Sid Sidberry Reads

Well this is certainly news to me. But seriously the lowest level secure network in the U.S. can tunnel over regular internet with no loss of security and we still don’t have Internet elections?

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_parliamentary_election,_2007

In 2007 Estonia held its and the world’s first national Internet election. Voting was available from February 26 to 28.[2] A total of 30,275 citizens (3.4%) used Internet voting.[3]

Electronic voting in Estonia began in October 2005 local elections when Estonia became the first country to have legally binding general elections using the Internet as a means of casting the vote and was declared a success by the Estonian election officials.

Check It Out:
Estonian parliamentary election, 2007 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I’ve been slowly working on moving all of my projects and tutorials to one site. Mainly because there treated like blog posts instead of projects. This of course lead me to start looking at which license to start looking at which license to release everything as.

After a few days pouring over everything on the web I decided to choose the mit license. Why? The mit license fits how I want to release my code. It releases my code openly to anyone, only asking that the copyright in my code remain.

This will probably lead to you ask why not gpl, apache, or bsd?

why I didn’t choose gpl

the gpl license [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License] is restrictive IMO, due to the fact that it forces a user to release anyone that uses what i create under gpl as well. This is not to say that the gpl is wrong, just that its restrictive to end users / developers in a way I choose not to me. If someone takes code that I am openly releasing, I don’t want to limit them in anyway other than to leave a portion giving me credit for my portion of code, that’s it.

If i was working on some huge next best thing (think wordpress) and planned to release it, then I would use a gpl license. why? something like wordpress could easily be exploited commercially. If I take the time to build something like that I would want anyone who decides to change it or build off of it to release it themselves, to also make sure it’s free under the same license. The biggest difference here is intent. If you were to create the next swfobject.js (which uses an mit license), why restrict your users? But if your creating the next wordpress you don’t want to restrict users, just ensure that your work continues to be free.

why i didn’t choose bsd

the bsd license is similar to the mit license, but with an advertising clause. So to prevent anyone from any legal issues (who knows what counts as advertising in the future), why restrict end users?

why I didn’t choose apache

the apache license is the default license for projects at google code (you can select others), so it’s gotta be good. But it feel slightly more restrictive. That said: I’m releasing anything that uses patents. If you are then an apache license might be for you if you’d like to not restrict users.

in a nutshell

I think the best quote I came across was from eagain.wordpress.com:

if you want software to be free GPL is better than BSD. If you want use of software to be free BSD is better.

I think mit/bsd licenses are better for developers when your creating random things that might help someone (think swfobject). gpl is better if your developing an application to help everyone (think wordpress).

sid

*update* – found another good article:

http://fosswire.com/2007/04/06/the-differences-between-the-gpl-lgpl-and-the-bsd/

everything waffle grid in one easy wiki
Main Page – The Waffle Grid Project

Came across this today while looking into fail to ban. This is a pretty good overview of applications you can use to secure your server. The directions are for ubuntu, but source packages and alts are just a google away of course.

Quick ‘n Dirty Security and Visibility

1. Introduction
2. Firewall
2.1 FireHOL
2.2 ufw
3. Intrusion Prevention
3.1 Fail2Ban
3.2 sshdfilter
4. Intrusion Detection
4.1 chkrootkit
4.2 rkhunter
5. Log Monitoring
5.1 LogWatch and Dropbear
6. Security Update Notification

Introduction

This article describes some of the tools and utilities I use to better secure and monitor my servers. Simply following the article below does not get you a secure box, you also need to ensure any services you have running are correctly configured and you should disable, or better yet remove, any services or software you do not require.

Quickn Dirty Security and Visibility

Ok so to add to an already awesome day I ran across the javascript version port of the tweener actionscript class.

If you don’t know about tweener they link to it on the page,

JSTweener – CodeRepos::Share – Trac

JSTweener’s transitions is Tweener’s easing functions (Penner’s Easing Equations) porting to JavaScript?.

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ted to find myself thinking really weird whenever i spaced out. at first it seemed like i was thinking about seo algorithims, but then as time progressed and i let my mind roam more it started to appear like search / indexing algorithims.

Needless to say this was all out of my range of knowledge. So i was kinda freaking for a bit like: umm i think i’m going crazy, because i don’t know how the heck this is making sense. about a month into this i was actively letting my mind do its algorithim thing about once every other day and trying to figure out how to apply them to stuff. 2 months into it i contacted a friend of mine who knows a bit about stuff like this because i was starting to think i might just be crazy and looking to much into mental gibberish. My homegirl quickly told me, not only was i not crazy, but there’s ton of people who write on the subject.

fast forward 4 months later, I’m not doing the algorithim thing as much, but i’ve been looking around the net to figure out how they could be used. I’m supposed to be meeting with a friend of a friend who develops encryption algorithims to see if any of this makes sense to him, but today i came across the netflix algortim project while looking for the netflix video rip project.

turns out theres something that all this applies to: Machine Learning. So it looks like it’s time to finally head back to school, because i’m gonna have to do alot of learning to understand all of this. But hey maybe 20 years from now i’ll be one of the few web developers with a dual degree in graphic design and ai – lol.

Oh yeah on the note of school, i’m gonna start looking in la, once i’m settled, for weekend classes in graphic design. anyone know any good spots for me to start learning about ai (non web)?

ai coder idea

Machine learning – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

elsid out

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yeap still on my htpc trip. after spending hours on newegg looking at cases i stumbled across this list at mythtv. save yourself time if your building a linux htpc, check out their list

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Cases

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I’m looking at grabbing a zalman hd160b, and lucky for me theres a how to in the ubuntu forums on enabling the bundled ir and remote, sweet

HOWTO: setup the VFD & IR of Zalman HD160 case – Ubuntu Forums

*update*
mythtv page : http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Zalman_HD160

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I’ve been preparing the specs for my next home network (feb in canada), and honestly I feel bad for not using ubuntu just because of a tv tuner, well guilt be gone. the pchdtv project makes hd tuners for linux.

pcHDTV

also you might want to check out myth tv’s page for other supported tuners

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Category:HDTV_capture_cards

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I honestly haven’t used ask in forever, but their commercials got me interested. After a quick google i found a few positive reviews, and decided to give it a try.

first impressions : sweet

I’m writing this as i go through the site, but just the start page was pretty sweet to me. I should probaly note i always wanted to be a designer, it’s just code is what came naturally. That said i love the icons / skins idea.

so far i’m impressed, but haven’t actually done anything other than play with the homepage

lets get to searching

wtf! that was my first thought. my initial search was arnis.

I was really feeling the fact that the first thing listed wasn’t for wikipedia, but honestly that would have been redundant as they show a partial from the wikipedia posting in the side bar. the images results are better than googles. i got a few off topic images with google on the first page, none with ask.

also the related names, expand your search, and narrow your search are sweet features, but more importantly we’re related to the search. google just gives me the standard listing.

all in all I’m liking it so far.

notes vs whatever its called at ask.com

notes suck, thats my opinion and I’m sticking to it. the bookmarking features at ask are on point, they make actually ant to use them.

video

google owns ask in this area. both we’re relevant, but since google owns google video and you tube, they can let you watch a large number of them right there in the results.

I won’t mention the sorting function as their somewhat similar.

another search

I searched my name: greg sidberry, and google seemed more relevant, not by much. ask seemed more diverse. probably not a good test term, but whatever.

final search

I searched saul williams. while both google and ask seemed to give similar results. ask was better at presenting the data again. the top link was an overview of who he is, as will as providing links to his bio, discography, and songs.

images ask won again, but get this they have had is music in the sidebar for me to listen to.

also google had fresher results. apparently the saulwilliams.com domain was suspended at some point, and thats what ask is showing as the first result in the actual results listing.

final decision?

I think ask does an awesome job of presenting the data to the user. but i’m a goggle fan, and will probably start there. my dad has been an ask.com fan forever, so maybe i’ll get his take on the current version soon.

I use google for groups, mail, ad sense, and for a few clients stats (sorry mint). i don’t really see myself using ask.com’s webmaster tools (if they have any). and as cool as the sidebar is, i don’t think I’d really use it to much. so theres my 2cents. go to ask and check it out yourself.

check it out:
http://ask.com