Archive for February, 2011

340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 (2^128) addresses ought to be enough for anybody

Today’s XKCD got me thinking:

The joke, of course, is about the Great IPv6 Debate. If you’re lucky, you’ve never heard of it. Basically, the debate is being fought by folks over at Slashdot and the other tech news sites. Whenever an IPv6 story comes up, you end up with dozens of comments along the lines of “why is this necessary?” or “this is just excessive” or “it’s too hard!” or “but NAT works” or my favorite – “NAT is my security”.

Well, those are all wrong. Let me try and address some common misconceptions. Read more

Possessed Magic Trackpad

I received Apple’s Magic Trackpad as a gift a few months ago. Since I usually have my MacBook Pro hooked up to a huge monitor and my Model M-style buckling-spring keyboard on top of the closed screen, the internal “magic” multitouch trackpad is unusable. I was looking forward to using all the nifty gestures I missed out on most of the time, such as inertial scrolling and 4-finger-swipe “show desktop”. I also figured I could reclaim some desk space. Read more

Cats!

Aren’t they adorable? My family got them yesterday. I can’t wait to meet them on Spring Break (next week!).

We had the nicest cat, Shanghai, for 21 years – she was older than I was. She died last winter, and we’ve finally decided to get two new kittens. We found a fantastic shelter in Bloomfield, NJ – they’re really careful, and even call your vet (!) if you’ve had other pets to see how you’ve taken care of them. The animals are out of their cages for most of the day and get all sorts of human interaction, they bring dogs in – it’s just a nice place. These kittens are about 9-10mos old. To avoid over-exciting them, we’re confining them to the dining room and kitchen for now, and we’ll gradually open up the rest of the house.

Videos to come.

Santorum (adj) – The assassination of one’s political career in spectacular fashion.

No, this is not the “real” definition. In the attempt to be safe for work, you’re welcome to Google it yourself.

Alright, you’re back. Or perhaps you never left. I won’t assume you know what it means, though you’re welcome to read the Wikipedia page on some of the backstory. It’ll help.

In any case, as a punishment for some incredibly bigoted statements of then-Senator Rick Santorum, a new word was coined. If you didn’t hear at the time, essentially he said that consensual gay relations were as morally justifiable as incest or adultery. If you hover over the above link, you’ll see the parenthetical “sexual neologism”. This should be enough to give you an idea about what kind of word was defined in his name. Well, in the absolute sense (and playing devils’ advocate), he has a point. But then again, no act of sex is justifiable. The drive itself is a necessary instinct, but unexplainable in rational terms. It’s an axiom of our existence, or should be – some try to ignore it. Attempting to justify sex is like asking why we’re afraid of death – it just is because that’s how we are, at the deepest level

Enough about that. This entry isn’t about the man, the act, the statements, or the word. Rather, it’s about Google.

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Nothing is impossible if you give me money

I’ve got a marvelous proposition for you: Give me a picture of a guy, and I’ll tell you if he’s a terrorist. Wait – that’s too easy. Instead, I’ll find one hidden in an Al-Jazeera broadcast.

Unfortunately for all of us, the Justice Department said “we’re listening”.

Government Tries to Keep Secret What Many Consider a Fraud – NYTimes.com

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