Yes, there was once a time when we would often go a week or more without a single rambling, but in this day and age of pervasive content vulturing, a more proactive approach to high yield structural systems management is required. We wouldn't want our incrementally differentiated baseline to be adversely affected by the deployment of the integrated content solutions framework. Uh, yeah. That's my inner pointy hair talking.

[Bitscape compulsively plays with the yoyo he won during Wednesday's trip to Dave and Buster's.]

With the weekend now underway, I suppose I may as well divulge a plan or two I have for the near future. Well, of course there's the virtual Quake 3 game to be played among content vultures and other friends of the circle tomorrow night. But I mean besides that. (I suppose this could fall under the category of "You know you're a geek/nerd when your big plans for the weekend involve...")

A slight restructuring of the Louisville Compound's network topology is in order. Argo is going to become the main router, and will be connected directly to the DSL line. I'm going to salvage Dagobah's 10base card, put it in Argo, and use it as the eth1 interface to the outside.

There are several reasons for this. One is that Illian's software is way out of date. Kernel 2.0.36, running on Rex. (That's Debian 1.2, for who, like me, were still on Red Hat or one of the other lesser distros back in those days.) While there's probably not too much to worry about in terms of security vulnerabilities, since just about all the ports are closed off by default, I'd still feel better with a more up-to-date setup.

Another thing is that bouncing has requested certain high ports be forwarded to Festery, and while the TEAM Internet interface allows ports to be forwarded to internal hosts, it places the restriction that the internal port has to be the same as the external. So forwarding ssh to Dagobah/Argo has been easy enough, but if I'm in the totally non-hypothetical situation where I want port 6080 to be redirected to port 80 on Festery, it's not gonna help much. (And for some reason, the ipportfw program, which was what was normally used to control port forwarding in the 2.0 kernels, is nowhere to be found on Illian.)

The other, probably biggest reason: I wanna play with netfilter. I wanna set up port scan detectors. I want to have as much fun doing crazy things with my desktop machine on a static IP address as I did when it was in the dorm, but this time, no irritating IS to set stupid firewall policies. Live life on the edge, baby! Argo is just about ready to come out of the stable, and into the wide open air. :)

And so, I consider what needs to be done: Network card transplant. Should be easy. Recompile kernel with additional driver, plus all the masquerading and forwarding stuff. Close off all the unnecessary or insecure services. Anybody who thinks telnet should be the standard for securely operating remote machines over the net really needs to have their head examined. Preferably, it would also be nice to get the Lounge up and running on the Apache here sooner rather than later. Anyway, I've got a project for the weekend. :)

And in the cool software department, not one, but two interesting releases over the past twenty four hours. M18 hit the wires last night. This browser gets better every time. Slicker. Faster. More stable than before. I still haven't installed a copy of NS4.x on Argo. It's looking more and more like that won't ever be necessary. :)

(Ok, maybe if I want to test backward compatibility on occassion, but for everyday surfing Mozilla is rockin.)

Also, Sun released OpenOffice under GPL. Given that, as always, I continue in search of better ways to deal with obfuscated document file formats inflicted upon us by the idiots of the world, I downloaded the binary and gave it a try at work. The biggest, most obvious improvement is immediately recognized upon opening it: The programmers of this thing have finally realized that we have window managers for a reason! Yes, instead of trying to hog the entire desktop, a nice, familiar looking window appears with a cursor on a blank page, where one can open files, type documents, and when you open another file... [drumroll]... It puts it in a separate window, not one of its fake little wannabe windows imitations. Yea!

As for the usability of the whole thing, I did a little poking around, and it looks like most of that stuff is just the same as it was before. (Example: I hate the way when you type a date in a table, it always tries to guess the formatting and justification you want, and performs this without even asking. Inevitably, these guesses are wrong.) I'll have to try using it for a real task to truly evaluate it though. Maybe with the source out on the open now, improvements to these sorts of annoyances will happen more readily. Perhaps.

Hmmm... I was sort of thinking about going to a movie tonight. Lost Souls looks like it could be entertaining. But now, I'm feeling so sleepy, I might just as soon go to bed early. Maybe I'm getting old. Feels like it when I say stuff like that.

Ho hum. I guess that's my content for the day. The band marches on.