Welcome to James Brown's blagoblag! This contains various thoughts and opinions, mostly wrong, going back a couple of decades. All of the opinions are my own, and probably not my employer's. Feel free to visit the about page for more useless interesting facts about me.
*nix Tip of the Day: SSH Private/Public Keys
Hello kind readers, and welcome to by *nix Tip of the Day. It's
finals week, and I'm sort of slacking, so I thought I'd post some of my
accumulated folk wisdom on the Internet, so that it might help others.
Today's topic is SSH Private/Public Keys. If any of you are CS majors,
or go to a tech-heavy school, or generally interact with Linux/OS
X/Solaris/HP-UX/AIX/any other *nix, you've probably used SSH. SSH,
at its most basic, is a replacement for telnet and rlogin; it allows you
to get a shell at a remote machine …
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New Bike

So, yesterday I went to Jax Bicycle Center in downtown Claremont and
I bought a new bike. Yep, I'm completely crazy. But it's such an awesome
bike. Thin, barely treaded tires like a road bike, upright seating
position, and nice hardware. It cost a mint, but hopefully I'll put it
to good use. With PLs on Pomona next semester, I'll need it to get to
class. So, yeah, that's what I've been up to…
Not much else interesting to report. School is school. Meh. But, hey, at
least I got a new bike.
So, apparently this is a meme
Everybody in my RSS feed list is doing it. So why shouldn't I?
(no, it's not the exact same line. close enough)
% history 1 |awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head -n 20
140 cd
67 sudo
59 vim
52 mplayer
51 svn
47 rm
43 ls
33 eix
29 xsnap
29 wmiir
24 mv
22 cp
15 ps
15 killall
14 ssh
12 xset
12 history
11 man
11 evince
10 sed
Headphones

Since this summer, I've been using a pair of Sennheiser HD280 Pros.
Let me just say that they're excellent headphones, and they provide
better attenuation than most noise cancellation headphones without
murdering the sound quality the way active noise canceling headphones
do. This is a great feature when North is having a party, or just when
my roommate is listening to music on his speakers. However, like all
closed-back headphones, they're a bit constricting, and there are some
minor audio artifacts caused by the hard backing.

So, last week, I picked up a pair of Grado SR60's. They …
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A brief thought on the new Microsoft "Interoperability" documents
If you haven't seen the recent Microsoft Interoperability
announcement, I suggest you read it. It's been Slashdotted, so I
figure there's a decent chance that everybody on the Internet has seen
it already. This is, of course, an extension of the Microsoft Office
Binary Formats release of a few days ago, and I'm equally leery about
it. There are some interesting comments on the Office Binary formats on
the web, including these by Jeff Licquia, and those he links to
by Joel Spolsky.
On the one hand, this is an amazing opportunity for F/OSS developers and
pretty much everybody …
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New Release of Compiz