Monthly Archive for September, 2006

How To Fly Without ID

Published
by
Chris Meller
on September 21, 2006
in Commentary, Cool, Daily Grind, Freedom of Speech, Government, Internet, Legal, Links, Questions and Random
. 0 Comments

I just stumbled upon this story today, about How To Fly Without ID. Since I’m more-or-less anti-government intrusion (yes, Google tracking my life is still fine) into my life, it caught my interest.

Now, since the only time I ever fly is on the way to or from a great vacation, I’m usually not in a hurry to miss all my connecting flights over refusing (however legally) to provide my driver’s license. Still, in the event that I ever get to travel for business again, it would be an interesting test (particularly if I wasn’t in a hurry to make it to my destination).

Anyone else out there flown recently and decided to decline to provide identification? I’d be particularly interested to hear opinions on the matter from other people who have gone through it…

Update: Dugg here and here.

Three Months of Porn!

Published
by
Chris Meller
on September 20, 2006
in Cool, Daily Grind, Internet and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments

I just got home and saw that Giganews has upped their binary retention to 90 days. That’s really cool news indeed!

I switched to Giganews1 earlier this year because they offered 70 days of retention (whereas my old provider was around 30 days), and to hear that they’re upping their storage once again is particularly nice. I agree that their unlimited service is a tad on the pricey side, but if this is the kind of rock-solid and remarkable service you get, I’ll gladly shell out for it every month.

  1. That’s a referral link. I believe I get $5 if you hang with them for 90 days. [back]

Democracy 2.0 Beta Test

Published
by
Chris Meller
on September 19, 2006
in Beta Testing, Incoherent Code, Links, Public Opinion, Questions, Random and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments

Just testing the Democracy 2.0 poll system. Nothing exciting, just a simple question… What’s your favorite RGB color?

{democracy:2}

Fixed Comment Subscriptions

Published
by
Chris Meller
on September 16, 2006
in Announcements
. 0 Comments

Thought I’d break up the boredom around here by letting everyone know I just realized that there was something broken with the subscriptions plugin I was using. Fortunately, there was an updated version that seems to have fixed everything… Hurray!

Searching for a Firewall

Published
by
Chris Meller
on September 13, 2006
in Announcements, Commentary, Internet, Networking, Public Opinion, Questions and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments

Last night I upgraded our BellSouth DSL to their finally-available 6.0 Mbps service. The sales rep told me it would be speedier by the 14th, and much to my surprise, I woke up this morning to find a newly improved 6 meg connection.

Tonight I get home to spend a few hours enjoying twice my former bandwidth, only to reallize that my little DD-WRT-running Linksys router can’t keep up with demand. When my download kept “randomly” dropping by 200k/s, I started poking around to see what was up.

Turns out it was related to all the logging I had going (built-in logging, syslog, rflow, etc.) that was eating the processor of the wee little machine (load averages up in the 3’s on a router aren’t generally a good thing for your packet latency).

So, for now I’ve disabled all those “unnecessary” (but highly necessary) services on it to get things working. I’m now looking for a small fanless Linux box that will appropriately run one of the common firewall distros. At the moment, I’m looking towards m0n0wall, but if there are other opinions out there, I’d be open to hearing them (I’ve used IPCop in the past, but it looks like they may have died, since it’s been a year since a patch was released).

LinITX looks great, particularly their m0n0wall box and their beefier generic firewall box. Unfortunately, they’re based out of the UK, which means shipping is expensive and it could take forever to get it. My AmEx and constant desire for instant gratification don’t particularly care for either…

So here are my requirements:

  • Capable of running a popular *nix firewall distro with no “tinkering” or “tweaking”
  • Fanless
  • Low-profile and low-power

Somebody out there has to have a good suggestion. I don’t have enough time to build this thing myself, so I want a pre-assembled (and preferrably m0n0wall-installed) appliance. Suggestions, please…