Simple explanations of how crypto works. The ever-excellent Khan Academy has produced a very nice and short series of videos explaining how cryptography works. Anyone who understands basic high...

Here are many reasons why I don't like Dell. Why I hate Dell servers:Every Dell machine which my clients have purchased and paid big money for hascaused problems. I'm not very happy with my Dell...

You owe it to yourself to try one... When you are a professional or use a particular tool constantly every day you inevitably become somewhat of an afficionado or at least rather particular about...

Last week I got checked out in the Piper Aztec. We shot some video of the flight. You can check it out here.

The ever-popular misconception that "Windows only attracts worms/viruses/botnets because it is the most popular" came up again today. Fortunately, this is readily disproven by counter-example....

A very good use of our tax dollars and worth the attention of sysadmins.I often say that most successful attacks and vulnerabilities are failures of imagination (when they aren't outright...

It has been a while since I did any language trolling so let's talk about a religious issue: PHP. You either love it or you hate it. I have been looking at PHP frameworks lately. Not that I want...

What does it mean for CAs and our business? Verisign has had some sort of intrusion, apparently: Key Internet operator VeriSign hit by hackers Note that the Verisign CA business was sold to...

Someone posted about why some IT pros seem to be against change. And then wondered aloud why the mailing list software we use doesn't accept HTML email. I had to to reply... I write a lot of...

A few comments and observations regardingViews regarding PCI compliance are mostly positive Most IT security practitioners believe... Sure, they are the ones for whom work is being generated by...

VOIP systems are under attack. If you run a VOIP system accessible to the Internet you need to keep up on your system security. Over the last year I have seen an ever increasing amount of brute...

Antivirus is inherently out of date while consuming ever-increasing resources while viruses are now far more dangerous. As the number of viruses/malware to scan for and parts of the system to...

For the very first time ever in my many years of involvement with Linux and KPLUG (and probably even in my life) it is credibly reported that Windows market share is decreasing. And a FLOSS web...

What to do with expired aeronautical charts? The special aeronautical charts (aka maps) used by pilots have expiration dates. Dates vary between every 56 days to every two years depending on the...

Yeay!Psyb0t Attacks Linux RoutersWhy am I saying "Yeay!" about a Linux worm? Read on...I've been a Linux fan for 15 years. Linux has always had good security and it is constantly improving. Much...

I don't post nearly enough about my flying adventures on my blog. I have long vowed to write more about aviation here but for some reason once the plane is tied down and paperwork done I don't do...

Fly to Catalina, shoot a VOR approach to minimums, eat some buffalo, come back home. On March 21st, 2009 (Yes, I'm a little behind in my blog entries!) I flew my wife and three of her friends to...

By popular demand you can now all know what I'm having for lunch in real time. Isn't technology great? http://twitter.com/tracyrreed

So yesterday at around 3:30pm I got a strange email from LOLLERSKATES (system logfile analysis software which I wrote to warn of unusual activity). It said that Yahoo was blocking a whole ton of...

RedHat has just released "Risk report: Four years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4"http://magazine.redhat.com/2009/03/10/risk-report-four-years-of-red-hat-enterprise-linux-4/#id1550537 This sort of...

More and more this is what freedom is about in the modern age... I have a bumper sticker on my car.Should I be worried about being assaulted?Update: I guess I should be worried! Robert Donovan...

I am putting together a theatrical version of Stanley Kubrick's classic war film "Full Metal Jacket". Starring: Microsoft as the fatbody Private Pyle. Russian crackers as Sargeant Hartman...

o/~ Come fly with me, lets fly lets fly away. If you can use, some exotic booze, There's a bar in far bombay. Come fly with me, well fly we'll fly away. o/~ When I started this blog I originally...

The meaning of the word has changed a bit since then...

I'm surrounded by Linuxy goodness [This has been sitting in my "to publish" queue for a year or so it seems. Or maybe it was published but got retracted somehow at some point. So it's a bit out of...

The BUGTRAQ mailing list ain't what it used to be. I sent the following to the bugtraq mailing list. The moderator of the list replied with basically a shrug of the shoulders and bounced my post...

An anthem for Computer Nerds This song is for all of you who work hard cranking out code without appreciation from your boss OR from women! This song is from jonathancoulton.com and can be freely...

Hello colleagues, friends, and acquaintences! I have been meaning to send out this email which I have had sitting in my drafts folder for many months but never got around to it. I just created a...

This is something I wrote around April 30th 2005. Just now getting around to posting it. Today I took a trip to the Mekong Delta. We visited the town of My Tho (pronounced more or less as Me Taw...

Federal Aviation Administration Saves $15 Million by Migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux; FAA Achieves 30 Percent More Operational Efficiency for 50 Percent Less Cost I'm not sure whether I...

When my gig at Telepacket ended I went straight down to the airport and met up with my friend Alex Diaz for a flight down to his villa near the village of Chamela in the state of Jalisco, Mexico...

Lately, in addition to learning more about python I have been doing a lot of reading about functional programming (as opposed to imperative programming). I have talked with some of you about this...

When I look for employees or look for an employer I consider whether they are a real "geek" (which these days is a serious compliment)or just a 9 to 5'er. This message, posted to OSNews.com...

I just signed up for this. I found it via this article about LifeLock which was linked to by Bruce Schneier, my favorite security guru. Hopefully over the next few months it will cut down on the...

The GNU General Public License, the software license which has enabled companies like Interactivate, Google, Redhat, and others to thrive and for guys like me to have a career, has just had a new...

And people wonder why I'm such a big fan of Linux and dislike MS so much. It is because even though I don't use Windows or anything Microsoft and have not for over 10 years Microsoft STILL finds...

A tale of two communities... For the last year I have been hanging out on a local Windows user group mailing list just to see how the other half lives. I have been on the local Linux user group...

I think a lot of people misunderstand ReiserFS and filesystems in general. I think a lot of people misunderstand ReiserFS and filesystems in general. ReiserFS (3 and 4) acknowledges the fact that...

Do you know what a "blog" is? You are reading one right now. It's short for "web log" which is a sort of online diary or news site. Blogging (see, it's even been verbed so you know it's hot) has...

Target is selling EEE PC's with Linux in their stores. To follow up on my last posting I just noticed that Target has EEE PC's that come pre-installed with Linux in-stock. You can order straight...

Crab Mentality, cooperation, and pagodas on beautiful mountaintops Having spent so much time in VN the past year I have learned a lot of interesting things, not all of which I like. I have...

Here's an XML export of all of the RSS feeds I read daily. I've heard about RSS for quite a while but never really got into it until I discovered the Sage RSS feed reader extension for Firefox....

Since I spent most of the last year in Vietnam I guess I should write about it on my blog and post the pics. The pics can now all be found in my photo gallery. Here are some comments and...

the word for today is: Change So I quit my job with Telepacket. Long story. I am rejuvinating Copilot Consulting and getting in touch with all of my old clients. I have migrated everything off of...

After several years of admiring the software from afar I have finally dived into zope/plone/python. I have a number of big projects in the works, several of which will require a website with some...

Windows apologists have always said that the only reason Linux doesn't have viruses (or worms, which are the same for the purpose of this discussion) is because it is not nearly as common as...

s3-backup.py uploads Bacula (backup software) file volumes to Amazon S3 for safe, cheap, easy off-site storage. I'm crazy about backups. This is part of my disaster recovery plan. "If it wasn't...

The former Hourglass Field is a block away from my place and served an important role in aviation training in San Diego, hosted drag races, caused a riot involving 3000 people on El Cajon Blvd,...

SCO has lost their epic legal battle. The judge ruled against them. Time to party! No more FUDing about Linux. At least not that same old FUD which we have had to tolerate for the last 4 years....

Learning to fly the seaplane... It has been far too long since I updated my blog and much has happened. I had planned to accomplish many things before leaving on my great adventure in Vietnam....

I don't know if this will catch on or not but it is a very interesting project. The goal is to make an extremely reliable and provably secure operating system. I have not yet downloaded and played...

Some months ago a fellow KPLUGger won the book "Silence On The Wire" at a raffle. The book publishers are very kind and send us books as long as we provide feedback in the form of a review. My...

I read http://slashdot.org every day because it has a lot of interesting news about the computer business and computer culture. Today there was an article about how the US Department of Defense...

So many, so lame... Every time some new social network site springs up one of my many friends or colleagues just has to invite me. And of course I have to try it out to see if there is really...

How I spent my Saturday It passed in the US with hardly a mention but for the rest of the world September 16th was "Software Freedom Day" and events were held all over to celebrate and promote...

Every now and then I fire off a lengthy rant to someone which all too often is only read by me and the other person. Sometimes I get to inflict my rants on a mailing list but that is only...

One reason why I like Linux/Unix is the community. Other OS's tend not to have communities. They may have lots of users but no real communities. Nobody writes stuff like this about Windows:...

This is an excellent article: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/index.php?m=20050318 This guy hits all of the big wifi security myths that are out there. As far as I am concerned there is only one proper...

You have to be very careful about what you read on the net and consider the source. I use the net almost exclusively for my news and current events but I know to consider the source and use a...

Tried CVS, didn't like it. An ancient PITA. Used Subversion lightly for a couple years. Liked it but felt someone could do even better. Looked at Monotone, Darcs, Bazaar, Mercurial. Finally picked...

Oh Nein Eff Nein For decades they have tried and for decades they have failed. You simply cannot completely secure a digital computer against its owner and prevent the owner from copying data in...

A couple of nights ago I gave a presentation on Xen at the Kernel Panic Linux User Group meeting. There were 30 people in attendance. I won 4 books in the raffle (which I need to write reviews...

or perhaps this entry should be called "Why is there such a lack of professionalism in some places?" or "Why give up all control of your email?" A friend of mine in Vietnam had cablemodem...

A very appropriate poem by Rudyard Kipling Whether dealing with corrupt local policeman, customs officials, foreign countries, or even litigious bastards such as Microsoft and their proxies (SCO,...

It's not often that I get to entertain Internet friends from abroad... It has been a fun month. First my friends Stephen (kimihia on Freenode IRC network) and Alan from New Zealand showed up....