philisha.net

To follow the path:
look to the master,
follow the master,
walk with the master,
see through the master,
become the master.

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The fundamental tragedy of life is that on some level, everyone gets what they want.

Iustus Regis Prodeunt.

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Today I developed a coherent sociological theory.

Aren’t you proud of me?

I was talking with Jon and Libby about generations and TV shows. As you may have noticed, Happy Days is a 50’s TV show from the 70’s. And That 70’s Show started in the 90’s. We should be due to emulate the 80’s any moment now. What’s up with this trend of skipping 20 years in our nostalgia?

I’ve always just kind of assumed that these distinguishing characteristics of the decades come because people realize the flaws of the last decade very clearly after it has just happened, so the next decade will know better how to avoid those problems.



New theory: people in general tend towards emulating the decade that had the most formative influence on their development in childhood. As a child, they pick up the characteristics of a culture that they don’t really participate in, yet it affects them deeply. These resurface again when they are older and think more about their childhood. Also they tend to get nostalgic later in life. But at this point, they are in a position to really make an impact on culture as a group. So two decades after a cultural phase has passed, it becomes really vogue and hip again.

The theory is that people are most impressionable at junior high age. That’s when they absorb their culture that will affect them. According to the 20-year gap observed, this means that it’s at age 32 or so that people have the most impact on society around them. Sounds about right.

That’s good—it means I’ve got 12 years before I hit my peak.

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This time it’s a little more scary.


I was looking over the referral logs to philisha.net to see who’s been visiting. I saw that I was linked to by http://www.mazfaka.ru/, which was interesting…. A Russian site, huh…. Let’s see what it is…. Yikes: Network Terrorism! Let me tell you, to have your site listed on a page titled Network Terrorism is pretty unnerving.

It turns out that the site is a listing of a bunch of sites that are vulnerable to a certain password-grabbing exploit. Basically all the links on that site point to pages that will output the contents of a filename that you give it. On certain poorly-configured servers, this can allow anyone who understands this vulnerability to access any file on the computer, including password lists. These are usually encrypted, but a brute-force attack can crack them given enough time.

I’ve realized for some time that my site could theoretically allow for this to happen, but I never imagined someone would actually try it! Thankfully Biola’s admins are smart enough to block permissions in this case, but it’s a good lesson to learn for strong security measures even when you don’t think them necessary.

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Holy Cow!
I found the end of the Web!

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• Was Leo Tolstoy an anarchist?
• What’s VNV Nation’s best album?
• How is William Gibson’s blog?

One of these days I’m just going to start a list of little questions to ask Jon Clede….

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Gondolin has fallen!

Before start assuming I’m about to make some sociopolitical metaphor about an ideal or institution and Tolkien’s subcreation: Gondolin was my web and database server I used to help host the forums for Cynical Studios.

Cynical Studios is the flash movies web site of my fiancee’s brothers. I had a beige G3 Power Mac running Debian GNU/Linux behind their home router. There were many problems including DHCP throwing the router’s forwarding off and their ISP blocking web serving ports, but what finally killed Gondolin was a hard drive crash. That really annoyed me because I put all this work into fixing one problem, and another would pop up, like trying to get a bubble out of wallpaper. Then there was something that was just completely gone.

In the end, it just wound up not being worth fixing, so I moved the forums to Jacob, the same Biola server that hosts philisha.net. It’s too bad, because now I’m just stuck deeper in the Biola Bubble. Before if I had some kind of problem with Biola’s connection, I could always just ssh over to Gondolin and see what things were like over there. For instance, my friend Josh Brown’s blog Expressed Thoughts is frequently inaccessible because Biola’s name servers just plain forget how to get to it sometimes. (idiocy) When I had Gondolin, I could just go there to look up the IP address, and then I’d be good to go.

Bah!

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You haven’t lived until you’ve operated an industrial-strength paper-shredder.

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