I heard a rumor that San Francisco's Tommy Guerrero has agreed to allow people to tape and distribute his live shows. I really hope this is true - Guerrero's music is great and well worth a listen.

--> Tommy Guerrero's Homepage.

... and here's some additional information on the archive.org website about live shows. But this seems like old news... What no shows? That's a real bumah as we say here in Maine.

I was watching the local weather report here in Portland, Maine the other night and found it hillarious that the weatherman was wearing blue pants against the blue screen. Given where we live and our proximity to Massachusetts, the choice of blue pants was particularly poor as the image of Cape Cod appeared to originate in his trousers.

Wednesday morning in the early AM I logged in and noted that several of the websites that I maintain were offline - appearantly locked by my hosting provider Pair Networks. I've been a Pair customer for six or seven years now and have been very pleased with their service. So I didn't think a lot about it attributing the account lock to a failed auto-debit of my credit card (which I recently canceled). So, after many months of simply ignoring my e-mail I sorted through the 10K or so messages that had accumulated over the fall to sort out the notices from Pair and figure out what the problem was.

I immediately started to get tense because the first notice I opened was an invoice for 500+ GB of bandwidth overage charges in excess of $12,000 US. The second notice appologized for the inaccuracy in the first and revised the figure upwards. Several hours passed before Pair's phone support opened and I sweated it out worrying that some mistake of mine had caused the world to focus on my little 1U BSD box at Pair. YIKES.

Well not to draw the tale out too much, but Pair's support staff was both helpful and professional. Speaking with a fellow named Brian in their billing department, he searched through the files on my account and found the culprit - 1GB worth of adult movies uploaded into a hidden directory on my server. Given the location of the files in the b2 directory structure (b2 is the now dated PHP scripts that run this blog), it seemed a good bet that someone had subverted the b2 scripts to affect the upload. Inspection of the server logs confirmed this to be the case. Based on this information, Pair waived the overage charges and restored my account in full. Reasonable people rule.

Anyone looking for a rock-solid, no bullshit hosting provider run by people who (a) know their networks (b) know how to treat their customers should strongly consider Pair Networks.

Needless to say I've made a few tweaks to b2's installation to make sure this doesn't happen again before I have time to figure out how to get all the data out of b2 and into another, more secure, blogging package.

Mr. Fish is a contributing cartoonist for Harpers.org. He can be reached at applesandcheeses@verizon.net.

Last night's All Things Considered on NPR aired a great commentary on cyberspace privacy by Paul Ford - a database programmer for Harpers Magazine.

"Commentator Paul Ford is a computer programmer who has spent a lot of time looking at the ways to keep personal information private on the Internet and in large databases. He says that privacy is technically possible -- but not very likely."

To listen listen to Paul Ford's commentary, click "Listen" on here -> Privacy in Cyberspace: Is It Possible?

---

On Monday, January 16, 2006 former Vice President Al Gore delivered a major address on the threat posed by policies of the Bush Administration to the Constitution and the checks and balances it created. The speech will specifically point to domestic wiretapping and torture as examples of the administration’s efforts to extend executive power beyond Congressional direction and judicial review. The speech was cosponsored by the transpartisan Liberty Coalition and the American Constitution Society.

http://www.libertyspeeches.org

I have saved a copy the MP3-encoded audio of Gore's speech on my own local Linux server. If you have problems obtaining the source from the link above you can download the audio here.

---

Don't be vague or overblown in your promises.

Don't tell prospective clients that you engage in strategic planning or stock analysis.

Be prepared to offer the nine services consultants are traditionally hired for:

Augment the staff.
Provide expertise.
Be objective.
Offer instruction.
Identify problems.
Oversee projects.
Serve as a catalyst.
Act as a hachetman.
Bring influence to bear.

- Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Printable Version

Must read: Listening to WBUR's On Point (NPR Boston), I heard an interesting interview with Gary Bersten, author of the censored book "Jawbreaker, the attack on bin Laden and al Qaeda: a personal account by the CIA's key field commander."

- WBUR's On Point : Hunting Osama
- "Jawbreaker" on Amazon.com

Although I write code for Windows professionally, I'm a Linux enthusiast. Recently I was reading up on some of the recent doings over at the KDE Desktop Project and feeling a really strong urge to blow away Windows XP on this dual Xeon Dell Precission 650 workstation... The Linux From Scratch project looks to be just what I need to get going on this project and create myself a kick-ass desktop environment.

A great article has been posted on Artima in which Bjarne Stroustrup previews the work of the ANSI C++ committee on the C++0x specification. I'm particularly interested in the discussion of thread support in C++.

A Brief Look at C++0x - Bjarne Stroustrup