iPad Reactions

So, yesterday was the big day. The Coming of The Tablet. I'm not
exactly a big tech pundit. I've never seen an iPad in person. I haven't
even played with the emulator yet. But I thought I'd still post my
immediate reactions.
The Name: It's not that bad. It doesn't trigger the same juvenile
"feminine products" joke urge in me that that it does with all of the
commentators on Slashdot. It kind of reminds me of PADDs from Star
Trek, which is a good association for a high-tech device. It's better
than "iSlate" would've been. I think "Apple …
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SpamAssassin 2010 Bug
Hey all. One of the sysadmins at Mudd, Claire Connelly, pointed out
that there's a widespread bug in SpamAssassin that might cause large
numbers of false positives on mail sent after 2010-01-01. Apparently,
the "date in future" rule is hardcoded to look for years after 2010. You
can read more at LWN; the short of it is that you probably want to
add the following to your SpamAssassin config:
score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0
sa-update
may or may not be pulling down updated rules. You can find
the relevant bug at the SpamAssassin Bugzilla (#5852). Anyhow,
something fun to be aware …
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New Machine
I picked up a new "computer" last week. A virtual one, that is. I ran
into this site called prgmr which offers very low-cost, bare virtual
private servers. So far, so good. Got Debian set up all the way I like
it. Now just to find something fun to do with it. :-)
Recipe to Crash a Kindle

Here's a fun thing that I've just discovered:
- Purchase an Amazon Kindle 2 (this trick may work on other
versions)
- Download the MobiPocket version of The Devil's Dictionary, by
Ambrose Bierce
- Copy the .mobi file into your Kindle documents folder
- Open the copy of the book that appears on your device
- Enjoy the frequent crashes and random "java.lang.integer"
exception errors that pop up (even when you do not have the book
open!)
- Fight with the Kindle for a while until you realize that it's this
book, remove it from your device, and reboot the device (yes, this
step …
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New GPG Key
As you may have seen around the Internet, there was a
fairly significant break in the SHA-1 hash function, which is used
by default in GnuPG. This is worrisome, since GPG/PGP signatures are
one of the only things I'd actually trust to verify somebody's identity
online. So I've generated a new key with a 2048-bit RSA primary (for
SHA256 and SHA512 support) and a 4096-bit ElGamal encrypting key (which
took about 15 minutes to generate, so better be worth it). The key ID is
CB8AA0FF
, and the fingerprint is
5C35 D713 3E10 9A19 FFFC F58A 68E8 3B57 CB8A A0FF …
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awesome window manager
First, some background for the non-technical among you. A window manager
is a piece of software that controls the windows on your computer. It
will do things like placement, drawing, keybinding, et cetera. If you're
on Windows or Mac OS X, you have a window manager built-in to your
operating system and cannot easily change it. However, if you're on a
more traditional *nix (Linux, Solaris), you are free to select your
window manager. In this post, I'll talk a little about what I use and
why it's awesome.
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