Wednesday, December 3, 2003

Christmas Spirit -- 4:07 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

This is cool: the guys over at Penny Arcade have teamed up with Seattle Children's Hospital to provide toys for kids at the hospital. They've set up a huge Amazon wish list and have invited readers to buy toys (or donate cash) for sick kids. They estimate that within just a few days they've received over $30,000 in toys and donations. The pictures are impressive.

Miscellany -- 12:00 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

At this time of year, it's good to review your place in the four stages of life:

1. You believe in Santa
2. You don't believe in Santa
3. You are Santa
4. You look like Santa

It's also wise to remember that happiness does not come from getting more and more stuff, but from wanting what you have. If you can do that, you must not want a Playstation 2 as much as I do.

My fist would like to meet the marketing bozos who decided that it's cool and attractive to advertise using real people with big open-mouthed smiles. Ugh. And who decided to use the hideous creatures from the Cat In The Hat movie to sell junk at the post office? My fist would like to meet that guy too.

Pondering the Imponderable -- 11:22 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

You know you're a parent when you can say in all seriousness and with a perfectly straight face, "Do NOT hit your brother with your lightsaber!" Or you're insane. One or the other.

The Master comments: Is that anything like saying "Don't run your brother over with your dump truck!"?

Tuesday, December 2, 2003

Pondering the Imponderable -- 8:57 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

If there's anything more geeky than compiling a new kernel, I'd like to know what it is. Actually the process isn't that hard. I am now running on a freshly compiled 2.4.23 kernel, which fixes a kind of nasty kernel exploit that was recently discovered (see this Slashdot article for the details). It appears that you need local access to exploit it though. Still, better safe than sorry. Nice to know that this bug was patched well before an exploit was found. It just shows that all OSes are vulnerable to exploits like this. The difference is how quickly they are dealt with.

The Master comments: Actually, this bug has been exploited before the kernel updates were widely published -- the Debian server compromise used this kernel bug to gain access to a slew of Debian systems.

A.T. Hun comments: Of course, the only way they were able to use the exploit was because one of the Debian developers' password had been compromised.

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