Not a Bot
Found on the road.

The Silicon Valley is an echo-chamber of technology companies. One of the many side effects can be seen in vanity license plates on car. Let’s take a look at this one seen today on 101 southbound approaching Palo Alto.

Enhance… Not a Bot
Not a Bot.

In a land where A.I. has been revived as a buzzword to add to all companies, is this some sort of pushback? A reminder that this is not an autonomous vehicle? Maybe this person wants to remind us of their humanity.

Naaaw…

Just another computer security worker on their way to work. There are companies popping up everyday attempting to stop and mitigate automated attacks on web sites. Whether there’s a WAF, it’s part of a CDN product, painfully weak and annoying CAPTCHAs, or something else entirely; there’s lots of work going on in this field of security.

Army Cyber

I rarely watch TV and when I do it’s almost always DVRed so I can skip commercials. But one advert for the U.S. Army caught my eye even while fast forwarding through the break. I went back and actually watched the ad. Then I went back and paused the playback to view the technobabble that was slow-rolled onto the blacked ruggedized laptop (dude, the hacker uses a Durabook? Maybe, it’s really the NSA).

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DEPRECATED

Updated Instructions Here


Let’s Encrypt provides a free, automated, and open Certificate Authority. It’s useful for providing basic SSL certificates for your web services. Although one of the quirks of their setup is they only provide 90 day certificates. That means you need to renew and deploy new certificates within every 90 days if you wish maintain certify and functionality. For single server deployments, it’s pretty trivial to setup an automated process to renew and update your certificates. On GitLab Pages, where you don’t have access to the container your web pages are running, things are further complicated.

I’ve taken to scripting the manual renewal process while waiting for GitLabs to add support. Unfortunately, while I can automate the certificate renewal process, it is currently not possible to automate the certificate deployment process.

So let’s walk through the steps.

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Your GPS is Wrong

My first introduction to high precision reference clocks came about in the late 1990s. There within the cabinets of servers Netscape had a pair of HP 5071A Cesium Primary Frequency Standard rackmount devices. They were part of the local NTP network that all the switches, routers, servers, and satellite communications devices used to stay in sync.

While I may never get my own cesium reference clock, I’d still like to have accurate time on my clocks. With an inexpensive Raspberry Pi and a cheap GPS chip, you can build a stratum 1 time source ganged off the cesium clocks circling in low Earth orbit.

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Only in the Silicon Valley

Even though this plate was found on a minivan, I kind of expect the driver to have a tattoo that reads vi Life in gothic script on his bicep. And when that baby grows up, I suspect she’ll rebel by only using WYSIWYG IDEs like Eclipse or Visual Studio.

… written in emacs.

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