Clack

I guess this makes it official

Scott and I have decided to sell our motorcycles. Scott sold his GZ250 this past weekend, and I've placed my Honda Rebel in the Cycle Trader. The print ad hit the newstands today.

There it is, at the upper left hand corner of page 108. It makes me a little sad.

But, the sadness (hopefully) won't last too long. We're both buying slightly larger bikes and hope to do a little travelling on them this summer. No long trips, just to a couple of the neighboring states where we have friends.

I've had my heart dead-set on a new 2004 Honda Shadow Aero 750, but I made the mistake of sitting on a Honda Sabre 1100 last weekend. Wow! What a nice bike...and comfortable too.

I've also looked at lusted over the Yamaha V-Star 650 Silverado and the V-Star 1100 Silverado.

But, in order to have room to put the new beauty in the garage (whichever one I decide on), I've got to sell the old one first. Any takers?

Update: It appears the Rebel is sold. I received a call tonight from a guy in Jacksonville, Florida offering to buy the bike.

YAWF (Yet Another Windows Flaw)

Yahoo! has a story about Microsoft's announcement today that a "critical flaw" exists in most versions of Windows that could allow attackers to run malicious programs on your PC.

In its monthly security bulletin, the world's largest software maker warned that Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 were at risk and offered software updates to fix the flaws, which were given Microsoft's highest severity rating of "critical."

"It does affect all (current) versions of Windows," said Stephen Toulouse, security program manager for Microsoft's Security Response Center. "We're not aware of anyone affected by this at this time."

Marc Maiffret, co-founder of eEye Digital Security, the company that discovered the flaw, criticized Microsoft for taking more than six months to come up with a patch to fix the problem, particularly since the flaw allows an attacker multiple ways to break into a system and could do almost anything they wanted to the system.

"We contacted Microsoft about these vulnerabilities 200 days ago, which is insane," he said. "Even the most secure Windows networks are going to be vulnerable to this flaw, which is very unique."

Letters to State Legislators

Nothing To Say Here has LOTS to say to the state representatives of Georgia regarding SR 595 (the bill aimed at declaring that marriage in Georgia is between a man and a woman and expressly declining to honor any gay marriages executed in other states...if there ever is one).

He especially comes down hard on the sponsors of the bill:

I am writing to you as a concerned citizen of the State of Georgia. I know you recently introduced a bill (SR 595) that would ban gay couples from marrying and prevent recognition of such marriages licensed in other states.

I do not understand why that in this time of terrorism, war, weak economy, budget cuts, unemployment, etc that this issue would be at the top of your desk. This would be the first time that a constitution would be used to actively discriminate (not protect) a group of individuals.

Gay people are people and we deserve some dignity. We try to earn a living, be respectable citizens, abide by the law, and pay our taxes. Yet, you insist on bringing this bill before a congress that should have better things to do. You cloak this bill as protecting marriage. But I would ask you what you are protecting it from? If you honestly, in your heart, believe gay marriage is going to bring down the institution of marriage, I would urge you to look in other places.

Marriage is already a failing institution and you cannot blame it on gays (since we are not allowed to marry). It is a failing institution because of high divorce rates and the ease of which heterosexuals can get married at the drop of a hat. Maybe the best way to strengthen marriage would be to make it an inclusive activity and not an exclusive activity. Better yet, if you were really serious about protecting marriage, you would increase the barriers to heterosexual couples and propose waiting periods before any couple could be married. [...]

Dave, you rock!

Why IP banning is useless on a blog

Kalsey Consulting Group has an article on why bloggers are wasting their time banning IP addresses...unfortunately, they don't offer a suggestion for solving the problem.

Many proposals for eliminating comment spam are focused on banning or throttling comments from the IP address of the spammer. This is fundamentally flawed because it assumes IP addresses are both unique and hard to come by.

Banning an IP address can have severe consequences. Many ISPs (including AOL) and companies use a proxy server that makes it appear as if all users are coming from a single (or a handful) if IP addresses. By blocking an IP address, you might be preventing a substantial portion of AOL users from commenting. Depending on your point of view, eliminating AOL may not be a great loss; however the same thing would happen to millions of users behind other proxy servers.

The other problem is that IP addresses are very easy to get or fake for spammers who care about such things. There are hundreds of thousands of open proxies that will let anyone direct Web traffic through them. When I’m using an open proxy, my IP address is effectively masked. And I can use simple software to switch to a different open proxy (and thus a different IP address) every few minutes. So my spamming activity isn’t tied to a specific IP address.

[...]

Battlestar galactica regular SciFi Channel Series

Found on Boing Boing

SCI FI Channel has greenlit production on the Battlestar Galactica franchise as a new original weekly series. Based on the top-rated December miniseries event of the same name, the one-hour drama is slated to begin production on 13 episodes in Vancouver next month.

All principal cast from the mini will reprise their roles for the series, including Edward James Olmos (Commander Adama), Mary McDonnell (President Laura Roslin), Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck) and Tricia Helfer (Number Six), among others.

Link to the press release or the SciFi Channel's Battlestar Galactica site