This past Saturday Bryan and I went up to the
Monday, December 31, 2007
The Great Outdoors in the upper North Island
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Whole lotta shaking going on
A 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck Gisborne this evening about
Friday, December 7, 2007
Spam, spam and more spam
Sender Policy Framework or SPF is the implementation of path authentication that has been incorporated into software such as SpamAssassin. It works by having the owner of a domain designate which computers in the domain are allowed to send email to the internet. These machine names and addresses are specified in special records on that domain’s domain name server or DNS. In essence the email receiving domain verifies the legitimacy of a given message by querying the sender’s DNS to see if the message was sent from an authorized host. Email addresses can be easily spoofed but not the IP address of a domain designated email sender. SPF wouldn’t prevent a spammer who has legitimate mailboxes on a domain from sending spam from one of those mailboxes but this is easily traced and it’s not how spammers currently work. The deficiency with SPF is that email that is forwarded does not retain the original return path and may be dropped. Also by using a DNS that has been compromised an attacker could designate his own sender authenticated hosts. However DNS attacks are much harder as these servers are usually carefully hardened with security patches applied on a regular basis. Together both path based authentication and signed mail should be very effective but unlike Bill I won’t make any predictions.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Oh Oceania, where art thou?
Bill Bryson in his wonderfully entertaining book on Australia, “In a Sunburned Country” noted that he researched the 1997 index of Times news stories and found 20 articles about Australia while Peru was reported on 120 times and Albania had 150 new stories. I would venture a guess that New Zealand faired worse for being under reported. If the Times can make room for Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan can’t it do a little better in it’s coverage of this region?
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Thanksgiving in New Zealand
Saturday, November 17, 2007
The only certainty - The Republican Vice Presidential nominee
Regardless of who gets the Republican nomination it is almost certain that Kay Bailey Hutchison, the senior U.S. Senator from Texas will surely get the spot for the Vice Presidency. Although slightly liberal on abortion Hutchison, unlike Romney, has solid conservative credentials since she was elected to the Senate in 1994 with an ACU life time rating of 90.4. And as a woman she will help blunt the almost certain criticism that would result from an all male, all white Republican ticket. Expect her to decline when first offered but will relent after accepting the pleadings that she will be critical in preventing a Clinton-Obama administration. You heard it here first.
Mystery bird song of New Zealand
Do you remember when we spoke last Sunday and how after more than an hour of our instant messaging each other I said that I had to go? That’s because I just had that urge to go hiking along the Southern Walkway that leads up to the top of Mt. Victoria and to do it before the sun set. You hated it, how in the past when we used to go into an angry funk with each other and how I would just storm out of the house without a word and just go off walking somewhere without any purpose. We’ll it was kind of like that except this time I wasn’t angry with you it was more like, baby I miss you so and I can’t just sit here on the floor and IM you forever from my laptop because with all of this nervous energy it’s just has got to be expended somewhere. And it’s got to be before the sun sets. What made it so different this time was that anger had nothing to do with it but it was all about how I could only imagine being together and the love I felt but there was also so much longing which could only be salved if I headed up that hill and then maybe by getting out of breath in the process, I could feel that all is right with the world and get that “into the moment feeling” where you don’t think, you just do. That’s almost what happened but here’s the twist; that bird we marvelled about wouldn’t quite let me get into that meditative state. You know which bird I’m talking about? The one with that song that truly is like a human song, that we used to hear hanging the laundry out side our flat on Wilkinson and we thought was a tui but we’re not ornithologists, hell that song could be any of a number of different New Zealand birds and I just can’t trace it on the web. I walked along that trail that Sunday and I heard that song for the length of it. Like all those birds were on the same page and wanted to remind me that there was no shaking off that melancholy. Now I think that I have got the melody placed – it’s just the beginning of the theme from the film Midnight Cowboy. I saw that movie with my brother almost thirty years ago on a cold day in New York and hearing that brings me back to that time we shared together but now it will also remind me of you and the short time we had in Oriental Bay. Listen carefully to it now, just the opening bars to the theme and tell me if you agree. Dee de dee da dee dee dee.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11 month of 1917
Monday, November 5, 2007
Guy Fawkes Night in Wellington
Sunday, November 4, 2007
On the internet know one needs to know you're a phish
Friday, November 2, 2007
Saying good bye to Lucy
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
A modest proposal to the board of directors at Merrill Lynch from a former (and onced RIFed) employee.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Doing my own production systems support
The service has not been very robust to say the least. Lucy needs the internet especially for an on line nursing exam prep course that she signed up for 2 weeks ago. Our cable modem needs to be frequently power cycled; sometimes too many times to count in a single day. Today, Saturday was particularly vexatious. I couldn't get a connection this morning and tried multiple times to reset the modem, all to no avail. It was hard to raise a support tech through the voice mail system (some things don't change regardless of what hemisphere you're in) and when I finally did, after an interminable amount of time on hold, I was told that the modem looked good on his end. I had earlier tried to isolate the problem by taking my wireless Netgear router out of the picture. That didn't work. When I tried it again at his suggestion it did. I thanked him, finished the call and then tried to put the router back into my configuration but without luck. I did succeed with Cat 5 connecting one laptop to the router but it was strange that any wireless node I set up could see the router but not get out any further. After a few hours of this I finally got to the point where my wireless devices suddenly could make internet connections. I have no understanding of what the original problem was or how it could correct itself. Any insights would be greatly appreciated. I no longer do this type of stuff for a living, as I once did, and I'm glad for that. Still I'm uncomfortable with magic pixie dust solutions.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Red Rocks Beach
We went hiking on Sunday to the Red Rocks beach near Island Bay. This is a rugged and rock strewn beach where there’s a seal colony that takes up residency during the winter. When we got there it looked like all but two seals had checked out for the season. Actually most of the fun was in the long hike to get to the sea. We started our trip at the wind turbine on the top of a hill in Brooklyn (yes, it was named after that borough of New York City. There’s a park that separates Brooklyn from the rest of Wellington and of course it’s named Central Park. Many of the streets are named after U.S. Presidents. I haven’t determined if they have also have a restaurant named Junior’s that serves great cheesecake). The wind turbine is an experiment by one of the local energy providers to determine if wind power is cost effective and profitable. It’s hard to see how it could be anything but and I agree whole heartedly with the observation that Wellington could be the “Saudi Arabia of Wind”. We hiked with our new friends and fellow American ex-pats George, Susie, their son Wilson and a group of their Kiwi friends. We were blessed with perfect weather; a clear, cloudless day that reminded me of Southern California in the late Fall but without that brown ring of smog in the horizon. The trail we hiked was about 4 kilometres along a high and rugged ridge line that afforded expansive views of Wellington, the Pacific and the snow capped mountains of the South Island across the Cook Strait. I have more pictures at www.flickr.com. Keywords to search for are DannNewZealand2007 and the photo set is called Red Rocks Beach.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
New Zealand Terror Training
This is the first time that New Zealand has invoked an anti-terrorism law that was enacted in 2002. New Zealand has not had terrorist acts committed within its soil as have Britain, Spain and the United States. To this writer it seems unusual to hear that a terrorist camp would include multiple groups with different causes. Besides the local media this story has been reported by Reuters and some of the British press including The Guardian. There’s no mention of this at all on the New York Times Asia/Pacific section of their world news web site.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
The Haerbin, a missile destroyer and the first Chinese warship to visit
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Television
Television programming for some time has been crafted to attract what is euphemistically called “young demographics”. But I question the usual explanation for the obsession that advertisers have for seeking the eyes and ears of younger viewers. The reason that advertisers are less interested in attracting aging baby boomer viewers is not so much because they are less open to changing brands or for trying new products. It is probably more to do with their learned cynicism in believing in the mantra that buying more stuff is fun and will help make you happy.
With the obvious exception of public broadcasting the main content of television is the advertising and the programming is really just filler. It’s ultimately a passive medium and we needn’t surrender so much of our waking hours to it. But first I must catch the finale to “Nip and Tuck”.