ShmooCon

I'm off to ShmooCon 2007. See y'all there. It looks like I'll be the one with the cane (I'm seriously gimping this week).

Ted Stevens Ringer

While we're on the subject of ringtones, here is one extracted from the famous "it's not a truck" speech. Again, I made it with Audacity.

Scanner back online

I'd only blogged about it previously. Due to numerous and repeated upgrades and distro switches, one of the peripherals that I'd left offline was my $.67 scanner. Needing it this evening showed just how long it's been offline: I last took notes about installation back when I was using devfs (vice udev). The installation is now much, much easier. My new installation notes will be wiki'd here eventually. (For now, they're a mess.)

Bruce Ringer

Get your own Bruce Potter "Bow to my firewall!" ringtone here. I extracted it from the "Speaking ala Bruce" video with Kino and clipped/converted it to ringtone format with Audacity.

Enjoy!

Snort + OpenWRT

Here's a paper on building intrusion detection into OpenWRT. The paper describes the need to limit the signature set due to memory limitations.

This might be worth trying again. Maybe you could get better mileage with something like a WRTSL54GS which has more memory? There's also a lot more features/software around to hook together. Any takers?

Network visualization

In searching for a flow tool for OpenWRT, I found "Network Intelligence. It has an interesting 3D depiction of traffic. If anyone has used this, please let me/us know how you like it.

ShmooCon Schedule

It's probably old news for most but the ShmooCon schedule has been posted.

Time

Two things I learned today:

• My browser only supports 9 open windows in YouTube before the sound doesn't work, and
• It's absolutely silly: the amount of videos on YouTube where someone plays the Tetris song (Korobeiniki)

So far: piano (different types and styles), guitar (different types and styles), piano and guitar, ocarina, recorder, punk-skateboarder-chant, spit-filled saxophone, drum kit and oompah band.

Yeah, most of it is pretty bad but it leads up to challenging people like the following (warning: runs about 10 minutes):

I do have to admit that people with casual whole-octave one-hand reaches do intimidate me (okay, scare me). Blame the Nigerian Dead Parrot scambait. It lead me there.

Life and Politics as a form of entertainment

I lived in Hawaii for five years. At the time, Hawaii was the only state that had "politics as a form of entertainment". We had stuff like:

• the Chief of Police being indicted for ticket fixing (in a place where the majority of the state's 4M population lives on one side of one island, where there's only one road on the entire island where the speed limit is greater than 35, parking tickets are serious business)
• the Honolulu mayor arrested for instigating a fight onboard a flight from the mainland
• Emelda Marcos displaying her dead husband and saying "Living in America is like living in jail" (which would cause the local shock jocks to organize drive-by shoeings)
• the Oral Majority (in response to the Moral Majority)

Nowadays, it's everywhere:

• the SCO trial
• Julie Amera (this is getting out of hand)(I'm still predicting that the Amero's sue the school system. Maybe after sentencing/appeals)
• PETA's Holocaust Your Plate tour (the World Headquarters is here in Va. Beach) (not to forget their freezer or the euthenasia
• The Edgar Cayce Foundation offering to improve your spiritual love life (their headquartered here also)
• Pat Robertson threatening people or telling Floridians that they brought it on themselves or just talking directly to God (yeah, CBN is here too)
• a local vice mayor periodically at odds with local government and with police (he once threatened the entire department).
• some interesting attempts at emminent domain
• the Malvo sniper trials (one in Chesapeake, one in Va Beach)
• Missy Elliot's spat with the homeowner's association, and her revenge (the house across the street)
• the Beach's Friendship Patrol (we don't like the t-shirt you're wearing and stop cussing!)
• Misc. Bike Week antics
• Gay Pride protests at the Founders Inn
• ... and other assorted silliness

Yeah, some of that was on the national level but a lot of that was local. You've probably got some pretty good examples yourself. Me? The only way I can watch it is to think of it as entertainment. It's the only way to stay sane in a world where you run the risk of getting ticketed for distracted walking.