A Wednesday Buffet...

Politics (sort of)

This method of verifiable voting looks very interesting, if a little complicated for it’s intended users (no such issues here in Australia, especially if you’ve ever seen our Senate voting forms). Ron Rivest really knows his stuff, being the inventor of the RC5 (and series) cryptographical digests and $DEITY knows the USA needs a secure voting system, given that the Diebold machines are notoriously hackable and thus can’t really be trusted to give an accurate result (or compromise by a party with a vested interest in the result.)

Tech Bits

To the Canadian guy who managed to reel off 200mb of my RPMs today: Shit, man – talk about a) massive overkill and b) using a teaspoon to dig a trench.

WGET is a decent tool, but it’s a bit like a ball hammer – it will do the job, but there are better alternatives even for older RedHat versions. cURL has more features than you’ll ever need and seems to be more efficient.

Better still for pulling RPMs is yum/smart (I no longer do apt-get per my Packages page) – you can at least pick and choose those you need. It’s not like you need all of my packages on both architectures (and dangerdeep must have taken AGES at 10k/sec.

Plus, if I wanted my repository mirrored, I’d offer rsync access (to authorised folks at least). While I don’t have a bandwidth cap, it’s a bit discourteous to flood a modest ADSL pipe like mine.

I’ve also determined the source of all the referrer spam down to a single /16 and tossed it into the firewall. If you’re on dip.t-dialin.net’s dialup pool….. you won’t see this post anyway, why am I bothering?

Seriously – the amount of pollution from that block is too much, so bye!

Life

Saw (but didn’t speak to, perhaps a good thing) an old girlfriend while exiting an inner-city eatery on Friday.

Wow. A lot’s happened in 6 years – at least for most people. She’s barely moved on and looks a little worse for wear too :-(. She’s still hanging around with a couple of folks that even in those days kept her down and told her how to think/look/eat/shit etc. She’s still in The Box, when the rest of us got out long ago.
I could say how glad I am to have moved on, or some comment about how she should have stuck with me and gone somewhere, had a better life – but it makes no difference and such talk is essentially useless. I know that she’s a great girl at heart and I hope that she finds her nature and path in life.