I’m currently at the Marriott Copley Place hotel, giving a kernel tutorial for Usenix, and for the first time ever, the video projector dealt with a 1400×1050 VGA output without my having to doing any futzing. In the past, I’ve always had to adjust down to 1024×768. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come….

The HIP folks requested that Tero generate a 384-bit DH group for PDA’s with lame CPU’s for which it would take too long to use a 512-bit DH modulus. Oh, when will they ever learn? Heck, a 512-bit modulus was considered a bad idea thirteen years ago in Brian Lamacchia’s Paper.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my journal, mostly because I’ve been insanely busy at work. So I thought I would jot down a few interesting things that have happened in the past week or so. I spent around $300 to get 2 custom-made suits (with two pairs of matching pants each), a sports coat, and several additional custom-made shirts and pants altered to fit the new me. This meant bringing in the waist by 3-4 inches and additional material out of the crotch of the pants, and bringing in the sides of the shirts and coats/sports jackets.

What does it mean to be a friend? In LiveJournal, it has a very specific meaning; it means that you’re interested in reading someone’s journal, and that in general, you’re willing to let that person read your “friends-only” postings — at least, unless you start using friend groups to control who can see which posting. In Orkut, however, saying someone is a friend has little or no meaning, since in orkut you don’t really do anything other than define your social circle.

RISKS digest recently posted a link to the following. It’s definitely worth repeating in as many places as possible. The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing Peter Deutsch Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences. The network is reliable Latency is zero Bandwidth is infinite The network is secure Topology doesn’t change There is one administrator Transport cost is zero The network is homogeneous EDIT: Added the first fallacy, which I missed when I first posted it: The network is reliable.

I found the following from the Risks Digest, authored by Robert Bruce Thompson, and the following had me rolling on the floor: For years, the conventional wisdom has been that one can’t trust Microsoft software until version 3.0, and that apparently is true for their security patches as well. The middle of last month, with much fanfare, Microsoft went to their new scheme of releasing patches in batches once a month.

I’ve just taken delivery of 0.8 terabytes of hard drive, and it set me back less than $700. For some reason, this amuses me greatly.

I’ve recently decided to replace my 2nd telephone line with an IP telephony line from Vonage. There are a couple of really nice features with this service. First of all, the service is really cheap. $24.99/month buys you unlimited local/regional service, and 500 minutes of long distance service. If you go over the 500 minutes, the cost is only 3.9 cents a minute. International calls are also quite reasonable. (5 cents to call Europe, 6 cents/minute to call Tokyo, Sidney, etc.

I know, lots of people have done this before me — I’m behind the times, so sue me — but it really is nice to be sitting in a Starbucks (I’m currently in the one in Arlington Center) hacking on a laptop, while sitting at a table watching the traffic and pedestrians go by on Mass. Ave. It makes a nice change from working at home…

The networking at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference seems to be up about half time, and down half the time. And when it’s up, it’s corrupting packets so frequently that ssh connections die after a few minutes, and imap-ssl download connections die after downloading 2-4 messages, thanks to checksum errors. LAME…