Lunatic Platitudes

Ok you techno nerd demi-deity, take a few milliseconds to three way handshake with one of the load balancers serving up www.amazon.com and pray that NetScaler box doesn’t dig a hole and die before you get the bits transferred sufficiently to treat yourself to the goodness that is DRM free mpeg layer 3 encoded audio files waiting to be transferred to your handheld media player device. Even over a slow link, rest assured you’re being spoon fed the silkiest bytes on the Internet.
My headline is sensational isn’t it? The fact is I am a little excited about the Amazon MP3 store. Download a single MP3 for (at most) .99. Download entire albums for $8-$10. I don’t know what their entire price range is, but who cares. The fact is you download songs freaking fast and can play them with anything. I like Linux better than OS X. I like OS X better than Windows. It’s my preference. I don’t have to answer to anyone for that but me, and I agree with my inner computer user. I have never liked being tied down to Apple for music anymore than I have liked any of the alternatives, such as ripping my Audio CD collection which is illegal according to our idiot industry people. I also dislike the idea of doing something that is illegal which has the potential of keeping me from my son (and wife). So for me the legal route is the only one.

iTunes is nice, but I can only run my account on 5 computers, and if I get lazy I get five different song collections. Trying to keep things synchronized here is difficult at best. Don’t even get me started when I want to listen to music on my Linux machine. It just ain’t gonna happen because I’ll be dipped in pooh and shot for stinking before I burn a CD just to rip it back into my Linux box. So $100’s of dollars cumulative over the last several years and I finally discover the real answer at amazon.com.

I recommend looking at Amazon.com.  The selection is nearly unabridged.  I found the Nothin’ Fancy bluegrass album I was dying for and even picked up that last Nickelback album too.  It’s on my Ubuntu box, playing right now.  Amazon even has their little (not required but cool) download manager for Ubuntu and other Linux variants.  It’s slick how they didn’t leave out my demographic.  I certainly want my wife to use this method instead of her iTunes too.  She’s been using iTunes in a VMWare machine running under her OpenSuSE 10.3 laptop system which is *painful*.

My advice to Apple: drop DRM.  Port iTunes to Linux.  Provide the ability to transfer files to other devices through an MP3 transcoder or something.  The iPod is certainly cool, but it’s expensive and far from the BEST player on the market.  I am through with you (finally).

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So I’ve been annoyed by this thing where I cannot copy / paste to or from Windows machines while using RDP from my Linux machine. I’ve been using Ubuntu 7.10 which has been one heck of a good system. I am downloading the beta 8.04 right now, I can’t wait to try it out, but I digress. If you too are having issues with copy/paste from Linux, use RDPv5 instead of straight RDP. See the picture? How dumb is that?

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This is pretty amazing footage of what is likely to be the device used to kill all of us when our government finally goes all the way over the edge. It’s a happy post Easter thought I just couldn’t resist sharing. Follow the link below…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww

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In the new days of technology we live in constant fear of our social security numbers being downloaded and used by criminals, flippantly tarnishing our good names. We’ve read and heard about countless corporations inadvertently distributing our credit card information to thugs, or simply losing track of it. Now we get to learn about one of our largest government bureaucracies with what must be the most wide open, insecure network on the planet. How is it that “low level” contractors (contractors?) can access files with sensitive information about anyone in the employment of the government?

I have worked in IT for many years and have lived through security breaches of my own. I’ve seen them happen and I can tell you that even when you are not particularly a target of attacks, you still have to be careful. I would find it very hard to sleep at night if I was as big a target as a government agency though. Especially the state department.

Perhaps the indication given by the article I read is just basically misinterpreted. I don’t know what the goal of the article was, but what struck me was that it basically meant that if you can walk into the state department, you can download whatever data you want to get at. Of course, they reference a system that brought up the fact that there were accesses to sensitive information. I reckon that system was good enough when they started tackling the question of access rights in the first place (as if they did). What a joke.

It’s a good thing public companies have to comply with millions of lines of legislation regarding privacy and security concerns with respect to computer networks and business processes. Wouldn’t it be nice if it didn’t always come down to the pot calling the kettle names?

The article I read was: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/21/obama.passport/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

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I find myself with less and less time to geek out lately. Tonight has been a rare instance where I was able to carve out a couple of minutes to go browsing and I found something really cool. All the credit for my two finds tonight have to go to the folks who develop and document the Crossroads load balancer project. I downloaded their latest stable release and built it on my local Linux box. As I was reading through some of the documentation, there was a really cool configuration example that caught my eye.

Crossroads has the ability to “stick” requests to whatever servers are there to listen. For that reason, a clever person decided to run it locally and set up all the various proxy servers they encounter on a daily basis. This way, when they move their laptop from home to the office, they didn’t have to configure their web browser proxy differently. They just pointed their web proxy at the local crossroads instance and let it handle “load balancing” them to whatever proxy happens to be available. I love it! Go to the crossroads site and get things compiled and installed. Then go to their documentation and search for “lazy”. You’ll see the passage I am referring to.

This is a double purpose post though. If you went off on the crossroads shiny quarter above, you may have already met Charles. Charles is an HTTP/S proxy system written in Java that allows you to see everything involved in the process of loading a web site. It’s very easy to set up and use and is chock full of goodness. Check it out, too…

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From an unknown author:

Like a lot of folks in this state, I have a job. I work, they pay me. I pay my taxes and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit. In order to get that paycheck, I am required to pass a random urine test with which I have no problem. What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don’t have to pass a urine test. Shouldn’t one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare check because I have to pass one to earn it for them? Please understand, I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do, on the other hand, have a problem with helping someone sitting on their butt, doing drugs, while I work. . . Can you imagine how much money the state would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a public assistance check?

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