> The Darkener's Console

You are behind the white house. A path leads into the forest to the east. In one corner of the house there is a small window which is slightly ajar.

Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category

Emoticon Evolution —

For many years I’ve used the =) as my “emoticon” (though I hate that term – it’s a smilie, damn it). Before that I generally used :> as a snarky, 14-year-old would to show how unique and cool I was compared to the lamers who always used the standard :-) of the time (~1994). In […]

Voting Machines —

“Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who is a proponent of electronic voting and the examiner of electronic voting systems for Pennsylvania, stated “It’s the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system.” Douglas W. Jones, a professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, stated […]

The FoxIt Linux Fiasco —

Last night when I was off-site furiously doing a major upgrade on a client’s server I checked my email. I quickly glanced at the RKHUNTER logs sent to me by a script I crafted up a long time ago. They were for my primary Linux system at home. My heart skipped a couple of beats […]

reCaptcha v3 —

I’m impressed with reCaptcha v3. I haven’t gotten any spam through my contact forms on various sites I manage since I installed it. The best part is that I don’t have to subject any innocent people to clicking on endless pictures of storefronts, cars and traffic signals. I fucking hate that shit. I hate it […]

Regarding UI/UX Design —

Reading comments on this Slashdot article and I found this very insightful comment by houghi regarding software user interfaces: “I liked it when each part of the software did its own thing and you could exchange it for something else, without any issues. Now we have a bootmanager that tries to do everything, starting a […]

My Predictions for Things to Invest in —

Desalinization technologies Renewable (solar/wind) energies Open and moral A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) systems Autonomous vehicles (cars, but moreso drones/quadcopters, including passenger and freight/non) and autonomous vehicle networks Freight/shipping services (FedEx/UPS/etc.) Open Source security-focused hardware and software Electronic voting machines with paper receipts

Facebook Privacy —

You know, I would hope that people in general would have understood that Facebook is free for a reason when they signed up. You need to keep your defenses up just because of the nature of their business. They sell ads, ok? With a network so large you need to expect that “big players” are […]

Conversation with my Dad —

I was talking on the phone with my dad the other night about business, money and character. I was telling him a story about how I had worked for a public school district for a couple of years as an I.T. contractor long ago. I was making good money and had there was much opportunity […]

Virtualization —

Having been researching different open source types of clustering + virtualization + cloud platform technologies (IPVS/LVS, Proxmox, corosync+pacemaker, and at the moment openstack). I feel it is a probability that, based on peoples’ ability to advance this kind of thing at such a rapid rate, that we’re all living in a simulation (virtualized environment/reality). Think […]