Capturing packets with a router

I came across this story of how to capture packets using a Cisco router.  Nice when you don’t have any alternatives.

Whitfield Diffie talks about secure cloud computing

In this article Whitfield Diffie talks talks about secure cloud computing.  I take comfort in knowing that he and I used to work for the same company, Sun Microsystems.  There are some really smart people at Sun.  The article is small and I recommend reading it.  I specifically quote part of the article below as it mentions OpenBSD.  I’ve been running OpenBSD for years.

TR: If a full cryptographic solution is far-off, what would a near-term solution look like?

WD: A practical solution will have several properties. It will require an overall improvement in computer security. Much of this would result from care on the part of cloud computing providers–choosing more secure operating systems such as OpenBSD and Solaris–and keeping those systems carefully configured. A security-conscious computing services provider would provision each user with its own processors, caches, and memory at any given moment and would clean house between users, reloading the operating system and zeroing all memory.

An important component of security will be the quality of the personnel operating the data centers: good security training and appropriate security vetting. A secure data center might well be administered externally, allowing a very limited group of employees physical access to the computers. The operators should not be able to access any of the customer data, even as they supervise the scheduling and provisioning of computations.

iBlogPro3 automatic thunbnail sizing

While playing around with themes from StudioPress I learned about TimThumb.  I managed to get it working with iBlogPro3 from PageLines.  IMHO much easier than doing it the way the theme author suggested.  If you’re curious the changes need to be made within library/_posts.php find the line that deals with the thumb images and change it too something like the following.  I choose to also create a tools directory in the root folder and put timthumb.php in it.  Also make tools/cahe and make sure the webserver can write to the directory.

<img src=”/tools/timthumb.php?src=<?php echo $postimageurl?>
&amp;h=200&amp;w=200&amp;zc=1″ alt=”Post Pic” width=”200″ height=”200″ />

When all is done and working, you can simply put the img url in the custom field and timthumb will automatically size it accordingly.