If you’re completely finished being productive at any given point, head over to popurls.com and see what’s interesting on the Interwebs.

Very cool.

http://www.trolltech.com/products/qtopia/greenphone

Audiobooks.

Yeah, that’s it. I feel like an iPod is not really an iPod unless it holds my entire media collection. And since the iPhone isn’t going to do that, the perfect application for it is as a reading/training device.

I have so many audiobooks that I’ve never listened to yet, as well as a ton of SANS training that I would love to have with me at all times.

Not many full music/media collections will fit on 4-8GB iPhones, but probably 99% of audiobook collections will.

So think of it as an opportunity. Get all your books and training courses loaded up on it (and maybe a few classic albums if you must) and be done with it. Future generations will no doubt aggressively multiply the storage capacity, so use this time to catch up on your digital reading and studying.:

President Bush isn’t the hateful warmonger people make him out to be. I agree that he’s hurting the United States to an obscene degree (as well as the world as a whole) but it’s not because he’s evil. Allow me to explain.

Requirements For Evil

First off we have to decide whether evil lies in the intent or in the outcome. I think it’s a matter of intent. While those who are ignorant may cause just as much suffering as an evil person, as long as they are clueless rather than hateful I think they fail to meet the rather high standard for “evil”.

And before you go off on me for implying that Bush is some victim of ignorance and “really a nice guy”, I acknowledge that he’s ultimately at fault for the mistakes he’s made, and that he needs to be held accountable. All I’m saying is that there’s a moral difference between someone misguided committing evil and someone with full understanding of their actions.

In His Mind

Bush doesn’t want to be some oil tycoon; he’s not doing any of this for the money. His main goal in life is to be remembered as a hero. He wants to be Ronald Reagan. He wants to go down in history as the man who defeated terrorism and brought peace and democracy to the Middle East.

That is the single most important thing to him — his legacy. Everything he’s done in Iraq and elsewhere has been toward the goal of making the world better so that people would love him. His secret fantasy is that of being remembered as a savior, and his most horrible nightmare is being thought of as a bad president.

No, seriously…think about it.

Everything he has done since he’s been in office has been for the purpose of “improving the world” so that people would love him. When he says he wants to bring democracy to Iraq, he’s not lying. Why does he want that? Because he wants to see them be happy. He wants them to celebrate him in the streets. He wants them to remember him as the man who freed them from the old, broken way and showed them the American dream.

Sure, there’s no doubt he’s throwing a ton of business to his friends and protecting our oil interests in the region at the same time, but that’s only natural to him. It’s part of the same thing; he doesn’t see any harm in his friends (and the U.S.) benefiting from what will ultimately be positive for the Iraq and the Middle East.

This is why he’s so frustrated when he’s labeled as a warmonger and accused of being a bad person. Do you see the look on his face when he’s trying to convince people otherwise? He’s seriously confused and offended about why people don’t like him. I can guarantee that he walks around in private saying, “Don’t they see that I’m trying to help them?!?”

The reason he’s so stubborn is because he thinks he’s on one of those humps, like Reagan was with the cold war. I’m sure he tells people, “People thought Reagan was wrong, too…but look what happened! No, sir…I’ll stick to my plan, and when they see how well it turns out they’re going to feel awfully stupid for treating me this way. They’ll know then that I did the right thing…” This is truly what he believes, my friends. He really thinks that if things go his way the world will benefit from it.

Conflicting Realities

Unfortunately for Bush (and the world), his perspective of how the world works is catastrophically incorrect. In other words, the one thing that makes Bush a good person is being right about how the world works, and being able to do exactly what he said he could do. And that’s simply not possible.

He’s not an intellectual, he’s not cultured, and he’s rather close-minded — all negative traits for someone who’s trying to go around “fixing” the world. And as a result, he overlooked the simple fact that Iraq probably isn’t ready for a democracy. Call me naive, but I’d say that Saddam’s system worked because it prevented many within the population from expressing themselves. So a system designed to let people do just that is probably not the best approach just yet.¹

How To Proceed

So, hopefully I’ve convinced you that the President’s intentions are not nearly as malicious as they might appear. Surely wanting to save the world and be remembered as a hero ranks far lower on the evil scale than being a man of war who just wants to hurt people.

Ironically, however, my assessment for what needs to be done to try and remedy the situation is the same as if I thought he were an evil man. I think Bush should be impeached for being dishonest about a great number of things, as well as simply being ignorant of how the world works and killing tens of thousands of people as a result.

I don’t think he should be tried as a criminal; again, he’s not an evil man. Ultimately, his deception came from the will to do the right thing — however misguided that turned out to be. But he must be removed. And most importantly, the next president needs to do something unprecedented: they need to stand up in front of the world and apologize. Apologize for what Bush did on behalf of the American people who put him in office.

Not from the perspective of, “Sorry for putting a killing machine in office for a few years…”, but with the stance of:

“We are sorry for what we caused. Please understand that he was not an evil man, and that the thought he was doing good in the world. We promise to try to learn from this mistake, and we look forward to conducting ourselves more befitting of true Americans in the future, i.e. treating people with the respect they deserve.”

That’s how we should move forward. End this madness, do our best to help in the aftermath, and learn from our mistakes. But as we move forward with removing Bush, do keep in mind that we were taken with his passion for fixing the world. That’s what attracted me to him, and that’s what attracted many others to him as well. What we need to realize is that it takes more than just passion to solve complex problems. It takes intelligence and and the willingness to see other perspectives.:

– ¹ I’m referring to the expression of hate here — especially religious hate — which is obviously a serious problem in Iraq.

If you’re into driving or gadgets you may have heard about the Escort X50 radar detector. Well I got one like a year ago and it worked great…up until it didn’t anymore.

It’s saved me from numerous tickets during my time with it, but a few weeks ago it started acting kooky — telling me it was “calibrating”, and then demanding to be serviced. Of course, you don’t service radar detectors — you replace them.

So, like a dumbass, I ignored it. And last weekend I drove through some cop’s speed trap. He was right in the middle of the road no doubt spraying radar down the road for miles. My trusty detection device remained silent, however, and I got what’s commonly referred to as a “citation”.

Bastards.

So I’ve rectified that situation with the new BEL STI Driver. Turns out the Escorts are renowned for being excellent detectors with serious stability problems. I wish I had known this. When it comes to both radar detection and IDS, nothing’s worse than a false negative. Oh well, lesson learned — stick with BEL, they’re solid.

1839?

I’m sure they’re not trying to hide anything, as doing so with a robots.txt file would be asinine, but 1839 entries is just insane. At some point you have to start wondering whether the content should be online at all if you don’t want it indexed.

I wonder if they’re using any of the directories as honeydirs (I just made it up). The idea being that you would have no links to a given directory, tell people in the robots.txt file absolutely NOT to go there, and then sit and log people who show up. It’d be easy to do in Apache:

grep $baddirectory accesslog | cut -f1

...and there’s your list of “curious” people.

Probably not worth it for this kind of site, but an interesting thought. In fact, I’m going to implement this tonight for my site.

So I get a trackback to my site the other day and I notice the name of the other blog: “cat mind | grep understanding”. I was mildly alarmed.

Turns out someone just put up a new blog about information security and some other interesting topics. I was going to get slightly miffed about the title similarity, but he mentioned it and where he got it from. No worries.

So his second post is about a SANS certification (GCIH); it’s a small world. And in good faith, here’s a link to his site. Best of luck to him with the new blog.

Ramknecht.net

I implore you to stop what you’re doing and go read this right now. It’ll only take a few minutes, and it’s worth it.

How To Destroy America

This is the main topic I’d like to see discussed during the next presidential election. Of course, that’ll never happen. Plus, the Republicans have made people cringe when they hear this kind of language because it’s often associated with negativity and hate.

We need someone to separate necessary truth from bigotry and isolationism. I hope someone capable of doing this shows up soon and starts a discourse. We desperately need one.

Since getting my watch I’ve received some pretty interesting reactions from people. The biggest misconception people seem to have about Rolex is that any Rolex is better than any non-Rolex. Or to put it another way, they simply think that Rolex is the “top of the line”, “best of the best”, most expensive, etc, etc.

This is simply not the case.

Rolex makes really excellent watches, don’t get me wrong — but Rolex is more comparible to like a $50,000 BMW than it is to a $250,000 Porsche, Ferrari, or Rolls. There are many watches that are 1) more expensive, 2) more exclusive, and 3) more accurate. There are also other brands that rival or surpass Rolex’s engineering — Patek Philippe is one example.

The thing that attracts me to Rolex, however, is their focus on rigorous testing and durability combined with the accuracy and appearance. Rolex tightly controls every element of the materials selection, the engineering, assembly, etc — all so that they can guarantee that the watch will last for multiple decades. I’ve met several people who’ve had their Rolex for 25-40 years and have never had it serviced.

This is what I like about the Rolex Submariner. Very high standards, excellent durability, meticulous testing procedures — all resulting in a piece that is superbly engineered, highly functional and looks great without calling too much attention to itself. The Patek pieces, for example, are incredibly awesome, but many of their movements can be damaged by the G-forces from as little as a Golf swing.

I compare my watch (the Submariner) to a low-end BMW or a Glock. Both of these are really excellent brands, but they place their emphasis on quality engineering and durability rather than being exotic or flashy. There are cars that are faster than a BMW, corner better than they do, and even cars that look better. The point is that the BMW does all these things really well for general use.

And that’s how I feel about my watch. It’s the perfect balance of the qualities that I look for.

So the next time someone freaks out about someone having a Rolex, point out that there are many watches that surpass Rolex in one or more areas. They aren’t “the best” (as if there really were such a thing). They’re just extremely decent. And that’s what I like about them.

I’ve recently started searching my site using Google rather than using the built-in Wordpress search. That’s nothing new — pretty much everyone knows that if you use site:yourdomain.com in front of a search term, it’ll search only your domain for that term.

That’s cool and everything, but it doesn’t get really sick until you combine it with Firefox’s Quicksearches. Quicksearches let you configure keywords that you type right into Firefox’s address bar. You can, for example, search Google for “cars” just by typing “g cars” into the URL field. The results will exactly the same as if you had gone to the Google homepage, typed in the word “cars”, and pressed enter.

So since Google is so good at search, and since it’s crawling your site constantly anyway, why not let Google do all the work when you’re looking for links on your own site? That’s what this little shortcut does — it uses a Quicksearch to find exactly what you’re looking for on your site — all without going to your site or to Google.

Adding The Quicksearch Bit

To make this work you just have to make yourself a new bookmark with the correct properties, like so:

1. Go to Bookmarks –> Organize Bookmarks
2. On the top left, select “New Bookmark”
3. Give the bookmark a name — something like, “Site Quicksearch”
4. Give it a keyword (this is what you’ll type into the URL bar). Try “ss”.
5. In the Location field, paste the following:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:dmiessler.com%20%s

Then, simply replace “dmiessler.com” with your own site and you’re done. Now hit ctrl-L to get to the address bar and type:

ss linux firewalls (then press enter)

What you’ll get back is Google’s results for “linux firewalls” coming from your page.: