RFC: Sans Alternatives

Just emerging from the disorientation and exhilaration of SANSFire 2011, a huge computer security training event with weekend and weeklong courses, vender demos, and some really cool one-off presentations. (My highlight – a unified “lessons learned” assessment of the Tōhoku earthquake/tsunami, the Fukushima meltdown and the Sony Hack by Japanese security analyst Tomohisa Ishikawa.)

One of the traditional special events is the annual State of the Internet roundtable, where the Internet Storm Center handlers take questions on the year’s internet security events. Topics include big attack vectors and stories, the tech media, and – this being D.C. – politics and the military. I asked a pretty spontaneous question, inspired by a previous one about getting involved in computer security that hadn’t really been answered terribly broadly (“become a consultant”).

This isn't really my millieu. At the time, I didn’t really have any answers in mind to my question (I have some ideas now), and it seemed to catch the panel off guard as well, with most of their answers overlooking the activism aspect. (To be fair, their focus is tech analysis, not activism, and my question was a bit off topic.) So, I turn to you, my scattering of dedicated readers, for your thoughts:

Anonymous and Lulzsec and other popular “hacking” groups in the media right now seem to exist in a miasma of criminality and pranksterism, but also genuine activism. Who do you see out there right now providing a positive outlet for legitimate technical activism?

I’ll follow up with my own ideas later, but I want to hear from you, first.

Taking the baby blog out of mothballs...

Annie and I are proud to announce the relaunch of Like we invented it and Project: Baby. Oh, also, we're pregnant.

Better than the real thing

Wired's article on this very cool 360° panoramic photo of the Philosophical Hall at Strahov Monastery in Prague reminds me of our trip there in October 2008, while we were teachers in Slovakia. (Can it really have been that long ago?) And Wired's assertion that “viewing Martin’s web-based panorama might actually be better than an actual visit,” is actually quite accurate. While the Wunderkammer/natural history museum that opens onto the library is quite fascinating, there's nothing sadder than being that close to such a marvel of a library and being unable to browse.

While we were not allowed to take photos in the Philosophical Hall (I forget if it was against the rules, or if there was a photo fee), we did get some great, moody shots from the restaurant beneath the monastery. (As well as fantastic pork knuckle.) Positioned as it is deep in the Premonstratensian Order's former wine cellar, this cool little restaurant is named Peklo, which is Czech for inferno. Perfect place to grab lunch on Halloween, no?

Sad literary news

Very sad to hear of the passing of Diana Wynne Jones, author of the Chrestomanci Series, Dogsbody, The Ogre Downstairs, and Howl's Moving Castle, among others.

Her rich, familiar characters and effortless world-building sold fantastic, reality-crossing plots. All were crafted with sophistication and her respect for an ostensibly young adult audience won her plenty of fans of all ages, including Neil Gaiman. I never knew, until today, that she studied under CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien at Oxford.

Wynne Jones was never hugely famous*, even after Howl's was made into a movie. When Annie found out I was a fan, it was like discovering we shared membership in a secret society. Along with John Bellairs, Diana Wynne Jones was a literary titan of my youth, and her work set the standard for so much of what I love in fiction today. With dead-tree bookstores and public libraries shutting down by the drove, one wonders how anyone will get their hands on these sorts of magical, secret authors in the future. But I'm confident that, as long as there are kids who read until they've run out of books, who'd rather stretch up to an author than be talked down to, someone will find these treasures, in whatever format, and share them with their friends.

* Even though she deserves to be; Annie points out that Harry Potter pales considerably next to Jones' far more satisfying Witch Week.

Recipe: Bacon Turkey

We here at Team Edison-Albright try to be health conscious, try take care of ourselves, so I’ve been on the lookout for turkey breast at the local market ever since Mom and Dad E-S dropped off our new roasting pan a couple weeks back (from their market’s incentive stamp program.) Nice healthy lunch option, but I wanted to add a bit of a smoky flavor and didn’t have a grill available, so I slid a couple slices of bacon under the skin while cooking. When I removed both skin and bacon to apply my glaze, I discovered I had unwittingly created a chimerical abomination I like to call “bacon turkey,” pictured here.

The God-fearing human in me confesses shamefully to trying a bite slice; meanwhile my inner scientist is licking his fingers and muttering something about “reproducible results.” Needless to say, this one is not going to be featured on ReciPants.

Is it just me

Or has Google Reader been demoted to the "More" tab in the Gmail menu for everybody else, too? Eric Schmidt hands over the reins and everything goes to heck!

Humbly submitted, for your consideration

So the game I mentioned in yesterday's KDE upgrade post was Bit-Blot's Aquaria – the stand out success (for me) of last year's Humble Indie Bundle. It's a gorgeous underwater exploration and adventure game, with intuitive, learn-as-you-go controls and a commitment to immersive detail on par with Ultima VII. There's a rich backstory, a cool magic system, companions, even cooking.

The Humble Bundle itself is a pack of awesome, DRM-free, multi-platform games with pay-what-you-will pricing. The proceeds are divided (at your discretion) among charities (EFF and Child's Play,) the games' makers, and Humble. The current bundle looks very fun, but there are only 6 days left to grab it, so act fast if you're interested.

This year's big draw seems to be Braid, a clever little time-manipulation side scroller about dysfunctional relationships. Only problem -- it didn't want to run on openSUSE for me. Run from the command line, it complained:

Game Startup Error: Unable to set up graphics.
Reason: Missing required OpenGL extension.

To help fix this problem make sure you are running the newest version of your video drivers.
Lastly, you could try running this game with the -windowed command-line option.

The ubuntu folks, who always seem to crack these problems first, tracked the issue down to missing S3 texture compression support – disabled in the open source drivers because it's patented (further details if you're interesed). Their simple solution (where patent law allows) is to install driconf and re-enable S3, as described here.

Since driconf isn't in the standard openSUSE repositories, you can grab it from the build service. Mine didn't work out of the box, though – it was looking in the wrong place for the python module. So, I edited /usr/bin/driconf and added the line:

sys.path.append("/usr/lib64/driconf/")

which is where I found the file driconf.py. Then, if I were in a country where patent law allowed, I could run driconf, go to the Image Quality tab, and enable S3TC, and Braid would run like a charm. If I were not in a country where patent law allowed, I'd suggest giving Osmos a try, an addictive physics-based osmosis game. Haven't checked out the others yet, but will when I have some down-time.