Journal of Omnifarious

23:59 - To all of my friends

Could you also please friend omnifarious' OpenID account [omnifarious.org] by clicking here: and put that user (who is also me) in all the same groups you put me. If LJ ever lets you use your OpenID identity to log into an existing journal, this may be moot. but I'm not counting on that feature ever happening.

As an aside, if you click on the icon in omnifarious' OpenID account [omnifarious.org], it takes you someplace different than clicking on the hopper [omnifarious.org] does. The takes you to the LJ user info page, and the hopper [omnifarious.org] part takes you to the homepage for the ID.

Current Mood: working

06:15 - Weird telecommunications/power outage in Seattle

There was some kind of weird telecommunications outage in Seattle last night. My Internet connection dropped and my phone lost signal from any tower. Does anybody know what happened?

Current Mood: curious

20:59 - I will be in Minnesota from the 1st through the 12th

I will be in Minnesota for Convergence. I will be bringing tazfrog with me, and I'll be staying at rosencrantz319's house.

I hope to see all of my friends who live in Minnesota. :-)

I should probably not be spending money on this, being unemployed as I am. But Convergence is really high on my scale of important events to attend.

Current Mood: excited

12:12 - Switching ISps today

I'm switching ISPs today, and that means I will be down until it's all done. I meant to send email out to various people who rely on me for some services, but I forgot to. Bad sysadmin!

Anyway, many of them read this LJ, so here's my message to you telling you that my systems are going to be down for a little while. I'm hoping they'll be up today.

Current Mood: anxious

10:21 - Eskimo North Internet questions

I've been looking to change ISPs. Recently Speakeasy's service has seemed to be really going downhill. And most recently, they want to charge me $300 to disconnect from a service they never connected and a line over which not a single packet has ever transited.

One ISP on my radar is Eskimo. One gigantic huge blinking plus for me is that they might support IPv6 natively. The carrier they use for DSL in this area is Mammoth Networks, which does support IPv6.

The problem is, I've called them twice and each time I've gotten a salesperson who was weak on the technical details and instead of punting my question to a technical person, they got huffy with me.

Has anybody had any experience with them? Is the level of poor service I'm getting from the salesperson indicative of how they run their operation in general?

Current Mood: curious

16:15 - New kind of phishing

I just fell for a new kind of phishing scheme. They sent me a message which looked exactly like messages from my bank usually do and asked me to call an 800 number regarding restrictions places on my check card. The 800 number then put me through an automated process asking for my card # and my PIN. I didn't give them then PIN because I've forgotten it for that card.

Since I didn't know the PIN I hung up on the call and tried calling a different # for my bank to ask them what the heck was up. I'm glad I did that. I had the card cancelled immediately. :-(

I feel a little stupid. But I'd never seen a phisher actually set up an 800 # before. In retrospect it's obvious. They have money. It's not hard.

If the mail had had a link to a website I would've noticed that it was a phishing scheme immediately. It had a link to an email address @ my bank, but that was secretly a link to a website. I didn't mouse over it to find out though until after I realized it was a phishing scheme.

It also happened to hit me at just the right time. I'd happened to be using that card about the same amount in the past month as I'd been using it in the past 4-5 (I don't use that card often at all), so it was plausible they'd see that as a fraud issue.

Anyway, I'm posting this as a warning that phone #s in email messages are an even worse problem than links because there's nothing that really identifies who owns a phone # at all.

Current Mood: annoyed

15:30 - Interesting idea for encoding small numbers efficiently.

I'm trying to think of a way to use a set of prime numbers to assist in efficiently representing a series of arbitrary integers.

My first thoughts about this involve defining a set of n primes P in conjuction with the set of n values V such that P_i is the smallest prime greater than V_i for all i from 1..n. Basically I was thinking of using a set of primes as a sort of basis vector. But now I'm not sure I can make this idea work.

Anyway, the idea is to encode several small values, each of which may take from 2-8 bits to represent in less than a byte or two if the total bits of all the values are less than 12 (bonus points for using only a byte of the total bits are less than 7) and less than 3 bytes if the total bits are less than 20.

Current Mood: contemplative

11:36 - Myth: MD5 is faster than SHA-1

MD5 is broken. It no longer satisfies one of the basic properties of a hash function. It is possible to find two values that have the same hash relatively simply and quickly. People say that this is a fairly trivial weakness and that there are many things MD5 can still be used for. They are wrong. It is very hard to accurately analyze exactly where and when the lack of that particular property can bite you. But still people persist in saying MD5 is fine, and we should continue to use it because it's faster. But the idea that it's faster is a myth.

OK, so it's not a total myth. On paper MD5 should be faster than SHA-1. It's simpler and requires fewer operations to computer. But in practice it often isn't faster.

Where I work we tested MD5 and SHA-1 from OpenSSL on several different platforms. SHA-1 was actually faster on most of them. OpenSSL has assembly optimized versions of both algorithms for many platforms. But the assembly optimized versions of SHA-1 were consistently faster.

I do not know exactly why this is. But I do have a guess. My guess is that everybody who actually knows enough to do significant work on cryptography algorithm implementations knows that MD5 is broken and should no longer be used for anything, no matter what excuse. And so they don't spend much time trying to tweak the assembly optimized versions of MD5 and instead concentrate their efforts on the much stronger (but still slightly broken) SHA-1. So those versions end up faster.

So please people, stop using MD5. And replace it everywhere it's used. It's broken, and pretending you can do the analysis to know that its brokenness isn't going to affect you is foolish arrogance. There is no excuse but inertia. The "but it's faster" excuse no longer flies.

Current Mood: determined

10:13 - Headed to Minneapolis for the weeked tomorrow

I should be headed to Minneapolis tomorrow morning to visit an um friend I met over CONvergence. I will also likely be making some time to visit with rosencrantz319 and maybe svairini. I will be back on Sunday evening.

Current Mood: excited

19:12 - I'm looking to leave Speakeasy

I want to find a Seattle area ISP that does DSL and IPv6. I'm tired of getting the brush-off from Speakeasy support reps when I ask them what they're going to do in a couple of years when IPv6 websites start popping up because they can't get IPv4 addresses.

IPv4 address exhaustion is happening and no amount of whining and telling people that NAT is the answer will solve it. I want an ISP that's actually interested in doing something about it before it becomes a crisis.

And, if you live in an area covered by Speakeasy and feel so inclined, please call them up or file a support ticket (if you're already a customer) and ask them for IPv6. In fact, no matter who your ISP is, call them up and ask.

Current Mood: aggravated

20:56 - Gaia consort is playing this Friday

tazfrog and I are going to try to go. I'm pretty sure we can get there, but I'm not so sure about getting back. Are any of you going and willing to take us? :-)

Current Mood: hopeful

21:39 - tazfrog's birthday is soon

tazfrog's birthday is on Tuesday, September 23rd and we're thinking of doing a few fun things that evening. We haven't decided exactly what yet though. If you would like to come, please post something saying what limitations you have and maybe some ideas for things to do. :-)

You might know tazfrog from wolfieboy's gaming night. :-)

Comments will be screened since exactly what's going to transpire and who will be there is meant to be a bit of a surprise. :-)

Current Mood: hopeful

20:54 - attachmate is looking for testers

The place I work is looking to hire people for testing positions. They make a security sensitive product and they are well aware of this, so I have the impression that testing is pretty important to them. OTOH, they only hire testers on contract and then sometimes give offers to the ones they really like.

If any of you reading this would be interested, I may be willing to recommend you for a position there. I'm thinking, in particular, of cooncat, but I might be willing to recommend other people too.

Current Mood: hopeful

13:04 - Visiting MN for CONvergence

I'm hoping to visit MN for CONvergence, and it would also be really nice to stay the week after. I have two problems with this though.

The first problem is that I don't have a room. I thought I'd filled out the room reservation form last year, but I guess I didn't. I'm wondering if maybe someone would be willing to let me stay in their room.

I can possibly get a room at the Crowne Plaza nearby, but that's not nearly as much fun. And I'm not really sure I have the money for a room for 3 days of my own at any hotel. :-/

The second is that I definitely do not have the money to stay in a hotel the week after the convention. I'm wondering if someone would be willing to let me couch surf for that week (July 6th->13th).

Current Mood: hopeful

13:15 - Seeing Indiana Jones very soon

I intend to see Indiana Jones soon and I would welcome anybody who wants to come see it with me. I will be seeing the 15:30 showing of Indiana Jones at the Majestic Bay theater in Ballard.

If you want to see it with me, please be here by 14:30 (2:30pm) so we can get decent seats. The Majestic Bay is a theater that actually has bad seats and is fairly small and very popular.

Edit 14:30: I've not been able to find anybody to see it with me, but given the short notice that's not too surprising or disheartening. I'll leave a review here later.

Current Mood: hopeful

22:46 - It has come to my attention...

That someone made up a reason out of thin air why I was having a hard time finding an apartment and subsequently has been telling people this reason as if it is fact. The supposed reason is that I do a lot of pot, which is an idea that would cause most people who know me at all to give you a really strange look and fall down laughing. It's really interesting to me that someone is willing to make up a reason out of thin air and spread it around as truth.

So, yeah, if you don't know the reason for something in my life, please don't tell people random garbage you just sort of randomly find in some deep dark stinky place in your own soul. You can just report what you do know and let me tell my own story if I so choose. That will be just fine, thanks.

Current Mood: annoyed

20:16 - This should be amusing

From mokie_sassafras.

Post something, anything, that you think I should do in 2008. Can be a resolution, or something fun. Ideas will be rated for merit :)

16:47 - Drug test using blood, not urine

This is a rather odd request, but I'm looking for someplace, anyplace in the Seattle area that will do a blood based drug screening test for a walk-in patient. I really need an answer to this before Friday. I've been doing a LOT of hunting myself and I haven't been able to find anyplace that will do it.

And it has to be blood. Hair will not do.

Thanks.

Edit: I found someone who would do it. It wasn't easy. I somehow magically got the contact # for someone inside one of the companies who's front people told me "We won't do that because you're just a person, not a corporation.". This person was willing to finagle something so that a place that normally handles urine walk-ins was willing to collect the money as a front for Labcorps, a place that will only do tests for individuals.

Current Mood: hopeful

23:35 - Need to find a home for Zow

rainonthewind won't be able to take him because her fiancé is allergic and her hoped for house with plenty of outdoors space for him fell through. She's pretty sure she can find a home for him, but I figure it can't hurt to ask here either.

I'm looking for a temporary home for this cat. He doesn't have any bad habits. He scratches his scratching post, not furniture. He uses his litter box. He doesn't have hairballs. He gets along pretty well with other cats. He's friendly, but not obnoxiously attention seeking. He's neutered and is about 2-3 years old. I'd be willing to foot vet bills if need be.

I hope to be able to take him back within 12-20 months. I will be moving from the place I just found unless they change their minds about letting me have him.

Current Mood: sad

15:02 - I will be offline for awhile soon, backup MX anyone?

My servers will be offline for nearly a week starting on November 30th and ending on December 6th (hopefully). This means that http://www.omnifarious.org/ will be down, and no mail to omnifarious.org addresses will be delivered.

*sigh* This is the part about moving that I hate almost as much as packing.

Anyway, if anybody who is online and running a mail server is willing to be my backup MX and store messages for the duration I would be very grateful. Especially if you have fairly good spam filtering that always blocks spam before accepting delivery so people who send legitimate mail that's accidentally blocked are given a decent bounce message.

Current Mood: annoyed