Don Marti

Fri 30 Jun 2006 03:42:37 PM PDT

MLP: Pants, LinuxWorld, TCP connection protection

Welcome, gentlemen. (via Doug Tygar, POST-to-GET by Web Developer Extension)

How would you like your apocalypse? We have climate change, Peak Oil, Second Coming, imperial collapse, and more to choose from. (Missing is my favorite: chemical castration of the biosphere by hormone-mimicking pollutants.)

Tired of just getting shirts and no pants at trade shows? Here are some pants for you. Oh wait, if you're small enough to wear those, you're too small to get into a trade show. Hmmm. OK, send your Mom or Dad to the trade show. (via parent hacks)

Greg K-H will be hitting the road with that fun driver tutorial. (As I said before, if you plan to take this, make sure you can build the kernel that's on your system, that it's close to current (people got by at FreedomHEC with not quite kernel du jour, but last year's distro kernel may be trouble), and that you can unload modules with rmmod.) Greg also writes, "The LWE people are trying to rescue the conference from the grips of the marketing people by introducing real technical talks that might actually be useful to developers." (Disclaimer: I'm on the program committee.) John Mark Walker and the rest of the IDG World Expo crew are paying attention to the Linux technical scene. Part of that is getting Greg and other real live experts on the program, and part is...well, come to LinuxWorld.

Speaking of LinuxWorld, if you got all fired up about One Laptop Per Child at the Boston conference, Jim Gettys has a lot to say (subscriber-only as of 28 Jun 2006) about OLPC on LWN.

Googleology: Nancy Gohring covers an Urs Holzle talk on why efficient power supplies pay. Google is surprisingly secretive about its hardware, so it's interesting to see a Googler help us out with a needed factor for sizing computer facilities by measuring the air conditioning (a technique Prof. William Burrows first pointed out to me, and which I think he got from the "intelligence community".)

alt.fan.ulrich-drepper: "Now we have a binary which can be used directly as an executable, as a dependency, explicitly loaded...and as a Python module." Sweet.

Software testing department: Dan Walsh writes, " One of the interesting things about SELinux is its use to discover bugs in other code."

Dusty Pigeon sends a link to net.anecdotes. Want to subscribe to random stories about, say, what it's like to work at a Rent-A-Center?

Cory Doctorow is free! Mark Pilgrim is free! Happy Independence Day. (What Would Thomas Jefferson Run?)

"The lost cannot be recovered; but let us save what remains; not by vaults and locks which fence them in from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such multiplication of copies as shall place them beyond the reach of accident."

-- Thomas Jefferson

Richard Clayton suggests a new OS feature: ignore the Great Firewall of China. "Having operating system vendors provide this new functionality as standard would also be of practical use because Chinese citizens would not need to run special firewall-busting code (which the authorities might attempt to outlaw) but just off-the-shelf software (which they would necessarily tolerate)." (via Bruce Schneier.)

Actually, since most OS vendor decision-makers are probably going to be alive and employed when the PRC owns the majority of the IT industry, it might be a good idea to be a little discreet here and just call it "TCP RST Attack Protection.