Honeypot.net

I’ve spent too much of this weekend writing Ansible to make all my Raspberry Pis similar.

This might say more than I’d wish about my nerd level, and about how many tiny computers I have laying around.

Trucking companies sue California, seeking a release from Clean Truck Partnership

They include Daimler, which manufactures about 40% of U.S. trucks, and Volvo, which makes about 15%, along with Paccar and Traton.

Those are among the companies suing California for the right to damage our air and our breathing. They are also among the companies whose vehicles I will never, ever consider buying. They can go rot for all I care.

Def Con was amazing and exhausting and fascinating and terrifying and just all around exhilarating and energizing. Thank you to everyone to helped make it possible, and also delightfully weird.

Time to pour some coffee, take a deep breath, exhale, and start working on next year’s project.

If you get on a plane, stick your carry-on at the very front, then walk to the very back so that there’s no room for the frontward peoples’ luggage when they board and everyone has to wait for them to trek to the back and stow it and return to the front, you are a bad person and should feel bad.

PHP is so hard for me to describe. I used it a lot in the late 90s when we were migrating off mod_perl because it was a great way to add dynamic data to otherwise static pages, and no one really knew how to develop large sites yet. We were making it up as we went along. But ye gods, the language was bad. “A poor craftsman blames his tools” and all that, but imagine a screwdriver with 2 handles and 3 tips projecting at random angles. Sure, you could assemble an IKEA desk with it, but would you want to? And would you look suspiciously at anyone who claimed to love that weird screwdriver when the equivalent of a Snap-On was available for free from the same place they got the weirdo?

I think that’s the root of much of the horror. No one would bat an eye at using PHP to add little bits of server-side content here and there. It’s great for that! But then you see the giant castles of non-Euclidean horror built with it, and people pointing to them and saying “see what you can make with that weird screwdriver?”, and parts of the castles randomly fall off and kill their owners. No! While that’s impressive, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the screwdriver, or in the people who keep using it to build things larger than it was clearly able to do well. But heaven help you if you point out that there are saner screwdrivers. “You’re just being close minded and out of touch! We added another handle to it and removed the razor blade so it’s much better now!”

Maybe so, but wow, it’s still one hell of an odd screwdriver.

I’m about to head to Def Con where I’ll be hosting a mobile Frozen BBS. I’m carrying it into work in SF this morning as a trial run, and also to make sure people don’t call the cops on it.

I just cut The Def Con Release of Frozen BBS, and updated the little radio and Rasperry Pi boxes that are going to be strapped onto my backpack next week.

Target followed up on my compromised credit card, which again, has never left my house except to go on Target runs. They mailed me a long fraud investigation questionnaire that asks for fun data like the PII of everyone who’s been around my house for the last year.

Yeah, no. The compromise was on their end. Go fix that. I’m not triggering an investigation into my friends and family for Target’s mistakes.

The emergency room I went to a couple weeks ago texted me a link to pay the bill. It’s to some generic payment system called “Papapapay”, which couldn’t sound scammier if it tried, and it shows a white screen if you open it in Safari.

Sometimes I’d swear they’re trying to train us to open phishing emails.

Pollito is still a photogenic little fellow.