the fact that I have my laptop. If someone tries to do something bad, smashing them in the head with the edge of the laptop is more effective than almost anything I could carry onboard that's on the banned list.
I'm sure what they're doing is fully logged. What better intelligence gathering source that give a bunch of (suspected) terrorists laptops. Once they feel safe with them, they'll go to any online communication method available and try to contact their peers/handlers.
Of course, that's the 10% of them that actually are terrorists. The rest are going to write to try to contact their families and let them know that they're still alive.... and then look at porn.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Now that you mention it, I haven't seen a firefly in years either. We used to have swarms of them flying around occasionally, in rural nowhere. Living in urban areas, I haven't seen one. I just asked two of my friends who happen to be sitting here while I'm writing this. They said they've seen fireflies in recent years, but only when they've gone out to rural nowhere and seen a few. Not swarms, just the occasional one.
I grew up about 100 miles from the nearest metro area, and we could see the stars beautifully. We could see the glow of two different metro areas on the horizon (each about 100 miles away), but that was it. Since being an adult, I've lived in metro areas.
I was driving, either on I-10 or I-5, in either case I was running almost the full length of it. One trip, my girlfriend's daughter was with us. We stopped in the middle on nowhere at about 3am, where you couldn't even see the glow from any city, most drivers had stopped for the night, and even truckers were stopped and sleeping. We looked up, and saw everything. She was amazed. She grew up between two of the previously mentioned metro areas, so not more than 30 miles from either one, and the light pollution prevented seeing much of anything, even 30 miles out. That was the first time she saw the night's sky the way it's suppose to be seen. I had almost forgotten how amazing it was. We spent an hour stopped, looking at the stars. Sometimes those long drives are worth more than just getting from point A to point B. On I-5 and I-10, there's a whole lot of nothing, but sometimes that's the perfect place to get the most beautiful view.
Another night, I stopped with another friend at the exit in the middle of "Alligator Alley" (the southern most East/West part of I-75) to watch a meteor shower. Even though we were a long way from anything (more than a day's walk from either side), the light pollution still obscured our view slightly. We could see the brighter meteor flashes though, so it was worth it. Of course, Alligator Alley has it's name for a reason. I grew up in rural Florida, and I knew the sound of alligators. When we got out of the car, and stopped talking, I realized there were at least 5 alligators not more than 15 feet away, and it was too dark to see any of them. The mosquitoes felt like someone was throwing ping pong balls at us. We quickly got back in the car, and watched the show from there.
When I lived in the hills north of Porter Ranch, CA (on the edge of Los Angeles), even though we were above the smog cloud, I don't remember a night where we could see many if any stars. Most days we could look down on the smog cloud, and sometimes we could even see through it. :) I can only remember two days were I could see clearly from our hill to the other side of the valley (approx 8 miles). Living in the valley, there was frequently enough light pollution, where you could see at night with no moon, just from the light being reflected in the smog.
The flexing of the wings is interesting. I know that they're designed to do it, so it doesn't bother me.
I never pay full price for a first class seat. I always ask "Are there any first class upgrades available", and about half the time I get one. I make up the difference in the booze and food. Hell, $5 for a shot of anything in coach, and I always drink doubles, I make up for it quick. :)
That, and I get to sit with a classier group of folks in first class. And the fat rolls. I've never had the next passengers fat roll sit in my lap in first class. I can't say the same for coach.
Myself, I enjoy sitting just behind the wings, so I can see the flaps and air brakes deploy, and I can watch the ailerons as we're flying. Boring for most flights, but fun during takeoff and landing.
My other favorite of course is first class. Besides the luxury of being able to get free alcoholic drinks before and during the flight (if I stay awake long enough), it's as close I can get to the front of the ride on a commercial flight. :)
I like riding in the front of a roller coaster so everything is my experience, and everyone behind me is tagging along. :) On some rides, especially the floorless ones, it feels like you're flying without anything around you. I love it. :)
I went through fight school years ago, so I understand the effects that make it happen. I'm still thrilled when they run the engines up, and we start rolling down the runway, and the plane rotates up and woosh, we're in the air. I don't let people see, but I'm like a little kid on a roller coaster. :)
I understand how a helicopter works too, but I've never flown on one, and I won't go out of my way to do it. I joke that they shouldn't be able to fly. "So, you take a perfectly good wing, and instead of bolting it to the sides where it belongs, you bolt it to a vertical shaft, and swing it around really fast." I wouldn't want to be in one.
Who am I lying to. If someone came to me and said "You want to go for a ride in this helicopter? You can have some PIC time once we're off the ground", I'd take it. It wouldn't matter if it was a ratty old piston driven helicopter that should have been retired 50 years before. :)
Well, purely from my own observation, and not from empirical data, a vehicle accident will involve the driver of one or more vehicles, and possibly one or just a very few passengers. Most likely, the individual driving will be directly related to the end result of the accident.
In an airplane accident, only two people are directly related to the cause of the outcome. Hundreds have absolutely no control over the outcome. They're just along for the ride.
And in a mid-air accident, the fatality doesn't always come immediately. It's a long way down from 40,000 feet, where all you can do is wish it wasn't happening.
I've been in a few car accidents, all non-fatalities. I've never been in an aircraft accident.
That means someone was having a really bad luck.
On a plane...
In the middle of a huge thunderstorm...
The plane gets struck by a meteor...
Which is large enough to cause significant damage...
In a critical place on the plane...
That causes a catastrophic loss in cabin pressure...
And takes out the electrical systems...
And causes a critical airframe failure...
That's a perfectly legitimate method to do it. I've actually seen quite a few older message boards that do exactly that.
The only problem that I'd see you running into is searching posts for a specific post, without doing a lot of greps, or pulling in a lot of files to parse. I haven't looked at the code to see how it does it though, that's just what came to mind.
Doing the flat file method saves a DB overhead, but you can't do spiffy features really gracefully like keeping stats and threading replies. That's where I stopped on mine (for right now) because I'm not done writing the message threading code.
It's partly to show my history, but I've been asked on an unusally high number by the HR person if I have experience with X, where X is the old tech.
The HR people aren't necessarily (or usually) familiar with the technology they're out hunting for candidates for. Some of their lists go from archaic to modern. I know just as well as anyone else, that the list of requirements for a candidate is a wishlist of skills, but if I can match that list in my resume, it saves them from asking silly things like "Do you know how to work DOS?" The blind stare and answering "I know Unix and Windows inside and out, couldn't it be assumed I know how to ... ummm ... work DOS?"
I trimmed a few things off of the lists, that I just hope to never see again. I'd like to trim Windows off entirely, but almost every *nix admin position I've seen asks for Windows also. Asking the HR person or head hunter "Why are you requiring Windows knowledge when you're hiring for a *nix admin?" always comes back with the same answer. "This is the list we were given by the department head for what they're looking for."
I've never had a complaint from an HR person or head hunter on those. The only real question on my qualifications was by a very technical interviewer at a large company. He was serious and curious, so we did a line item evaluation. Some things I only touch occasionally (like ColdFusion). Some things I'm in daily, like PHP, MySQL, Apache, Bind, and building/rebuilding Linux servers. So we rated each one on "the last 7 days", "the last month" "the last 3 months" or "quite a while". For example, I haven't touched a i386 and amd5x86 in "quite a while", but I have worked in depth on P4, Xeon, AthlonXP, AMD64 and Opteron machines. Within the last week. So, what's the big deal if I have to grab a 386 machine? Nothing really, other than I'll have to find ISA cards to stick in it, and complain that its ungodly slow and it should have been upgraded years ago. :)
I'm out of work right now (as of last Friday), but I keep busy working on my stuff and helping friends out with their clients. And you never know, I may end up working with a retail outlet that is still using DOS on their archaic POS systems. I do know someone who has his own store. The POS software worked on DOS machines, but he finally upgraded to XP, and runs the POS app in a DOS box. :) He tried to upgrade to the newer better POS system, but that failed miserably even with their tech people trying to do it, so he's staying with the ancient version and liking it.
I designed, built, and operated the infrastructure. Servers, network, streaming camera systems, etc, etc.
I've been on camera at live sites, just not naked. :) Of course, that would make me the only person in the room (of maybe 15 people) that wasn't naked. It's all fun and games until you get the billionth call saying "the girls broke a camera again."
That's an effect of overpopulation, overpumping of the aquifer, damns built up, pumping from rivers and lakes for drinking and farm water, etc, etc, etc.
But yes, we've had dry days (tails when Gaia flips the coin, I'm guessing), and enough dry days, without enough wet days, can hurt. Initial rainfalls evaporate pretty quickly. Kinda like dropping a few drops of water on a frying pan. :)
The good soaking rains are great. We just had another one come through this morning, and looking at the sky (and weather map), there'll be more tonight.
That's actually funny. The porn company was actually pleasant to work with the customers. Sure, we'd have the occasional annoying customer. Out of millions of customers, I can only think of maybe one or two. The biggest problem with the adult world was chargebacks. People would pay for an account, use it for a few months, then call their credit card company and say "I never did this", and get 6 months of charges returned.
The funniest one I can remember of those, which in the end didn't turn into a chargeback. I didn't handle the charges, but sometimes I listened in on the calls, and helped trace information for the billing department. This one was a nice lady who called rather upset that we had been charging her card for a year. She didn't recognize the charge. We clarified with her the charge, what site it was for, and that the IP which the charge came from was in her city. She realized exactly what happened, said "hold on", and started screaming at her husband. We got about a minute of the screaming before someone hung up the phone. Guys, if you're going to buy online porn, be sure it's ok with your wife, or make very sure she'll never find out. :)
The cases I mentioned were from a hosting company. Maybe 50,000 customers. It wasn't a terribly large company, but at least 2 coworkers, but maybe more, were harassed like I said. Phone calls, letters, death threats. People get really nutty with CSR's. I don't know that it ever happened to upper staff, but I know it did have some of the CSR's terrified. They're only CSR's. They didn't buy the account for you. They fix problems for you. We were actually very helpful to the customers, but sometimes couldn't help them. If your card doesn't work, and you can't give us a working card, what are we suppose to do, give you your account for free indefinitely? Someone (we never identified who) actually came to the office, and spit all over the front door. It wasn't just a little. They must have spent a good 10 minutes doing it. I know you can't make every customer completely happy, but that was just uncalled for.
I'd rather work for an adult company again. The customers want porn, they get porn, they're happy and don't bother you. :)
shit. thanks. I didn't get the renewal notice on it. It's paid for now, and will be alive again soon. :)
I'd rather the option, if they told me, they'd have to hire me, and I'd be locked away at a huge facility with all kinds of interesting equipment and intelligent peers. Light of day? Who needs it.
Dammit. I knew I'd miss something. I didn't think it'd be something important.
Like the previous poster said, crowdsourcing at it's finest. :)
If I'm a programmer, why would I use someone elses programming. Of course, I won't reinvent the wheel. It will have other parts in the back end that are other people's work (PHP, MySQL, Imagemagick), but something simple like a blog shouldn't be something that I give up and use something else with.
My biggest problem with doing that is the available exploits in other people's code. On my news site, I ran Slashcode. It was big, heavy, and hard to make significant changes to. I switched to PHPNuke, which got exploited twice The second time, I said "screw it", and wrote my own. My own is lighter, faster, and a lot easier to make changes to. I wrote the base of it for functionality in a couple nights (a Christmas holiday at that). I got the rest of the functionality working over the next few weeks, when I had time.
As far as the users knew, we were down for a couple days. It was better than seeing "You've been hax0red by the Chinese Mafia". They had hit me with a 0 day script kiddie exploit, that wasn't fixed for several days after. I don't remember exactly who claimed to have done it, but it was embarrassing. Since then, no exploits.
How would it look if I, as a programmer, had my own blog exploited. Of course, it would coincide with a prospective customer or employer looking at it, and that's the last thing I want to happen. It would look like I know nothing about security, so any programming I did was therefore potentially exploitable.
You know, 4 people including a professional editor read it, and missed that. Thanks. {sigh} Now I have to update the doc, word, odf, and both HTML versions.
I used to work in porn professionaly, you insensitive clod!
Seriously, I did. But not on my own site.
That would be part of 50%. Do you always get heads when you flip a coin?
We've been in a "drought" since I was a kid, so say the last 20 years. It's more of the population of Florida are consuming a lot more water than they were, so there's a human induced water shortage.
I'm writing this from my laptop with the wall power unplugged right now, because we're in the middle of a vicious thunderstorm, with so much rain, I can't see 100 feet off of the porch. I guess we got heads this time.
What do you with your domain? Anything you damned well please.
Check out http://jwsmythe.com
I have an redacted copy of my resume, some tools I use on a regular basis, my portfolio of some of the more unique and complex work I've done (and some lame stuff to fill space).
Under my site, if you know the directory names, you'll find work I did for particular customers that I wanted to make available, some personal projects, and other crap. My full resume is also hidden under an unlinked subdirectory, so I can give out the specific link to the full resume with my full name, address, companies I've worked for, etc. Sometimes I just need to move a file from point A to point B, where I can't FTP or SCP to either one, so it's a good transit point for me. Copy it over, and scp it down.
My site takes up 30Gb, even though the visible part is maybe (just maybe) a few Mb.
So, what do I do with my site? Anything I want. I don't have a blog on there yet, but I'm writing one from scratch. I've picked up a few new paying customers since I was laid off from my full time job, the paying customers take priority over anything I want to do for myself. Since I advertise myself as a sysadmin/programmer/network engineer/security engineer/DBA/etc, it would be silly to put a pre-packaged blog software on there. :) It also has my rate sheet, so if someone asks me, "Can you do this for me?", I can point them directly to it, so they can reference it any time they want.
My other domains, I put whatever is appropriate on them. You'll find my news site linked from my personal site. That makes a little money. You'll also find my cryptography site. It doesn't make any money, but it gets a lot of traffic from various places including universities and government/military facilities. I have to assume some have integrated my open source software into their own applications. It would be nice if they told me, but no one ever does.
I have a couple dozen other domains. Some are almost completely dormant (with Google or Amazon ads). Some got a good Google PR, so I keep them around to help raise my rank on other projects. :)
Oh ya, I forgot.
But, they'll still allow sharpened pencils, and 50+ pound bags. I love their idea of security and protection. I could (and even in high school) swing my book bag and knock someone out cold. Which is more dangerous, a little metal stick, or a 50 pound blunt trauma to the head? :) The only thing I was ever stabbed with in school was a pencil. One of the bully kids decided to mess with me, so he shoved his desk against mine, which had me trapped between him and a file cabinet. He stabbed me, and since I was now braced against the wall (through the file cabinet), I was able to shove him and his desk half way across the room. By the time anyone reacted to it, he was sitting at his desk (now in the middle of a bunch of empty desks all pushed out of order) stunned, with a bloody pencil in his hand. I was silent, with my hand over the stab wound, looking straight forward at the movie the teacher was showing, like nothing had ever happened.
Funny thing about bullies. They like to mess with the quiet kids. When the quiet kids fight back and win in the incident, they stop being bullies. It wasn't a "and we became friends and lived happily ever after" story. He knew (and passed the word) to keep your distance from me. Not only can I take a pencil stabbed in my arm, but I'm strong enough to shove a bigger kid and his desk, half way across a room. :)
When I changed schools, not too long after that (coincidentally), I kinda accidentally started a little trouble with one of the toughest kids in school. We both laughed about it, and became friends. I never had any trouble with people picking on me at that school.
So, who needs an evil miniature sharp object. We have pencils and brute force. :) I guess those are two things they can't take away though.
When I fly, I'm satisfied in the fact that I have my laptop. If someone tries to do something bad, smashing them in the head with the edge of the laptop is more effective than almost anything I could carry onboard that's on the banned list.
I'm sure what they're doing is fully logged. What better intelligence gathering source that give a bunch of (suspected) terrorists laptops. Once they feel safe with them, they'll go to any online communication method available and try to contact their peers/handlers.
Of course, that's the 10% of them that actually are terrorists. The rest are going to write to try to contact their families and let them know that they're still alive. ... and then look at porn. :)
Wouldn't that prove that 1 cat going into the box equals 2.2824 cats?
What the hell are you thinking? Kids don't need to learn to read numbers and letters. What kind of future would that bring us?
School is to keep them busy while we work, play, or whatever. School is not an institute of learning. Everyone knows this.