• Articles and Books,  Football,  sites

    Sports Center, godaddy and College Football

    This time of the year I can often be found watching Sports Center late at night.  I am a glutton for punishment…  Listening to ESPN commentators saying that Matt Stafford will be leaving Georgia early and likely getting picked up as the #3 pick by the Kansas City Chiefs in the Draft.  Hoping someone will finally get the Florida coach out of the SEC and into the NFL or anywhere other than the Georgia backyard.  Watching highlights.  It’s fun.  Sometimes, it gets to be really late at night before I get a chance to watch a little Sports Center and chill out before bed.  That’s when the GoDaddy.com commercials come…

  • Articles and Books,  Mac Security,  public speaking

    318 and MacWorld

    Beau and I will be giving a talk at MacWorld on Friday. It will be all about Sandbox, the Mandatory Access Control facility from Apple. So if you’re going to be around then you should definitely check it out. Also, Zack will be giving one on Thursday at 1. His will be on recovering from laptop theft. Both talks will be in the security track of the MacIT portion of MacWorld.

  • Articles and Books,  sites

    Snow, Clouds, OpenID and PDAs

    In recognition of the massive quantities of snow in my back yard at the moment I have installed Let It Snow. Props to Aen Tan for making it easy. Also, installed Cumulus, that cute tag cloud app I’ve been seeing all over the place. I hate to keep up with the Joneses (WP-style) but really, it’s nicely done… Have’ta scroll a little down past the graphics in the right nav bar. But it’s there… OpenID has also been integrated to allow for commenting.  I realize I’ve never really allowed comments.  But if you have an OpenID account I think it’s OK…  Also, there are two different themes that auto-redirect based…

  • Articles and Books

    Computing for Good

    While I despise Georgia Tech with every fabric of my being, following the loss to them in Georgia’s final game of the season, I do have to give them props for setting up a course to allow 17 students to do something good for humanity leveraging their skills in the IT industry.  The Computing for Good (C4G) course, resulted in a teaching web portal in one of the lower income schools in Atlanta, a database for United Way staffers to allocate and search for beds in Altanta without having to call around and tool to help monitor blood in African countries.   Given that a lot can be done with…

  • Articles and Books,  public speaking

    MacWorld Talk Posted

    Leopard represents a massive leap forward in security features included with Mac OS X. As the needs of users of OS X have matured so has the ability for systems administrators, developers and end users to secure their systems. One of new security features is Sandbox. Since it’s inception, Mac OS X has had permissions that can be applied to files allowing the ability to block access to specific applications. But Sandbox gives you the awesome new ability to apply permissions to what specific applications can have access to. In this session we will review what an application can access and how to harness Sandbox to restrict access to networking,…

  • Articles and Books

    Neal Stephenson's Anathem

    If you’re a geek, especially one interested in what I’ve started to call scientific fiction, then this is for you.  Neal Stephenson’s last work, a trilogy about slavery and the effect of the scientific community on it during the Age of Reason was astounding.  In the Cryptonomicon he really managed to bring about the concepts of cryptography from the point of view of someone surviving World War II.  In the U, he drilled down on the whole idea of a massive University and how ludicrous they had become (reminding me of my dorms at UGA along the way).  But in this title he goes back even further and looks more…

  • Articles and Books

    Microsoft Offers Rewards to LiveSearch Users

    It’s not desperation really, more like what AmEx does to entice me to keep using that damn card for everything…  Anyway, Microsoft now offers points of a sort.  Here’s where I heard about it: http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/search/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=XPUR4JVLKQ4UAQSNDLPSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=210605109