Hard drive/flash drive combo shaped like a Popsicle. When you plug the flash drive into the hard drive, any files on the flash drive are synced to the hard drive.

Clever attack exploits fully-patched Linux kernel

This is the part I find interesting (emphasis added):

The vulnerability is located in several parts of Linux, including one that implements functions known as net/tun. Although the code correctly checks to make sure the tun variable doesn’t point to NULL, the compiler removes the lines responsible for that inspection during optimization routines. The result: When the variable points to zero, the kernel tries to access forbidden pieces of memory, leading to a compromise of the box running the OS.

That sounds like a bug in the compiler’s optimization routines.

Today I sent an open letter to Brad Englert, our new Interim Chief Operating Officer, about some issues we’re dealing with. Since it’s an open letter, I’m posting it here too.

An open letter to Brad Englert (pdf).

I want to emphasize that I started writing this letter before Brad was appointed ICOO; the problems I outline have been developing for a long time.

I was reading this article about the CTO of a company that makes an open-source Enterprise Service Bus saying that you shouldn’t use one unless you really need it, and I liked this quote:

Architects and developers using an ESB in these cases are probably engaging in “resume-driven development (RDD).” If anybody asks you if you’ve deployed an ESB in an application you’ve worked on you can say, yes. And then you can hope the hiring manager doesn’t ask if the application really required the technology.

“Resume-driven development.” I like that; I’ll have to remember it.

The inimitable Joe Clark: Spay or neuter FixOutlook

If Microsoft Outlook, a favoured tool for top-posting assholes and phishing criminals, is to be “fixed,” that is only in the sense of spay or neuter.

This post is to document a problem I had and how I fixed it.

I have a job scheduled to run early every weekday morning that generates RMF reports, which get transferred to my Mac and every morning when I come it I run a script to extract significant information from this report. One thing this script does is generate a graph of CPU usage as an SVG document, and then uses Apache Batik to convert it to PNG. Earlier this week I installed the new security update for Java (that Apple finally released six months after the vulnerabilities were fixed on other platforms) and ever since the PNG was generated without any text.

So this morning I did some googling and found this Apple Support document which gave me the clue that the problem was in the 2D rendering pipeline. Further googling turned up this post on default 2D rendering pipelines on Mac OS X which allowed me to find a solution. I added

-Dapple.awt.graphics.UseQuartz=false

to the Java command line in my script, and the text reappeared. Apparently, at least for me, this security update reverted Java to using the Quartz rendering pipeline by default, and there’s a bug in text rendering in that pipeline (which Apple has supposedly deprecated.)

I’m going to see if I can find a preference file somewhere to switch this back by default, and if I find one I’ll post an update.

The Onion: Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles

He’s planning to write a book.

If you read his issues page he puts “moral rights” at the center of what he wants to talk about, especially because US copyright law doesn’t recognize such a thing. I’m inclined to think US law gets this right, but I guess I’ll have to read the book when he finishes it.

I should have known that a few months after I started my own blog the University would release a blog service. But I think I like the idea of having separate blogs for work-related and non-work-related stuff. In case you hadn’t figured it out, I’ll put the work-related stuff here.

Since I already have a work-related post on the other blog, I’ll link to it: my rant on Python’s urllib2.