posts | images | bookmarks

post 65

By anders pearson 09 Aug 2000

the Potassium Hydroxide virus is definately the coolest computer virus i’ve ever heard of. when it infects a drive, it politely asks if you would like the data on the drive IDEA encrypted. it’s entirely beneficial and sounds like a really convenient way to encrypt your data if you’re using windows (i know linux already has support for encrypted filesystems but i’m not so sure if windows does).

i really like the idea of beneficial viruses. what someone really needs to write is a virus that secures your system and patches the most common security holes, perhaps also with the capability to watch for and automatically download security updates. hell, maybe even just a vb script virus that when it infects someone, it changes their settings in Outlook so they won’t get infected with anything else. if that one went around once, it would probably catch 90% of the people who would be susceptible to email viruses and would just nip that whole problem in the bud. i’ll stop just short of advocating the linux installation virus…

post 64

By anders pearson 09 Aug 2000

today, one of my coworkers informed me that if i were an animal, i’d be a chameleon. i guess that makes sense. anyone who has known me for a while can vouch for the fact that i’m basically invisible (people in the service industry in particular seem to have a hard time seeing me. roughly 30% of the time when eating out, the waitress will go around the table taking orders and just completely skip over me). i can also move my eyes indepentantly of each other. however, i don’t yet have a prehensile tail. sure would come in useful.

perhaps i ought to switch over to SuSE linux…

post 63

By anders pearson 08 Aug 2000

Broadcast message from anders (pts/2) Tue Aug 8 23:31:40 2000…

on saturday i have to move out of my current room and into my fall room (hopefully. there’s a slim chance that i won’t have anywhere to stay for the next two weeks in which case my stuff goes into storage and i get an enforced vacation in maine). that means the familiar ritual of a new IP address and the days of being disconnected while the network people get their shit together. this time around though, instead of suffering downtime, i’m going to temporarily move things to my linux machine at work while my home machine gets moved all over the place. please just continue to use thraxil.dhs.org, a-nders.dhs.org, etc. with any luck it should be entirely transparent to everyone but me. however, don’t be surprised if things are a little weird for the next few days as i adjust settings and change dns entries. just be patient and let me know if you notice any problems that i should probably fix.

post 61

By anders pearson 07 Aug 2000

some things i will never understand. i’m sure it’s all some terribly funny inside joke that i’m just not in on but columbia has coke and pepsi accounts. if you finger the cocacola or pepsi accounts, you get what is at least supposed to look like inventory information for soda machines on the 7th and 8th floor of Watson (the building on campus that houses ACIS) respectively. you will also see that pepsi hasn’t logged in since 1995, but cocacola has logged on fairly recently. remind me not to drink anything from the pepsi machine in Watson.

post 59

By anders pearson 07 Aug 2000

i generally keep java turned off in netscape because it makes it crash too much, but now there’s a really good reason to keep it off. as far as i know, this is the first real exploitable hole in the java security model; there have been lots of holes found before but they were always along the lines of “well, this part doesn’t work quite how it should although we can’t figure out how anyone would actually exploit it; we’ll fix it anyway though.” it should be interesting to see how sun reacts; hopefully they’ll come up with an intelligent fix rather copy microsoft’s “ignore it and it will go away” attitude towards security holes cough back orifice cough.

post 57

By anders pearson 04 Aug 2000

i haven’t even heard of the “Cow Parade” in new york, but apparently, David Lynch is just too weird to be allowed to participate. i just really like Lynch’s quote in the article: “Don’t you think when people tell you you’re allowed to do whatever you want as long as it’s not sexually X-rated that they should stand behind their word and show your cow?”

i’d also like to know why i wasn’t given a cow to decorate? oh well, i’m sure they wouldn’t have shown my cow either.

post 55

By anders pearson 03 Aug 2000

i remember tuck rambling on a while back about how the nin show made every other concert he’d been to pale in comparison and opened his eyes to how amazing a concert actually could be. at the time i thought “all right, he’s allowed to exaggerate a bit; poetic license and all”. then it happened to me last night.

saw einstürzende neubauten downtown with my good friend erinmichelle. it was the second of their two night stay in nyc so the venue wasn’t terribly packed.

most industrial bands use lots of loops and samples and electronics to make their music sound ‘mechanical’. EN uses almost no samples and only some occasional keyboards. instead, they just bring what looks like a cross between a machine-shop and a junkyard on stage. the primary drumkit consists of a bass drum, a large (2m x 1m x 4cm) piece of steel lying horizontally over the bass drum with several big metal cylinders on and over it. ‘cymbols’ made from large sharp looking sawblades. what i thought were just some of the largest floor toms i’d ever seen at first turned out to be a 50 gallon drum and some sort of water heater turned upside down. then there was ‘the wheel’. i’m not sure what it used to be; some kind of grinder or buffing wheel. at any rate, it was about a meter wide and 30cm in diameter with short metal tines sticking out all over the whole cylinder and a variable speed motor. it was miked and made some surprisingly pleasant noises when metal bars and brushes were brought into contact with the spinning tines. there were countless other items brought out at various times to serve as percussion (recycling bins, gas cans, large sections of pvc piping, etc) but the coolest was, without a doubt, blixa’s air compressor solo. there’s no way i could possibly describe it, but somehow, an air compressor, a microphone, and blixa’s mouth combined to produce the most amazing tonal range i’ve ever heard from a single instrument. of course, there was also a bass (which was played with a vibrator at one point) and a guitar (which barely ever made a noise that was even remotely guitar-like).

not wanting to let me down, they opened with ‘silence is sexy’, which consists mostly of blixa taking drags off a cigarette into the mic in between ‘verses’ of complete silence. they played mostly newer stuff off Silence is Sexy, Ende Neu, and Tabula Rasa but threw in a couple older songs here and there. the set flowed quite nicely despite the minor construction projects that had to go on between songs to prepare the instruments. they played pretty much everything that i wanted to hear with the exception of ‘Stella Maris’ (no surprise that they didn’t play that) and ‘Was Ist Ist’.

it was, without a doubt, the most powerful, beautiful music i’ve ever seen performed. they play incredibly complex rythmic music and never missed a single note or beat. everything sounded perfect. usually, when you see a band, you’re pretty happy if they sound as good live as they do on their albums. i’ve loved my EN albums, but after seeing them live, their recorded material sounds like absolute crap in comparison.