Featured in Lockergnome

I woke up this morning and noticed a trackback from Lockergnome. A few weeks ago Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome sent an e-mail off to his group of orkut friends looking for more writers. I volunteered my services by offering chrisshort.net for syndication in Lockergnome. Last week Chris, Bob, and I sent a group of e-mails to one another and today Lockergnome is featuring my article, “Let’s Talk About Wireless Security“.

I appreciate the opportunity to have my work in Lockergnome and I look forward to writing more for Lockergnome in the future.
FYI: I will have another article in Lockergnome later this week.

Trackback Spam

I’m sitting in a class this morning and out of sheer boredom I pull out my T-Mobile Sidekick and check my e-mail. I pulled up my account for chrisshort.net and noticed a ton of trackbacks. My first thought was, “Here we go again.” Of course the Sidekick doesn’t mesh well with MovableType 3’s web interface so at lunch I went back to my office and deleted 36 trackbacks. I got home and deleted another 27 trackbacks. I’m getting really tired of all this spam and am looking forward to the release of MovableType 3.1 which includes Jay Allen’s wonderful blog spam eliminator, MT-Blacklist. MovableType 3.1 should be out at the end of the month. I’m pretty sure there will be at least one more onslaught of trackback spam this month though.

Linux Security Course

I’m in a class this week that I had very high expectations for. When I asked to be in it I was under the impression it was a UNIX security class. When I showed up this morning it was a UNIX security class with Red Hat 9 loaded on all the laptops. The room was also filled with people familiar with Linux (but not quite experts). So if we’re all familiar with Linux why in the hell does this instructor feel the need to show us every little detail of basic Linux user functions?

Making things worse; the instructor is of Middle Eastern decent and has somewhat of an accent and it’s truly irritating at times when you try to understand what she’s saying. However, I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know today and that is truly disappointing (especially disappointing when you try to fathom what the US government is paying for the class).

The lab at the end of the day was to install Red Hat 9. Of course, Red Hat 9 takes a while to install via CD-ROM and it was 1500 (3:00 PM) before she stopped being a “slowass” and started catching up with the rest of us.

Of course, once she set us free to install Red Hat everyone started having issues with their laptops (word of advice, don’t buy Toshiba). She had to frantically run around class fixing issues. I just plowed through the install while writing this article and helping other people out when they needed it.

The underlying issue here is if this is a UNIX security class then why the hell are we using Linux? I know why, money. Red Hat 9 is free, any good UNIX flavor is going to blow away JET Computer Services’ budget considering they would need twelve copies of that version of UNIX for this class alone.

This is also the first time this class has been run. They don’t know if this class is going to count as a part of a DISA certification, whether there is going to be an exam at the end, or whether or not this class is worth a damn. I have a feeling that I’m throwing a week of my life away in this class but it’s a hell of a lot better than being at work so I’m not going to complain too much. Plus, I might take something away from it so I’m going to pay attention when the curriculum starts talking about something I don’t know already.

NOTE: This rant was encouraged by Chrissy. She seems to think me ranting is a funny thing.