2002-07-05 · 05:23

What did he know, and when did he know it?

Over on Dave Farber‘s IP list, Dana Blankenhorn raises an interesting question about the Worldcom mess. John Sidgmore is now the CEO of Worldcom. Before the meltdown, he was the COO and vice chairman; he used to be the CEO of UUnet and took the current position when Worldcom bought UUnet. Why has the media given Sidgmore a free pass? Why isn’t anyone saying “Hey, John, you were the COO. How come you didn’t know this was happening?”

Timothy Smith, another IP contributor, says that Sidgmore was largely out of the loop– after a falling-out with the CEO, “[Sidgmore] pretty much went off and did his own thing” from sometime in 1999 until the present. If I were a stockholder, I’d be outraged. As a consumer of the business press, it certainly makes me wonder why no one asked this reasonable question of Mr. Sidgmore. Maybe someone will.

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2002-07-05 · 05:01

Happy birthday to the Queen
When my grandmother was a
little girl, she wanted to be Marie,
Queen of
Romania. In celebration of her birthday today, I thought I’d post a
picture of her in royal costume (doesn’t she look the part?), plus another
taken recently in her natural habitat: feeding the birds and explaining
nature to a small child. So, Grandmaw, happy birthday, and many happy returns
of the day!

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Filed under Friends & Family

2002-07-04 · 20:47

Happy 4th!

Happy birthday, America! We celebrated today by swimming twice,
once in the morning and again before dinner, eating steaks on the grill,
watching some baseball on TV, and letting Matthew test a swim diaper for
the first time. All in all, a great day! Besides the young American pictured
at right, we also have two short QuickTime movies of David
and Thomas falling
into the pool like scuba divers.

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2002-07-03 · 18:58

ISS gets spanked

Wayne Rash trashes ISS in a ZDnet piece today. He’s got a very good point, one which was made in Brian Bilbrey’s comment the other day: ISS jumped the gun, released a broken patch, and violated their own agreement. I suspect Brian still thinks MS put them up to it, but I am willing to not ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence; I don’t think ISS has a very long track record in the OSS world. Not like this is gonna help…

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2002-07-03 · 18:46

The Marines and specialization

As I was driving up I-75 on the way to Perrysburg, I began to wonder why the Marine Corps has been so successful, both as a fighting force and as a Washington constituency. Some of it is doubtless attributable to the heroic deeds for which the Corps is famed: Belleau Wood, Tripoli, Guadalcanal, Khe Sanh. Some of it is thanks to the Corps’ legendary esprit de corps. Some is undoubtedly due to Marines’ genius for self-promotion, whether intentional or otherwise. After the battle for Okinawa, James Forrestal (Secretary of the Navy) is reputed to have said “The raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five
hundred years”. [thanks to Michael Wellman for correcting my quote error!]

I think it’s more than that, though– I think the major portion of the Corps’ success has come from its focus. You don’t see Marines lobbying to be the lead agency for theater missile defense, like the Navy and Army. You don’t see them trying to take over strategic deterrence or control of space, like the Air Force. (Note to my blue-suited friends: the Air Force should own both of these missions, but the sight of zoomies back-stabbing the Navy is, shall we say, unseemly.) You don’t see mixed-gender basic training. The Marines focus on doing what they do: expeditionary combat, mixing infantry units with organic air and logistics. It’s worked well since 1775, although I admit that the Marines could learn some procurement lessons from the other services.

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2002-07-01 · 15:25

PDAHandyman

My pal Tyler Regas has been working on PDAHandyman, but I’ve only recently gotten around to visiting it. Nice site! I am certain that he’d like to hear from all you Linux folks who are using Sharp’s cool-but-IMHO-impractical Linux handheld. Personally, I have a Treo pricing rant that I’m saving up to send his way.

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Filed under General Tech Stuff

2002-06-28 · 11:05

Never heard of ISS?

Brian Bilbrey asks who ISS is and whether they’re in bed with Microsoft:

According to their website, ISS is Internet Security Systems. I hadn’t heard of them before this last few weeks. Certainly not one of the big boys, until all this recent press. From their marketing crap on the homepage (http://www.iss.net), it appears they are in the same biz as McAfee and Norton, but at a different tier.

So, let’s start with the simple stuff: ISS has been around for a long, long time as security firms go. I believe they started officially started operating in 1992 or so. Chris Klaus, the founder, dropped out of Georgia Tech after developing the core of what became ISS’ lead product, the RealSecure scanner. ISS had the first useful security scanner for Windows NT, and their products are very widely used out in industry and government. So, the answer to question #1: ISS is for-real, they didn’t just fall off the truck, and they are well-regarded in the security community.

Now, for Brian’s more interesting question: is ISS in bed with Microsoft?

Continue reading →

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Filed under Security

2002-06-28 · 10:50

The Programming Soviet

Dori Smith points to a fascinating essay, The Programming Soviet. Here’s a sample: “The Unix and Open Source worlds excel at improving life for programmers, not for users.” Worth reading, even if just to fuel up your rant generator.

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2002-06-28 · 08:49

Matthew birthday pics

By special request, before-and-after pictures of Matthew and his birthday cupcake.

before… after!

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Filed under Friends & Family

2002-06-28 · 06:35

My security’s better than yours

I consider Bob Thompson a good friend, as well as being a very knowledgeable guy. We’ve had a number of friendly debates about various things (hey, Bob, you still owe me a 3-liter bottle of caffeine-free diet Coke for this one!) We’re now engaged in a religious battle about Microsoft’s security. You can get the backstory of this particular debate here.
Greg Lincoln chimed in thusly:

It really annoys me when people call OpenSSH or Apache or “insert app that just happens to run on Linux here” vulnerabilities “Linux” vulnerabilities. OpenSSH and Apache are NOT Linux. They are applications that run on Linux. They also run on Windows and quite a few other OSes.
Most of the recent reports against Windows are in the media player or IE, or some other component which is considered by Microsoft as part of Windows and can not be removed. Therefore, they are holes in Windows.

Well, OK, I can see why that would bug Greg, but I think he’s wrong. Is Apache installed by default on the most common Linux distros? Yes. How about OpenSSH? I am less sure, but I’d bet the answer is “yes”. The issue isn’t whether or not they can be removed, but whether or not they’re default parts of the OS. Point being, of course, if I install a new Windows or Linux box, am I getting vulnerabilities without my knowing it? In addition, let’s not forget that one key feature in Windows XP SP1 is compliance with the consent decree requiring increased modularity in Windows. (And, FWIW, you can certainly remove, or not install, the Windows Media Player; I don’t have it installed on any of my boxen.)

Continue reading →

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2002-06-27 · 15:57

Nauvoo temple dedicated today

The Nauvoo temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is officially being dedicated today. For those of you who aren’t up on Church history, the Nauvoo temple was the second one built after Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon, but the Saints there were only able to use the temple for a short while before mob violence forced them to leave Nauvoo. An arsonist burned much of the original temple structure in 1848, and a tornado pretty much finished the destructive work in 1850.

I’m excited by this, because temples are an important element of our religion. We believe that they are literally God’s dwelling place on the earth, and that by prayer, study, and performing sacred ordinances there that we can draw closer to Him and prepare ourselves for exaltation. It’s a milestone for the Church that we’re able to restore this important piece of Church history.

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Filed under Spiritual Nourishment

2002-06-27 · 15:51

Happy birthday!

Baby Matthew celebrated his first birthday yesterday. I have some hysterical pictures and video of him “eating” [sic] a cupcake that I’ll post later today. He was really excited by the cupcake, but puzzled at the icing. I expect he’ll handle it better next year.

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Filed under Friends & Family

2002-06-27 · 15:49

Real estate frustrations

Selling a house is frustrating, and I think the biggest reason is the amount of uncertainty. Will our house sell in a week? A month? A year? What about our poor ex-neighbors who listed their house, bought another one, and then couldn’t sell the first one for 500+ days? We sure don’t want to end up like them. We have a good Realtor, and since we’ve worked with her before we have some idea what to expect… but that doesn’t change the fact that the house might sell tomorrow, not until after Christmas, or not until the cows come home.


Close behind the uncertainty is the hurry-up-and-wait factor. We’d much rather have this house sold so we can get serious about finding a new house, packing up our stuff, and moving. We’d obviously prefer to move before the new school year starts, but if we can’t, is that worth getting a bridge loan and betting that our Alabama house will sell soon? Who knows.

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2002-06-20 · 14:11

Danger: word game ahead

TextTwist is a simple yet addictive Boggle-like game. Thanks to Tony Dowler for posting the link in his blog; now I can get no work done.

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Filed under Uncategorized

2002-06-20 · 10:40

What a beautiful day!

Leave aside the sunshine and clear skies; today is a beautiful day for two reasons. One is that two legendary Exchange gurus, Chris Scharff and Kevin Angley, are both celebrating birthdays today (happy birthday, guys!), and the other is that the new version of Internet Explorer for Mac OS X has beautiful anti-aliased text that makes even crap look stunning.

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