So, when you’re sorting stuff like email, RSS feeds, etc., do you put the newest to the top or to the bottom? I’d love to hear your best reasons for doing whichever you do.

– EDIT: I’m switching back to new-on-bottom for both Mail and RSS. It’s just more natural to me. It doesn’t seem logical to me to assume that because something happened slightly farther in the past it’s less important. As such, I’d like to take them as they came in.

Has anyone else noticed this strategy by Microsoft? Their only means of defending Vista’s flopping seems to be to talk about how cool the next version of Windows will be. It’s like they’re saying:

We know Vista let everyone down, but trust us — the next version of Windows is going to be really, really, extra-super cool! Even better than Leopard, which is about to come out and make us look like fools.

So remember, when Leopard does lanuch, and it makes us look completely silly…keep in mind that we have something WAY better than that coming in just two years.

Uh, yeah…I believe you.

When apt your package manager is prompting you regarding an install decision, like so:

Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Just press enter. The “Y” being capitalized means it’s the default. :)

I think we all know this, but so many of us still type the “Y” out of habit. This is my attempt to free you from doing so.

I’m not sure how this is going to work out yet, but I’m making the switch away from mailing list for a couple of my key security sources — most importantly, Full Disclosure and Bugtraq.

A few I’ll still interact with through my mail client, i.e. those that I participate actively in more often, but for the majority of them I’m going to be moving to RSS. Here’s a short list of feeds you might want to look at:

• Bugtraq
• Full Disclosure
• Nmap Hackers

And here’s a comprehensive list from seclist.org.

There’s a really cool blog over at Violent Acres. The woman who runs it basically goes out on all-out rants that often cross all boundaries of political correctness and decency in search of truth. Needless to say — I’m a big fan.

Something’s been bothering me, though — she doesn’t have an RSS feed.

This bothers me because it’s a conscious effort on her part NOT to. I can see why she doesn’t have comments (to avoid petty Internet arguments), but in her FAQ she claims that she doesn’t use her real name because all she cares about are the ideas in her posts, not who they’re associated with.

Well, if her ideas were so important to her, why wouldn’t she make it easier for people to partake of those ideas? It seems pretty clear that she values her ad revenue more, which to me is a shame. I’m sure if she read this she’d give me a proper scolding along the lines of:

Yeah, I like money. So what? If you like my blog enough (which you clearly do) you’ll come visit me without your precious RSS laziness-reduction tool.

I’m most upset that she’d probably be right. Turns out, though, that there’s a site that mirrors her posts, and THAT site has an RSS feed. Nice.

– [Edit: Turns out she does have a feed. It's labeled, "RSS, bitch." and can be found on the right side of the site]

Seems like a good place to hang out…

Atheists of Silicon Valley http://www.godlessgeeks.com/

A most excellent piece on disproving fantasies.

I just finished getting Mail.app to recognize two seperate SSL certs from my server — one for imap.dmiessler.com, and another for smtp.dmiessler.com. This was less than trivial (mostly due to my own stupidity).

What this means is that I can finally use real domain names in my certificates (self-signed) for two separate hostnames while avoiding the annoying prompts that OS X likes to throw when it senses tomfoolery.

Here are the steps:

• Create your Postfix certificates the way Weitse wants you to, using your SMTP hostname.
• Import both the CA cert and your actual Postfix certificate into OS X.
• For IMAP, edit your imapd.cnf file to reflect your IMAP hostname, etc.
• Run mkimapdcert.
• Import that certificate into OS X.

Now when you open Mail.app you should not get prompted to accept any certificates. The trick is that you need to import the CA’s cert on the Postfix side or it won’t work. But with courier this is not required. It has something to do with the format of the certificates being different.

It’s on my list of things to research, but for now I’m just happy I got it working exactly as I want it.

An exceedingly cool description of how various numbers are unique.