It's almost like vacation. Doing the Training this week, checking out the various services and security issues that confront your everyday Linux admin. For example, there's "Creating your own Certificate Authority in 2 easy steps":
- openssl genrsa -new something-or-other blah
- make thisthinghere && then that otherthing
Easier than it looks, I tell you, I'm gonna ace this exam.
And then there's some stuff you put into /etc/hosts.allow. Or hosts.deny. The kids today apparently like to put them all in file, so they can more finely tune the filtering order. In that case, you get rules like, "*.cracker.org: ALL: DENY" in hosts.allow, which is confusing for an old-timer like me, who remembers when if it didn't run under inetd you didn't need it, anway, now get off my lawn.
Poking ever more knowledge into my age- and alcohol-addled brain may sound like a risky proposition. But The Company can be assured that, as long as free food is involved, I will make whatever efforts are necessary. And there is free food involved here.
I fully expect the Google-hits to go nuts tomorrow when everyone's Samba caches start expiring and the "Shared" sidebars start disappearing. Gruber posted a recommendation for OpenDNS:
OpenDNS is a totally free service that provides very fast DNS service to anyone, with a bunch of other optional features. Not new, but somehow I’d never heard of it before. Came in handy for me today after Comcast’s DNS servers crapped out.
? [From OpenDNS]
OpenDNS does everything right except for one thing: RETURNING BOGUS IP ADDRESSES FOR HOSTNAMES THAT DON'T EXIST!!1! That's what NXDOMAIN is for. Bad OpenDNS.
Found by A-Heldin in the Ladies' Bathroom of Stansted Airport
"Unfinished Tales: Of Numenor and Middle-earth" (J.R.R. Tolkien)
If you tried to read The Silmarillion, and were put off by its biblical prose and Byzantine character mesh, then stay away from this book. It's basically the same style, minus the cohesion of the completed book.
Me, I'm what you might call a Silmarillion guy. When I first read that book, I was in a trance for days afterward, completely blown away by its texture and tone, and by the absolute solidity of the world it presented. The Chorus of the Valar at the Creation is one of the most stunning stretches of fantasy writing ever.
Tolkien's stuff is the only fantasy or science fiction work that I can totally geek out on. I can tell you without much accuracy but with many details the relationships between Sauron and Melkor, the Rings and the Jewels, how that creepy-ass Galadriel turned away from the light of the Trees with the rest of the Noldor. Knowing the backstory, it's that much cooler to see a Balrog come out of its hole in Moria to lay down some old-school First Age whoopass on Frodo; that must have been like seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex showing up on a Civil War battlefield. I love that stuff.
So, I was sad to see the Silmarillion come to the Third Age and lose the distance from Frodo and Co. that the massive timeline of Tolkien's Middle-earth makes possible. The 'Tales is more of the same, with that great, lumbering voice that I bet Tolkien wished he could have written in all the time. You've got to love a book that has you looking up names in the index at least once per paragraph. And props to whoever decided to put Ulmo on the front cover up there with Tuor. He never did get the word count he deserved.
I wasn't really planning on writing about the Silmarillion the whole time, but that's basically what the Unfinished Tales represents. Put the two together, and you've got the Extended Director's Cut Edition. But you know, maybe it's time I read something this year that doesn't have its own booth at DragonCon.
March. If she comes in like a lion, she goes out like a lamb. At least, that's what the Google tells me. I've heard this saying about many things, including March, April, and some of your spicier Thai dishes. Hey-ooooo. But this is not a post about squeezing gags from topics of questionable funniness. This is a post about the Weather.
When I stepped outside the office today, the wind was absolutely howling. I was walking with a 40° list down the path to the smoking corner. There's an airport landing strip that runs along next to the building, and you could hear the pilots revving up the jets as they landed, surging them in that unsettling rise and fall that always accompanies Bad News during airplane shots in shows like Lost.
It was the kind of wind that makes you worry just a bit about your safety. It still is, in fact. Outside, there's that strange whistling going on that tells your that the caulk is going bad around your windows, and every now and then culminates in a good shaking of the house. If I was a hot cocoa type of dude, I would be snuggled up with one right now. But I'm not, so a Foster's it is.
So, established is it that March came in like a Lion this year. High winds, sudden temperature and pressure changes, needling high-speed rain. We'll see how that old wives' tale works out in about 4-1/2 weeks time.
