Dan Geer, the CTO of @stake (a security consulting firm that has Microsoft as one of its clients) has left the company after signing a report that explained how the prevailing operating system monoculture is a threat to national security. It is unclear whether he was fired or left voluntarily, but given the timeline we can make some assumptions. You can read the report here (it’s a PDF, unfortunately).

One of the things that I like best about this site is that it’s easily searchable. I oftentimes link to things just so I can go back and dig them up later. (Usually those are the items that are posted with really dull comments.) I find it easier to just note things here than to bookmark a single article or paper or whatever. The side benefit is, of course, that the people who read this site might also find whatever it is I’m linking to interesting as well. Movable Type seems to have a perfectly reasonable search function, but Syncato’s Xpath enabled query function (as demonstrated by Sam Ruby) just blows me away. It’s like being able to type SQL into your search box, except much, much better. I’m going to look at Syncato tonight.

One interesting debate in the weblog world is the effect that negative media coverage has on the ongoing efforts to rebuild Iraq. It’s hard to say where it all started (people unhappy with press coverage of Iraq have been blaming it for hindering our efforts for awhile now), but it came to a head this week when Josh Marshall called out Georgia Congressman Jim Marshall for an op-ed he wrote on the issue. The Instapundit responded with “the truth hurts“. Scott Rosenberg has also weighed in.

I have a few comments of my own. I can’t really tell how negative the overall tenor of the coverage is, because I’m not a serious consumer of media. I read some articles from the major papers, but I never watch the TV news at all. What I will say though is that I think that Glenn Reynolds’ characterization of how the media is covering ongoing events in Iraq is completely wrong. They’re not focusing on the negative, per se, what they’re focusing on is what they think will most interest their audience. I’ve read a number of interesting stories about our successes in Iraq, but what gets the most coverage is Americans getting killed? Why should that surprise anyone? When Americans die, they take precedence over anything else involved in any news story. When a plane crashes with two Americans and 150 non-Americans on board, it’s the two Americans that are mentioned first.

For all the talk we’re seeing about how the media isn’t talking enough about the good stuff that’s happening in Iraq, they ignore a lot of the bad stuff as well. We barely hear at all about the numbers of Americans who are injured in attacks, and hardly a peep is heard about the incredible amounts of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence that’s taking place over there. I honestly don’t have a clue how things are going in Iraq, in a big picture sense anyway. I know that there seem to be plenty of Iraqis who are eager to get rid of the occupiers, and I know that a poll said that most Iraqis are happy that America deposed Saddam. What I also know is that if Americans are souring on Iraq, it’s because Americans who are trying to keep the peace there are dying on a daily basis, and regardless of the good that may ultimately come out of it, that’s a hard thing to take, especially when we our leaders told us we wouldn’t have such problems in the first place.

My experimentation with Movable Type continues apace. The first big problem was figuring out how to get all of my old content into Movable Type. Movable Type can, of course, import content itself, and the import format is documented perfectly well. Unfortunately, that didn’t do it for me because I wanted to preserve the actual IDs of the items in my old database in the Movable Type database. Fortunately, the database schema for Movable Type was pretty simple, so I wrote my own script that exports my entries in a format that can be easily imported into MT. Now I have my roughly 5500 entries in Movable Type, and I can start futzing around with it for real. (I’m fortunate to have a complete mirror of my site on another server so that I can mess around with all this stuff without breaking the site.)

The thing I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around now is that MT seems dead set on exporting everything to static files instead of serving entries out of the database. There are two issues with that approach that make my brain hurt a little bit. The first is disk space usage. That’s not a huge deal. Without doing anything at all to save space (like using includes), all of the published entries add up to about 35 megs of space. My pair.com account provides 700 megs of space, so I’m pretty safe in that regard, but it still strikes me as wasteful. The second issue involves world writeable directories. I just don’t like them on general principle, and I’m still working on a good solution to that problem.

One thing that’s looking pretty hopeful though is that I will be able to move to Movable Type without breaking any of the archive URLs on this site. I don’t want to break any inbound links to archived entries, and I think I’ll be able to avoid that sad outcome completely.

Update: apparently there are many solutions to the world-writable directory problem (involving various CGI wrappers). I haven’t tested any of the ones that readers have sent in, but I’m sure at least one of them would work for me.

I had been wondering recently why I never got any email viruses. I was pleased about it, but I couldn’t figure out why everyone else seemed plagued by them and I never got any at all. As it turns out, I had a procmail recipe that I’d added a long time ago that was saving me a fair amount of grief. Here it is:

:0 HB:
* ^Content-Type:.*(application|audio|multipart)
* name=.*.(bat|exe|pif|vbs|swf|scr|xlq|zlq)
virus

I found a whopping 10 megs of email viruses in the virus folder once I realized that it was there.

Update: Nancy McGough sent me some information about that recipe, which you shouldn’t use because of this bug. (The bug hasn’t caused me problems because just by sheer coincidence the virus recipe is the last in my .procmailrc.) She provides some alternate recipes on her web site.

Why is providing government funds to faith-based charities a bad idea? Because even the most screwed up religions can apply. Salon today discusses the growing acceptance of the Unification Church (better known as the Moonies) among the religious right.

IBM developerWorks has an article on integrating Struts, Tiles, and Java Server Faces. That strikes me as a form of masochism, but I’m reading it anyway.

I took a pretty big bite out of my book queue this summer (even though I inserted some new books into the queue near the top of the stack out of impatience), so I’m looking forward to taking on Neal Stephenson’s new book Quicksilver sooner rather than later. Even though I was a bit stung by the ending of Cryptonomicon, I thoroughly enjoyed the journey, and have high hopes for Stephenson’s new book. Salon’s Andrew Leonard reviewed the book today, and Boing Boing had a link to the Quicksilver Metaweb (a Wiki set up for collaboratively annotating the book). I won’t be visiting the Wiki until I read the book, so as to avoid spoilers, but I do recommend the review.

Update: Paul Boutin also wrote a piece about Quicksilver yesterday.

MSDN has an article on migrating from PHP to ASP.NET that provides a pretty good introduction to ASP.NET if you already know PHP. I don’t really want to migrate to ASP.NET but I would like to be able to discuss it intelligently.

Here’s Fred Kaplan’s summary of Bush’s speech at the UN:

The U.S.-led occupation authority is doing good work in Iraq; you should come help us; if you don’t, you’re on the side of the terrorists.