kw

Cheney/Satan ‘08

“I love the smell of bio diesel in the morning”

A Mac OS X style HUD window. There is a base class that you extend for whatever component you want. Check out the work in progress here. I will be making this open source under a liberal license in the coming days, along with the Sheet style window.

Rode it last Saturday. It was a lot harder than I remembered it being (4 years ago). But the weather was nice, and I felt really good so I put the hurt on a lot of people on all of the climbs It was 82 miles total, with 3 long climbs (6200′ elevation gain or so). Lot’s of snow on the sides of the road this year, and a huge bank of snow at Johnston Ridge where the observatory (and turn-around) is. Check it out:

I’m beginning to wonder if we are ever going to actually have a summer in the Pacific Northwest. Here it is, well into June, and the weather is still crap. I’m still wearing knee warmers, skipping days out on the bike due to rain, and the heat is still on in the apartment. The Cascades are heaped up in snow, that should make for some awesome rides, but for the love of Pete, just give us some dry and sunny days that we could actually RIDE there.

Planning on doing an epic ride this week, from Portland to the snow line on Larch Mountain and back. Looking forward
to a tough climb followed by some serious eating and napping

Hillarious:

http://globalnerdy.com/2008/05/29/geek-gang-signs/

I took the digital cable box down to Comcast today and told them to kill my cable and just give me the cheapest thing they had (which is not much other than local channels). My response to the “why ?” that came from the Comcast agent was simple, there’s nothing on that I’m interested in watching.

I was running some errands today and almost everywhere I went I was asked, “do you have any plans for the holiday weekend?”. While it does provide some smalltalk and is friendly while taking care of the business at hand, I was thinking on the way home: holidays are for people that have a 9-to-5 job and a boss. For somebody like me they are a perfect time to work while everyplace is crowded. I like to think of most Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays as holidays

Sometimes I am amazed at the negligence of a public web server (or any server, really) that has all sorts of TCP ports open to the public. If the server is only serving HTTP content, then why on earth do anything other than port 80 and 443 need to be open? If 3306 is open, fire your IT staff/web developer. They might try to claim that MySQL is locked down tighter than Jack’s hat strap. This is nothing short of a lame excuse. If you are reading this BECAUSE port 3306 is open, here’s what to do:
Most likely you use SSH. Most likely SSH is open on the external interface so you can actually use it. Let’s start there. Don’t run it on port 22. Simply change the sshd config to another port that is available (let’s say 88). This makes running SSH on a public server a little harder to hack simply because it’s not standard and any automated bots looking to pound port 22 with a brute force attack won’t get anywhere. This does not however keep a good TCP/IP hound from figuring out what port 88 actually is, but it helps A LOT. If you don’t believe me just try it out for a couple of weeks and monitor your ssh logs. Now for that MySQL need. First, configure mydqld to only listen on 127.0.0.1. Next, use an SSH tunnel. I won’t go into the details of what it does and how it works, but using a command similar to this:

ssh -N -p 88 user@someserver.com -L 3306/127.0.0.1/3306

Enter your password when prompted.

Now all you need to do to connect your fancy MySQL client to the remote server is connect to 127.0.0.1:3306 as if MySQL was running on your local machine. You can do this for ANY TCP/IP based service.