i got bitten by a snake on saturday night. i've attached a rinky-dink cellphone picture of my feet from ~70 hours after the bite. Can you tell which foot it was? Boring details follow.

i was camping in the Shenandoah wilderness with a group of friends and acquaintances. i had hung the rope for the bear bag before the sun went down, but later on, after packing up from dinner, our bear bag started to look like it might be too heavy for the branch i had slung the rope over. i went off in the darkness (my flashlight batteries were shitty rechargables which kept dying on me) to see if i could put the rope in a better crotch of the tree. On my way up the side of the hill to the rope, i felt a sudden pain in my foot, and cried out. The folks back in camp immediately shouted to me and asked if i was OK, and i said "yeah, i just stubbed my toe on a sharp stick, i think." But it fucking hurt. i went up to the rope, and found that i couldn't really do anything about it succesfully without resetting it entirely. i didn't want to pull it down and try to rethrow it in the dark. and did i mention that my foot was hurting?

a SecurityFocus columnist has an article about the relationship between security and paranoia.

Since i'm routinely called paranoid (especially in the context of computers) by people i know and trust, it was interesting to read this guy's thoughts. For the record, he's even further along the path of paranoia than i am. Though i saw some of the things he said that made me think "ooo, i should start doing that."

so noesis had a spell of downtime that lasted about 20 hours yesterday.

the causes are embarassing, but i'll go ahead and own up to it all here.

basically, i upgraded my router (crusty) from debian woody to sarge on monday, following sarge becoming stable. The upgrade took a long time (1.5hrs?), primarily because the router is an ancient pentium 90Mhz machine, and there was a lot of tweaking that i wanted to do in the meantime.

When the upgrade started, crusty knew it was going to be upgrading the DHCP server for the LAN. before it upgraded that package, it was sensible enough to disable the DHCP server while the new package was being installed. however, this meant that my LAN had no DHCP server running for at least 30 minutes.

I'm starting to deal with some desktop publishing requests (a yearbook for Urban), and i've turned to Scribus. It's come a long way since i first tried it out, which i think was only about a year ago.

I need to learn more about it, because there are some things (such as auto-aligning elements or binding them into groups for aggregate manipulation) which i'm pretty sure you can do, but i don't know how yet. it appears to have good ability to import from Inkscape, as well. Nice to see that kind of interaction between projects.

I recently got a CryptoFlex smartcard with a USB token. This is a little device which supports some of the public key encryption so popular on the 'net. The idea is that the device keeps the secret part of the key, and does the actual computations needed directly on the device, so the console you are using never sees the secret bits.

here is my working notes. they're a bit long, but they're thorough and well-tested!

i'm attaching a dump of all my bookmarks which use parameterized keywords.

you should be able to just cut-n-paste it wholesale into a decent spot in your mozilla bookmarks file (~/.mozilla/default/*/bookmarks.html), and then you can try out thinks like typing

bible psalm 137:8-9

in your mozilla address bar.

i haven't tested if the same stuff works under firefox, but they would be crazy to disable the feature.

some folks at MIT are discussing the possibility of an exploit against SSH.

Bruce Schneier has his usual reasonable commentary about it here.

So the NYC Critical mass was extremely weakly covered today by the New York Times. Hopefully there will be a bigger writeup soon, given that the last paragraph of the article states:

Soon after the ride began, a freelance reporter for The New York Times, Colin Moynihan, was standing on a sidewalk at Sixth Street and Avenue A interviewing people when he was briefly detained and handcuffed. He was later released by the police without charges.

i had a run-in with the police myself, which fortunately ended OK for me. The numbers i heard for the arrest were more on the order of 30-40, not the 18 mentioned in the article.

i just got a used IBM Thinkpad X30. It's name is squeak, though i'm trying to not get too attached to it right now. i got it because it is extremely small and lightweight.

i need to spend some time with it to figure out if it is really what i want. Also, it was shipped with half the RAM it was supposed to have. The vendor will supposedly fix that by sending me more RAM. If that doesn't happen, i'll return the whole thing to them.

I'm running a series of tests on it to check out the state of the machine, and to snapshot it before i tune it to my tastes.

I've recently come across Inkscape, which is a pretty slick free SVG editor.

it's available under debian with a simple apt-get install inkscape.

i'm using it for building stationery, and starting to play around with vector graphics. The tutorials for it are all in SVG format themselves, which is pretty neat, because you can open the tutorial to read about it, and then manipulate the tutorial directly. i suppose that could be a problem if you were running on a system where the tutorials were writable as your main user, but nobody would do that, right?