LookIt

Five months later

The tsunami, remember?

Kimya Dawson does, and keeps singing an awesome song about it. "We'd have '12/26' tattooed on our foreheads if something this atrocious happened on our coast instead. Well, a tragedy is a tragedy no matter where it happens."

What ninny decided this was a positive feature?

Netscape 8 misses the point.

Some ads cost more than others to produce

...and sometimes it is worth it.

The next big word in spam

dapoxetine. It will be interesting to see what side-effects they list on the initial release, and what they list five years later, and whether anyone cares.

Hilarious irony or shrewd marketing?

The American Idols Live Tour is sponsored by Pop-Tarts.

Why can't iChat be like Skype?

Audio chatting with iChat is iffy at best. I am regularly unable to make audio connections with other iChat users, and I get different errors at different times. Two of those people told me to "just get Skype, which I did. Skype worked flawlessly, and the sound quality was impressive.

It is sad that Apple doesn't care enough about iChat to make the audio chatting feature as reliable as the text chatting. Skype proves that it is possible to do.

Google has DNS problems

Someone at Google probably did some experimenting with their DNS around 15:30 PST.

# dig www.google.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.1 <<>> www.google.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 3567
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.google.com.                        IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.com.         900     IN      CNAME   www.l.google.com.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
l.google.com.           900     IN      SOA     ns1.google.com.l.google.com. dns-admin.google.com. 1115309515 900 900 1800 900

;; Query time: 150 msec
;; SERVER: 208.184.76.39#53(208.184.76.39)
;; WHEN: Sat May  7 15:52:24 2005
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 113

In other words, trying to go to www.google.com failed. Whoopsie. It was fixed a bit later:

# dig www.google.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.1 <<>> www.google.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 60320
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 16, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.google.com.                        IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       216.239.59.104
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       64.233.161.99
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       64.233.161.104
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       64.233.167.99
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       64.233.167.104
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       66.102.7.99
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       66.102.7.104
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       66.102.9.99
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       66.102.9.104
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       66.102.11.99
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       66.102.11.104
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       216.239.39.99
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       216.239.39.104
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       216.239.57.99
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       216.239.57.104
www.google.com.         135     IN      A       216.239.59.99

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
google.com.             345435  IN      NS      ns4.google.com.
google.com.             345435  IN      NS      ns1.google.com.
google.com.             345435  IN      NS      ns2.google.com.
google.com.             345435  IN      NS      ns3.google.com.

;; Query time: 2 msec
;; SERVER: 208.184.76.39#53(208.184.76.39)
;; WHEN: Sat May  7 16:00:49 2005
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 360

That's more what you want. I wonder if said person will have a job on Monday...

How not to show that you have good networking equipment

Extreme Networks sponsored the free wireless access at Interop this week. That is nice of them. Too bad it didn't work in most places and many people were complaining about it the whole time. How hard could it be to wire all the access points together and run an adequate DHCP server? It wasn't a question of not enough signal; it was getting connected and not getting an address from DHCP. Bad feelings all around.

Best title in a patent application, April 2005

System and method for erasing a hard drive via a computer network

My second job

I have run the VPN Consortium for over six years, and continue to do so. And, as of today, I also run the Cybersecurity Association. The former covers systems that use crypto to protect your network traffic; the latter is the rest of the cybersecurity space such as firewalls and anti-virus systems. The two share the same business model (neutral, useful, and repeatable testing at a low cost) as well as lab space. This should be a fun ride!