In a fit of masochism, I decided to secure my Airport Express WLAN via WPA and Radius authentication.

RADIUS authentication lets you manage access to your wireless LAN from a central RADIUS server, making it much more secure than storing authentication info on your wireless access points.

I picked up a pre-compiled OSX package of FreeRadius from <a href=http://carpestellarem.com/Products/StellarRADIUSLite.php">Carpe Stellarem.

There are a few other ways to get FreeRadius, including via Fink package, and by Andreas Wolf’s installer.

I’m sure this is old news [I’m finding articles as old as 2002] but in reading the info for Apple’s latest Security Update, I noticed that in most of the security fixes, Apple gives the discoverer credit for finding and reporting the problem.

That’s a lot nicer than suing the whistleblower.

Not entirely sure what’s going on, but lately I’ve got a ton of fake referrer entries from various sites’ mt-comments.cgi — and they all come from one IP: 66.98.210.44 .

Luckily, I know the magic of .htaccess, so now nobody from “Everyone’s Internet” can read my page. And good damn riddance.

Here’s an example of the log files:

66.98.210.44 - - [02/Sep/2004:20:05:43 -0400] “GET /mt/archives/002005.html HTTP/1.1” 200 16969 “http://WWW.katiehood.COM/cgi/mt-comments.cgi” “Windows XP Internet Explorer 6.x”
66.98.210.44 - - [02/Sep/2004:21:22:24 -0400] “GET /mt/archives/001302.html HTTP/1.1” 200 17057 “http://zero12.securesites.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi" “Windows XP Internet Explorer 6.x”
66.98.210.44 - - [02/Sep/2004:21:39:55 -0400] “GET /mt/archives/001981.html HTTP/1.1” 200 17365 “http://www.thoughtbomb.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi" “Windows XP Internet Explorer 6.x”
66.98.210.44 - - [02/Sep/2004:22:26:51 -0400] “GET /mt/archives/001467.html HTTP/1.1” 200 16895 “http://www.graysathletic.co.uk/cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi" “Windows XP Internet Explorer 6.x”

Another blogger, fired for blogging.

Hint: you can cancel your Friendster account here.

Laura got me a really nice Magellan Sportrak GPS receiver for my birthday, because she’s the best.

Unfortunately, I made the critical mistake of purchasing Magellan Mapsend Streets and Destinations — and actually trying to use it.

Here’s the resulting love letter I sent to Magellan:

Wow. I am utterly amazed that your corporate headquarters isn’t a squatter camp in lower Bangladesh, although I’m sure it will soon be.

Only a nest of leper-rotting unskilled nomadic vagrants could produce software of such putrid quality. I cannot — absolutely cannot– believe that I was suckered into buying such an absolute pile of curdled feces.

For my birthday [which isn’t until next week, so you still have time], I traded my 3rd Gen iPod to Daniel, and got myself a new 20GB 4th Generation iPod.

Why try tired phrases when testing type? (A pangram is a sentence that makes use of every letter of the alphabet.)

I’ve set up my G4/500 to take part in the XGrid@Stanford project. By installing and running Apple’s XGrid client, you can donate CPU cycles to this project. Currently the project only has about 150 Macs, running at a total of 123Ghz.

Last week I went to Birmingham and set up my sister’s home wireless LAN. She’s only now gotten her very first computer, which is a 14″ G4 iBook. She’s already complained about “all the porn on the Internet”, and she’s sent her first dirty email Forward.

I’m so proud.

I’d decided to hand-me-down my old Linksys 802.11b access point to her, but when I set it up at her house, it promptly died. This involved much obscenity, and a few trips to Radio Trash. She ended up with a nice Linksys 802.11g AP/Router, and I had none.

Today I was going through old floppy diskettes and found one that had some documents that needed to be archived in a more accessible format than 1.44M floppies. Unfortunately, it was from my PowerMac 7500 days (OS9 at best), and my OSX PowerBook doesn’t have a floppy. There’s all sorts of nasty software you can install on a windows box, but I needed a simple, one-off solution to get the files off the disk, without needing to reboot on a live linux CD image or anything wacky like that.