For some reason my WiFi on my MacBook keeps flaking out and I have to disconnect and reconnect to the access point to restore the connection. I managed to write a simple shell script to do this, and I can run the script easily with QuickSilver or through Spotlight.

The package with Hardy for the nvidia drivers doesn't actually work. I really wanted graphics acceleration so I decided to download the Nvidia drivers from their site.

I don't know why the Ubuntu people didn't think of this.

After days of waiting I finally got my iPhone 3G.

I really like how Apple has taken to the dark side, supporting DRM as seen by their crippling of DTrace and the QuickTime update that disables video editing apps. I guess this gives me more reason to avoid switching to OS X and replacing my aging laptop with a MacBook.

I've always been surprised by the lack of people using GPG, PGP or even S/MIME. Perhaps now that the Sixth Circuit US Court of Appeals has stated that e-mail is not protected under the Forth Amendment of the Constitution and that "users have no expectation of privacy," people may think again.

It's been reported in the OpenBSD Journal that "itojun" Jun-ichiro Itoh Hagino, one of the developers who contributed significantly to implementing IPv6 in BSD, recently passed away. Although I did not know him personally, I can honestly say he will be missed and his loss will be felt in the BSD and IPv6 user communities. :(

I bought a "refurbished" mini-HD from Geeks.com. I was curious whether by "refurbished" they meant it was factory refurbished, in which case the drive should have been clean, or just "used and returned to us," in which case there were probably a lot of deleted files still on the drive. I decided before trying autopsy/sleuth, I'd try magicrescue. I found about 840MB of data -- mostly mathematical graphs and such and some other files that support my theory that the previous owner was quite the nerd.

I'm currently at COB Speicher in Iraq (been here since 21st of September). Presently, my internet access is considerably limited, but I'm doing alright other than that.

I'm in Kuwait at the moment and the camp where I am has pre-paid wireless hotspots that use MAC filtering to block unauthenticated users and redirect them to a login page. After, successful authentication the MAC is white listed. It's pretty weak security that can be bypassed by:

1. Running Kismet or Airsnort to capture some packets
2. Running Wireshark to find traffic other than people getting stuck at a login page (i.e., authenticated users)
3. Changing the MAC of your NIC to that of an authenticated user
4. Connecting happily