Semisane's New Writeups

All hell breaks loose (poetry)

2007-05-20T23:55:06Z

"Wherefore with thee / Came not all hell broke loose?"

This quote from John Milton's Paradise Lost (Book IV, lines 917-18) is the source of the common English expression. Note how in the original form, 'broke' is describing an ongoing condition (all hell, which had broken loose), whereas in the commonly used expression it describes an event (as soon as the monkeys escaped their cage, all hell broke loose). Another common expression relating to chaos also comes from Paradise Lost: the word 'pandemonium.' Meaning 'the abode of all demons,' it is the name for the palace the fallen angels build for themselves in hell.

An e-text of all of Paradise Lost is available at: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_1/

Paradise Lost was first printed in 1667.

road pricing (person)

2007-05-20T23:43:43Z

Over the next couple of decades, many people expect road pricing to evolve from its present state - focused on highway tolls and city centre congestion charges - to a model in which all road use is taxed. In such a system, all movement of automobiles would be tracked and taxed on a per-kilometre basis, subject to secondary considerations like vehicle fuel efficiency and level of road congestion. Singapore, London, Oslo, and Dubai have all introduced charges intended to reduce congestion and pollution in their city centres. Expanding such systems to cover all roads would involve some considerable benefits, though there are also problems that would likely arise.

Benefits

National systems of road pricing would have a number of benefits:

The high cost of building and maintaining roads could be more accurately directed at those who use them.
Externalities relating to CO2 emissions from automobile use can likewise be dealt with.

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Speeding up your Mac (idea)

2007-01-21T14:50:48Z

By repairing disk permissions, running maintenance scripts, and buying more RAM, you can dramatically increase the performance of your Mac, whether it's an old iBook or a snazzy new Macbook Pro.

Disk permission trouble

Does your Mac take a lot longer to boot than it did when you were first lifting it out of the designer packaging? One very common reason why is that problems have cropped up in the disk permissions.

People rarely fix this, because it is a little bit tricky. That said, it's not something you cannot do in ten minutes with these instructions. First off, you cannot repair the disk that you are running Mac OS off of (though if you just want to repair permissions, that is possible). What you need to do is get either: (a) any Mac OS X installation disc or (b) system recovery discs that accompanied your computer.

Next, you need to reboot, using the disc instead of your hard drive. For most Macs, you do this by putting…

failed state (thing)

2007-01-02T18:21:41Z

It seems to me that there are three general ways in which a state can be considered to have failed:

States can lose their integrity, as viewed from the security perspective by outsiders.
Alternatively, they can fail to maintain other characteristics that are considered essential in a modern state, such as a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
Finally, they can fall below some moral threshold, below which their government or leadership is no longer seen as legitimate.

Of course, the relevance of a state being 'failed' or not failed lies primarily with how this changes the behaviour of other states and non-state groups towards it. If being a failed state suspends the traditional rights afforded to states - from territorial integrity to diplomatic immunity - being thus categorized could very significantly affect the treatment of both individuals and territory by outsiders.

Three possible definitions

In the first instance, a 'f…

GMail contact list security hole (thing)

2007-01-01T21:41:05Z

In late December 2006, a somewhat serious security flaw in Google Mail (GMail) was uncovered. Specifically, when a user is logged into GMail in one browser window or tab, any other site you visit could grab their entire contact list. Whether that is a serious leak or not is a matter of perspective. Certainly, it exposes all of their contacts of even more spam than they already receive. The bug received coverage on Slashdot, Engadget, and other web sites that cover technological matters.

The bug arises from the way in which GMail stores your contacts as a JavaScript file that can be requested by other websites. Google initially claimed to have fixed the bug, but a script linked on several sites showed that to be false. As of January 2nd, however, the hole appeared to have been plugged..

Plausible attacks

A site that wanted to be really sneaky could exploit this information in many ways. At the very least, it could be used to very easily identify many…

Protecting your computer (idea)

2006-10-09T20:21:54Z

At least once or twice a month, someone who I know endures a computational disaster. This could be anything from a glass of wine spilled on a laptop to some kind of complex SQL database problem. In the spirit of Bruce Schneier, I thought I would offer some simple suggestions that anyone should be able to employ.

The most important thing is simply this: if it is important, back it up. Burn it to a CD, put it on a flash memory stick, email it to yourself or to a friend. The last thing you want is to have your laptop hard drive fail when it contains the only copy of the project you've spent the last month working on.

Now, for a quick list of tips. These are geared towards university students, not those with access to sensitive information or large amounts of money:

1. Do not trust anything you see online. If you get an email from 'PayPal' or your bank, assume it is from someone trying to defraud you. It probably is. Likewise, just because a website looks

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