This is a collection of the wisdom posted on the internet by a guy calling himself Gecko45. It all started back at the end of the halcyon summer of 2001, and his posts have created a certain urban legend that many refer to as the Mall Ninja. Hang out at any gun shop, gun show or shooting match and you’ll see one of these guys–you might even see a group of them since they are known to associate in the wild.

The Mall Ninja is easily distinguished by an abundance of “tactical” gear, such as fatigues, a thigh holster (with, of course, a Glock), combat boots, bandolier and other accouterments that you’d usually only see on a SWAT operative. Median age is usually 19-25, and they tend to boast about their various exploits with certain Special Forces units, all of which they’re too young and idiotic to have joined (real Special Forces types don’t brag). They typically have opinions on everything, regardless of expertise, they are uniformly poor shots, and they tend to exhibit a frightening lack of safety training.

The shadowy and shrill figure known as Gecko45 is the holy Dalai Lama of these dolts, but trust me, there are more. Many, many more.

Shrine of the Mall Ninja » LonelyMachines

The repository and its children matter because they preview this world to come. Graham promised parents smarter, better children than they could have naturally. He used the best science of his time (sperm storage and artificial insemination) to preserve and replicate what he saw as the most valuable genes in the world. New-genics will try to do much the same thing—though more precisely, more microscopically, more scientifically.

Genius Sperm

On September 3, 2004, a nine-member officer's panel at Fort Lewis, Washington, found Specialist Ryan G. Anderson guilty of five counts of seeking to aid the enemy during a time of war and attempted espionage. The court martial subsequently sentenced him to five concurrent life terms for his crimes. To date, the sentence represents the most severe penalty meted out to a U.S. citizen in President George W. Bush's global war on terror. The case also marked the triumph of the new field of cyber counterterrorism, which I helped develop. Working from my home computer, I enabled Anderson's capture. There have since been more than 200 other cases although many of these were intelligence cases that, for various reasons, did not result in criminal prosecution.

I haven't read this, but need to remember to do so.

My Cyber Counter-jihad - Middle East Quarterly

We all make mistakes. Wouldn't it be great if life always gave you a second chance or an opportunity to correct those mistakes? Fortunately when you are using Subversion you can always correct a mistake, in most cases, you can correct those mistakes quite easily.

So let's start with one mistake that Subversion does not allow you to do easily, and that is remove all traces that something ever happened. Subversion records the way your repository exists at a point in time, and that history is immutable, which means it can never be changed. Unfortunately this means that if you accidentally commit your password in a configuration file, you can edit the file and commit it again, but Subversion will forever retain that original commit, including your password. The only way to truly remove something from a repository is to dump the repository to a file, carefully remove the parts you do not want from the dump file, and then reload the repository. This is not for the faint of heart, but it can be done. It is worth pointing out that most Subversion installations use a commit hook to send email messages with the details of each commit. Even if Subversion made it easy to remove traces of something from a repository, in the case of something like a password, there is no way to undo the fact that it might have been emailed all over the world.

A common mistake that Subversion can easily fix is the recovery of something that you deleted. I hate to admit it but a few months ago I accidentally deleted the entire branches folder in the Subclipse repository. You can see the gory details of the commit in ViewVC here. Fortunately, I knew that I could easily get it back. If you looked at the previous link, you would see that I committed the deletion of the branches folder in revision 2981. So to recover the folder, all I had to do was copy it as it existed in revision 2980.

svn copy -r2980 http://subclipse.tigris.org/svn/subclipse/branches@2980 \
http://subclipse.tigris.org/svn/subclipse/branches

This command says, "Copy the branches folder as it existed at revision 2980 to a folder named branches (which does not currently exist)." You have to add the @2980 to the first URL to help Subversion's history tracing algorithm find the folder. If you leave off that parameter then Subversion would look in the HEAD revision of the repository to find the folder, but we know that it does not exist any more at HEAD. You can see the results of this commit in the ViewVC history here. Notice that it shows the item was added by copying it from revision 2980.

So that is how you can recover something you deleted. What about something more subtle like changes to a set of files that was valid, but now you have decided you no longer want those changes. You essentially want to "undo the commit" that made those changes. This is actually very easy to do in Subversion, even if there have been subsequent changes made to the same file, by doin... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Submerged - Subversion Blog - Second Chances and Subversion...

Is Winning on Faulty Slot Machine Crime?

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July 19,2007 | ELIZABETH, Ind. -- Prosecutors are considering criminal charges against casino gamblers who won big on a slot machine that had been installed with faulty software.

The machine at Caesars Indiana credited gamblers $10 for each dollar they inserted because the software wasn't designed for U.S. currency, state police said. More than two dozen people played the machine before one gambler alerted Caesars employees.

Caesars lost $487,000 on the machine during that time, state police said.

A decision on whether to bring criminal charges could come in a couple of weeks, said John Colin, chief deputy prosecutor for Harrison County. He said "criminal intent" may be involved when people play a machine they know is faulty.

The casino said some of the gamblers returned the money after the casino contacted them.

The incident occurred last July, but Colin said Wednesday that obtaining casino records took longer than expected.

Kathryn Ford of Louisville, Ky., the gambler who alerted the casino, said going after the other patrons was unfair.

When a slot machine jams and gamblers lose money, they don't get it back, she said.

"It doesn't work in the reverse," Ford said. "They need to forget it and move on."

Error voids all play. Works against the player. In this case, once the ticket is paid... they deserve to keep their winnings. The house cannot go back on a paid ticket if the player did not tamper with the machine.

Is Winning on Faulty Slot Machine Crime? : Salon

Setting Up and Maintaining NFS Security
3

This chapter discusses Secure NFS. It includes a description of the transactions between a server and a client using DES authentication and presents the administration procedures that are needed to set up and administer Secure NFS.

docs.sun.com: NFS Administration Guide

http://tofslie.com/work/apple_evolution.jpg

Evolution of Apple Products - Timeline

Asshole Driven development (ADD) - Any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions is asshole driven development. All wisdom, logic or process goes out the window when Mr. Asshole is in the room, doing whatever idiotic, selfish thing he thinks%

scottberkun.com � Blog Archive � Asshole driven development

Apache Cocoon

Apache Cocoon is a web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based web development.

Cocoon implements these concepts around the notion of 'component pipelines', each component on the pipeline specializing on a particular operation. This makes it possible to use a Lego(tm)-like approach in building web solutions, hooking together components into pipelines without any required programming.

Cocoon is "web glue for your web application development needs". It is a glue that keeps concerns separate and allows parallel evolution of all aspects of a web application, improving development pace and reducing the chance of conflicts.

Neat.

The Apache Cocoon Project

JasperReports
Introduction

JasperReports is a powerful—and even more important—well known open source Java reporting tool that has the ability to deliver rich content in formats such as PDF, RTF, HTML, CSV and XML. It is widely used and appreciated in the Java community because of its flexibility and the availability of various GUI tools for rapid report design.

The following paragraphs explain how to interface Rails and JasperReports.

HowtoIntegrateJasperReports in Ruby on Rails