John Lindal’s Blog

Front Switches

I don’t know how many of you are old enough to remember front switches on computers. I’m certainly not, though I’ve heard of them. But I’m still young enough to experience front switches on hairdryers!

Yes, that’s right, front switches on a hairdryer. The design boggles the mind. On first picking up the device, one notices three switches, two red and one black. None of them have labels. Further inspection reveals documentation for the two red switches camouflaged on a totally different part of the device:

• up/up → cold
• up/down → warm
• down/up → hot
• down/down → very hot

Oh, good. Up means Off. At least the black switch, which by process of elimination must be the power switch, works the same way…

Click Spam

It had to happen sooner or later. As reported by JenSense, the SANS Institute has caught a Botnet that was being used to generate bogus clicks on Google AdSense. Personally, I’m surprised by the part of the quote that says …a botnet generates the clicks from a few hundred machines… Clearly, these are still amateurs. The real storm will hit when the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) folks decide that they can use their massive networks of trojaned machines to make money instead of merely taking down web sites.

Update (June 15): JenSense reported that the network has been shut down. It was 50,000 infected machines! So the future is here already

Building a Rat Cage

It appears that we a have a non-paying renter. Some sort of rodent has decided, reasonably enough, that the vent assembly on top of our water heater in the basement is a very nice place to build a nest. I have decided, reasonably enough, that this house isn’t big enough for the two of us. So I spent yesterday evening down in the basement building a rat cage. Now, eleven years at Caltech has taught me a certain level of flexibility, so after constructing a mesh cage around the vent, I defined the inside of the cage to be everything but the vent, thereby trapping the rat