The Lone Sysadmin

• The secret about innovation secrets « Scott Berkun
  "This is good advice. But it’s advice few want to hear. What he describes is work. At least it looks and smells like work. The work is called thinking, which is very rarely mentioned in lists of secrets. People who think harder about a problem, and work at it longer, are more likely to be successful. End of story." I agree with Mr. Berkun — if there's a secret to innovation it's actually doing some meaningful work.

• The New Flight Security Rules, So Far – Security – Lifehacker
  Okay, so exactly what am I supposed to do for the last hour of my flight, if I cannot use electronics or any of my carry-on stuff? I can't read, I can't listen to music. I can't even go to the bathroom. What a pain in the ass. Now I'm planning on not flying anywhere, for any reason. I hope the airline industry dies because of the TSA, for they deserve each other.
• That's Not Art
  I always enjoy a site that puts some of the stupid crap on the Internet in its place. Good use of 10 minutes.
• SMS on Wheels: CarPong Is Vehicle-to-Vehicle Messaging
  Dammit anyhow, I've been thinking about building this for years. Guess I should have done it.
• Star Wars Weather Forecast « Tom Scott
  LOL, nice. I'm glad Madison, WI is like Hoth. "You may have to climb inside a tauntaun for warmth."
• Anniversary of a cosmic blast | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine
  Weird, I don't remember hearing about this at all, but that was badass (thanks to jwz for the link).
• AT&T Customer Service: "New York City Is Not Ready For The iPhone" – The Consumerist
  Instead of announcing a tablet PC in January I'd be fine with Apple announcing that AT&T has breached their exclusivity contract and because of that the iPhone is available on all major carriers.

• Chris's Wiki :: blog/web/SSLCAFailure
  "…having your root CA certificate included in as many programs as possible is a CA's real job" A) Thanks for the attribution Chris! B) Agreed, completely.
• Golfers knew about Tiger Woods' cheating on wife Elin Nordegren, but Helen Alfredsson breaks silence
  "She then roused Woods from an Ambien-enhanced sleep by whacking him with a golf club." I'm really not into the Tiger Woods thing but if this it true I hope she's brought up on assault charges. You can really hurt people with golf clubs, and assault is against the law regardless of whether your spouse was cheating or not.

• Everything is a project, even this « Scott Berkun
  "I wrote awhile ago about why project managers get no respect, and that’s because people who make a big deal out of the project-manageryness of their work, as opposed to the domain of the things they make (homes, software, films, cookies) come off as a kind of weenie, a pm-weenie if you will. They appear to be people who are more interested in schedules, budgets and methods than the results those tools help achieve, which is kind of weird. It’s like the director of a bad movie who talks only about his fancy zoom lenses, or that the film came in under-budget. They miss the point."
• as long as your arm | Gapingvoid
  I like Hugh MacLeod's cartoons. Some of them just make me laugh.
• Foreign Airline Safety versus U.S. Major Airlines
  Interesting read from Philip Greenspun on why Gladwell is wrong in his latest book, "Outliers: The Story of Success." It makes me think that it's probably not worth reading the book with this level of talking out of his ass.

  "No 'Malcolm Gladwell' is listed in the online FAA Airmen Certification registry, from which I infer that he has no flight training or pilot experience. His biography says that he majored in history, from which I infer that he has no technical education. Yet apparently he and his publisher, Little, Brown, decided to publish a chapter on how to fly airliners without asking a few pilots to review it."

So the SSL certification authority (CA) ipsCA is frantically sending out email because their root CA certificate will expire on 12/29/2009, and every customer of theirs needs to get a new certificate. This is a problem for my organization, because, being an educational institution we were able to get no-cost[0] SSL certs from them. Because they were no-cost we have a lot of these certificates for test & development systems, and are now scrambling to find what will break on December 29th.

Once we find all the certificates there’s another complicating factor. We could just renew the certificates again, but the new ipsCA root certificate is not shipping as part of any browsers except Internet Explorer 8 (the next Firefox will have it when it ships in February).  Since we know nobody ever patches anything[1] nearly every browser in circulation will continue to have errors. I can only conclude that ipsCA is being run by people who don’t understand their business.[2]

There are a few lessons here:

• Once again, free doesn’t mean it’s a good value. I’d much rather pay for a product I know will work well than have to babysit something that I paid nothing for. Though I’d be seriously upset if I were actually a paying customer of theirs.
• It would be real nice to have a central spreadsheet or tracking mechanism for SSL certificates and their expiration dates.
• It would also be nice to have all those SSL certificates co-terminate, so we can renew them all at once. Of course, we have an opportunity to do that now.
• For most test & development purposes an internal CA would work just fine, since it’s simple enough for staff to import a CA into their browsers. In fact, some of my coworkers have already set it up.

Let’s just hope these points don’t get lost in the chaos.

———————————————————-

[0] I say “no-cost” because it’s now obvious to a lot of people that they aren’t free.

[1] Except toolbars, things that install toolbars, and spyware.

[2] That’s probably the most polite I’ve been when describing this situation.

You think that server in our data center is yours?

The CIO paid for it.

The logistics & purchasing team ordered it.

The data center team installed it.

The system administration team configured it and patch it.

You installed the application on it.

The monitoring guys watch it.

The security team scans it.

I think it’s safe to say it belongs to the whole organization, not you.

• Woo Hoo! A Track from Paradise Lost is Featured on a Grammy-Nominated Disc « SoaringLeap.com
  Conspirare is a vocal group out of Austin, TX. This disc of theirs is great — the version of Eric Whitacre's "What If" is really cool, and I've liked Barber's "Agnus Dei" ever since the Dale Warland Singers did it. If you're into this stuff it's also on iTunes.
• Google Rejects Awesome People So It Doesn't Hog All Of Them
  Catching up on my reading — Google rejects awesome people so it doesn't hog all of them? Um, yeah, right. This just sounds like a way to make some people feel good that Google rejected them.
• Cool Tools: Behringer USB Audio Interface
  I think I'm going to have to get one of these. They look cool, with audio inputs AND outputs as RCA jack & headphones.

If you’re a student, or faculty/staff at an educational institution, and have need for CAD software you might check to see if you’re eligible for a free copy of Nemetschek Vectorworks.

I don’t know much about it yet, but I’m hoping to use it for some of the lighting designs I do. Seems pretty powerful, in the 20 minutes I’ve been using it, and I know a number of people who use it for a lot of things.