Monad is the new command-line tool from Microsoft, and supposedly it is it’s going to be highly cool. Unfortunately, for the time being, I’m not going to touch it.

Why? Well, as strange as it sounds, I’m afraid I’ll like it. The simple reality is that I’m not going to go back to Windows as my main computing platform regardless of how cool it is. And if it were to have some cool features that my shell in Linux or OS X doesn’t have, well…that would just be bad.

I mean, I already use SFU to emulate my *nix environments, and I’m pretty happy with having roughly the same set of commands when I go from platform to platform.

I think it really boils down to something simple, though — I am deathly afraid of facing a situation in which I’m on a Linux box and go to try something I can do in MSH, only to realize that I can’t.

An interesting response to a question about security testing:

Use your level 45 remote service enumeration spell! Be careful, as you wouldn’t want your spell to trigger a recasting of “Perimeter ACL Blast”. Unless of course you have learned the always handy “Unholy 0-day of Reckoning”; hell, that has its caveats. Of course, being a Sekurity Wizard, you know all of this already, as opposed to a lowly mage such as myself.

A: Maybe because some people are too annoyed by top-posting. Q: Why do I not get an answer to my question(s)? A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

One issue that falls under the header of Internet etiquette (netiquette) is something called Top Posting. Top posting, as the link shows us, is a practice spawned from Satan and should be avoided at all costs.

Top Posting (Wikipedia)

This is a must see: How we rank against other countries by the numbers (Video)

Folks, this isn’t funny anymore. Here are a few of the stats:

• 37 Million in Poverty
• 1.5 Million babies born out of wedlock every year
• We’re not even in top 10 in literacy rates
• Over 50% of Blacks and Hispanics won’t graduate from high school
• No longer the most college educated nation
• China graduates roughly 9 times the number of engineers we do
• Washington D.C. has a higher infant mortality rate than many cities in India

This country is becoming a joke; it’s already the laughing stock of much of the world, and if we don’t do something quick we’re going to start seeing a massive migration of the the country’s educated and wealthy to other, more fertile environments.

It’s going to be the opposite of what happened when this nation began to thrive — rather than people coming here full of ambition, those who have it will be moving as fast as they can to Canada, Europe, and other forward-thinking places.

Here’s a big part of the problem: The U.S. Is Attacking Science

It’s utterly sad. It’s not just sad, it’s depressing. What can we do to stop this from happening? Anything? I’m almost of the opinion that there’s too much momentum pulling us in the wrong direction, but I know one thing for sure — I’m getting involved in the next presedential election. I’m not only making sure that everyone I can influence votes, but I’m going to try and help with education on key issues. We have to at least try.

The other (and perhaps even more sinister) issue is that of a lack of performance standards (and/or willingness to enforce them). This applies to everything, but mostly education. We need to run this country like a fortune 500 business, i.e. like an organization focused on succeeding. We need to set standards for being first in literacy, first in Math and Science, etc., etc..

Anyway, I digress. I’ll leave these thoughts to another day in another post.

Most people, whether they admit to it or not, enjoy learning about their birthdays and/or who shares them.

Well, I stumbled onto a Wikipedia page for things that happened on a given day. I have some cool people with my birthday — Carl Jung, Kevin Spacey, Mick Jagger, and even Chris Pirillo. :) The cool one about Chris is that it’s also the exact same year.

Anyway, you can do a Wikipedia search on your own birthday and learn some pretty cool stuff about it. Check it out.

Well, Phreaknic 9 (a hacker event in Nashville) is over now and the videos have been posted.

Of particular note is the fact that my buddy Ken was one of the speakers. :) Here’s the video of his presentation:

http://tinyurl.com/cjh7q (phreaknic.wilpig.org)

A friend sent me a link to this today:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6739710473912337648

It’s worth watching if you have nothing else to do.

Look I’m pretty enthused about the new security features being used in the upcoming version of Internet Explorer. There’s a lot to be optimistic about.

But articles like this make me sad. I fail to see how IE7’s security hinges on the strength of encryption between it and a remote website.

Have you ever gone to fix someone’s system that was trashed by IE, only to say to yourself, “Damn, if only they’d used TLS instead of SSL.”? Yeah, me neither.

SSL 2.0, TLS 1.0 — whatever. I’m all for the stronger standard, but I’m more interested in seeing more needed improvements such as the handling of ActiveX, scripting, input validation, etc.

I’m horny for books. I read them, I collect them, I admire them — especially those that are information security related.

Recently I’ve been running into a problem in the bookstore while browsing. I come across a title that looks intruiging and then realize that I’m not sure whether or not I already own it. It’s a horrible feeling, really. The old me says buy it anyway and give it away if it’s a duplicate, but the new me demands that I check first to see if I own it.

The obvious solution is to be able to check, from the bookstore, whether or not I actually already have a given book. So I made a list of my books in vi, sorted it for easy searching, and put it on the site.

Now, whenever I’m in doubt, I can conjure the page over my Blackberry and check to see if I have the damn thing before I buy it. :) W00t.

http://dmiessler.com/mybooks

Next I’ll complete my previous project of manually building a database to do this using LAMP. I did it already, but my table structure was primitive and the only functions I had were viewing all books and adding new books. What I’d ultimately like to be able to do is search by any field, e.g. author, edition, subject, etc.

Another thought I’ve been throwing around is the concept of tagging along the lines of Delicious. In other words, take each book and give it a series of tags. Then, just as with Delicious and Flikr, I could search for all books with a given tag (or even multiple tags). As an example, it’d be cool to call up all books of mine that have to do with database, or all my Python books, etc. Anyway, this’ll work for now.

Since every improvement in one species will lead to a selective advantage for that species, variation will normally continuously lead to increases in fitness in one species or another. However, since in general different species are coevolving, improvement in one species implies that it will get a competitive advantage on the other species, and thus be able to capture a larger share of the resources available to all. This means that fitness increase in one evolutionary system will tend to lead to fitness decrease in another system. The only way that a species involved in a competition can maintain its fitness relative to the others is by in turn improving its design.

The Red Queen Principle