My connection dropped again today, though I can hardly blame them for it this time around.  A fire in the alley down the block from our house happened to occur directly below the pole carrying the wires that carried my packets.  It turns out charred copper and melted plastic suffer from approximately 100% packet loss.

There are a few more pictures on my Flickr stream.

The story of Hahn & Coe is the story of American ingenuity and entrepreneurship through generations.  It tells of burgeoning opportunity, economic and technological changes, and the struggles of a family to make it through on their own despite obstacles I can hardly fathom.  But the story has reached its end.  Sadly, the continuing poor economy in a long-downtrodden suburban area of Chicago has finally taken too much a toll.  The family business has closed its doors.

I keep a few of my grandfather’s things near my desk.  His old, wooden level looks almost comical in the bright glow of my dual monitors, and his cracked, yellowing slide-rule is painfully low-tech next to my sleek, black iPhone.  But they remind me of how far I am from vacuum tubes and CB radios, and yet how not very far at all.  There was geek in his blood, too.

I will be moving on to exciting new territory, however.  I have accepted a position with Apple, and the thrill of working for such a dynamic company on ground-breaking technology cannot be overstated.  Those who know me know I’ve had my ups and downs with Apple over the years, from buying an iPhone to decrying DRM.  None of that changes my commitment and interest in Doing Cool Things.  And Apple is certainly Doing Cool Things.  I can’t wait to begin.

Finally, Hedda and will not be moving to California.  I will be spending a fair amount of time in Cupertino, but our home base will remain in the District.

All of us ought to be using multi-factor authentication, but there are myriad reasons so few are.  Most two-factor solutions are too expensive, with prices often skyrocketing over $100 per user, year after year.  Or they’re too hard to deploy, and they don’t integrate with legacy or COTS software without special plug-ins or customizations.  Unless your company has an unusually large IT budget, chances are your company has been priced out of two-factor authentication.  Not anymore.

AuthLite from Collective Software is affordable two-factor authentication for Microsoft Windows Active Directory.  AuthLite uses one-time passwords generated by the YubiKey, and features deep integration with Windows authentication and leverages your existing Active Directory infrastructure and investment.  AuthLite is inexpensive, and can be ten times less expensive than the market leader.  And AuthLite is designed from the ground up to be easy to deploy, administer, and integrate with existing systems.

I’ve spent a good deal of my time in the last year-and-a-half working on AuthLite, and I will detail some of its features and technical aspects over a series of blog posts in the upcoming several weeks.  In the meantime, be sure to follow AuthLite on Twitter for up-to-the-minute information and updates.

This seems an opportune time to introduce to a broader audience the shot we invented on this year’s Marion Barry Day.  I give to you: The Marion Barry.

1. One part Stoli Blackberry
2. One part Southern Comfort
3. One part Blue Curacao
4. One part grenadine
5. Drink up, slam the glass, and holler in your best just-got-caught-with-crack-in-a-hotel-room voice, “Bitch set me up!”

The concoction is sweet and quite drinkable, and is rife with symbolism.  The Stoli Blackberry is because the marionberry is a subspecies of blackberry.  The Southern Comfort makes it in because the former mayor-for-life was born in Mississippi.  And the Blue Curacao and grenadine are there for flavor, and because together the purple hue they create reminds us of the purple velour jogging suit the elder councilmember has been known to sport from time-to-time.

Originally called “The Bitch Set Me Up”, we re-named it to be a bit more obviously associated with the man.

It’s a fairly simple process, and actually takes advantage of the generally-hated-by-most-people User Account Control (UAC) in Vista and 7 to block an unwanted action by a program.  And people say it’s nothing but annoying.

(Note: These instructions are for Firefox on Windows 7 or Vista; anything else and you’re on your own.)

1. Download the Flash updater directly from here.
2. Close all browser windows (including any opened by Prism).
3. Run the updater.
4. Start your browser back up.  Adobe will now sneakily try to install their awful download manager on your system.  This will generate a UAC prompt asking for administrative permissions to install.
5. Click “No” on the UAC prompt to stop the installation in its tracks.

Screw you, Adobe.  You’re in the Hall of Shame for trying to install backdoor software with critical security updates to a ubiquitous web technology.  And win one for UAC!

1. I am a person, not a search engine.
2. Google didn’t buy me.
3. Ardvaark is spelled differently from Aardvark, which is way different than vark.
4. The name Ardvaark (or the variation Jr. Ardvaark) has been my handle since I first started coding a quarter century ago.
5. The domain ardvaark.net has been my personal home page on the web since 2001.
6. My site ends in dot-net, not dot-com.
7. So you see, Google, there’s no cyber-squatting here.  Please don’t sue  me.

That is all.

Despite my general distrust, though, I still harbor a hope that most of the sites I regularly visit aren’t bad actors.  When it turns out they are, it’s a bit of a shock.  When it turns out to be one of the oldest names in net publishing, it’s really disheartening.

Wired News has a really cool article on lasers blasting mosquitoes out of the sky.  When you copy-and-paste from that article, it hijacks your clipboard and changes what you copied.  Try it yourself!  (Of course, if you’re running NoScript, you’ll need to temporarily allow all scripts on the page.)

From the article, copy:

The laser lights quickly located the mosquitoes in flight.

And then paste:

The laser lights quickly located the mosquitoes in flight.

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/death-star-laser-zaps-mosqitoes-dead/#ixzz0fKgTWFBU

Yup, they hijacked your clipboard, and added a tracking link.  Who the hell does that?

Wired, you’re officially in the Hall of Shame.

• Keep the vacant property registration system.
• Include ANCs in the exemption process.
• The proposed “blighted” classification is too subjective. An objective system, such as DMV-style points, should be considered.
• Vacant (but not “blighted”) properties are still a problem. Multi-year vacancies must also be taxed at a higher rate to promote their productive use.

My full testimony can be downloaded here.  You can watch the full meeting online here.  (My testimony begins at about 3:35:00, and then there is some Q&A at the end of the panel.)