entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

Two weeks, i hit LISA for the first time in 12 years.  I can't really explain why it took me so long to return, other than the typical excuse of indolence (and, really, from a professional standpoint, that is simply bad form).  It was good to see _nicolai_, pir, gothgeekgrrl, and gallifreyan, as well as Steve VanDevender, ex-coworkers Grant Talarico and Aaron Fraser, and talk.bizarre's own George William Herbert (pure chance encounter), and i indulged in the opportunity to show them around downtown San José for lunch at Morocco's, Hanuman, and Mezcal.

One thing i learned at LISA was from ARIN regarding the imminence of IPv4 address space exhaustion; if everything breaks right, the last available /8s will be handed out by IANA to the regional internet registries sometime in the second quarter of 2012.  So, adding IPv6 is moving out of the "hardcore early adopter" stage into the "prudent proactive user" stage (but feel free to disagree and call me names).  I also picked up some good tips regarding interviewing, résumé writing, and becoming a better senior sysadmin.

As of this week, i've been working during the day, filling in for someone else in the group who's out (the group is running rather lean as of late).  It's been nice to see people and actually get to have questions answered without having to wake someone up (although i get the impression today that far too many people have checked out early for Thanksgiving).  I hope that i'll be on days permanently soon.

<dkim-milter-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net>: host mail.sourceforge.net[66.35.250.206] said:
  550-Postmaster verification failed while checking <rone@eforceglobal.com>
  550-Called:   209.177.149.166
  550-Sent:     RCPT TO:<postmaster@eforceglobal.com>
  550-Response: 550 <postmaster@eforceglobal.com>: Recipient address rejected: eforceglobal.com
  550-Several RFCs state that you are required to have a postmaster
  550-mailbox for each mail domain. This host does not accept mail
  550-from domains whose servers reject the postmaster address.
  550 Sender verify failed (in reply to RCPT TO command)

Yeah, yeah, it would be nice if eFORCE's mail server were RFC-compliant, but at the same time, i'd love to print out section 2.10 of RFC 793, roll it up, and smack SourceForge's nose with it.

Dear dr_strych9: please supplement my arguments against real-time blackhole lists with this delightful story about a blackhole list that came back to life fifteen months after its death and caused all its subscribers' incoming mail to bounce.

... but i hear the train coming anyway.

My career is stuck in a bad spot, where i can't afford to work for a place whose output isn't objectionable (like a university or a non-profit organization), so i have to take a job with companies that produce abhorrent things, like social networks or online ad frameworks, and are either megacorporations ridden with politics and bureaucracy, or are minuscule startups run by delusional megalomaniacs who overwork everyone, or they're midsized companies run by decent, smart people and therefore are a target ripe for acquisition and reëducation.  And i'm still too far off my winemaking certificate to seriously enact a career change (and we're back to the "can't afford" part, anyway).  The small business is already a vanishing thing, but it's practically mythic in this industry.  I wonder whether there's anything that can be done about it.

• Warren Ellis brings us a disturbing answer to a troubling question.
• iayork could've been the coolest Dad ever.
• E. Howard Hunt died three months ago, and talked about LBJ's involvement in the assassination of JFK.
• "I have a great idea.  Let's rebuild the Internet from scratch!"
• Baseball might be getting rid of its longest-used performance enhancer, but in the meantime, the one undetectable performance enhancer might not be all that enhancing.
• Fox News never fails to disappoint: "Could [Seung-Hui] Cho have been possessed by the Devil? Could that explain the massacre at Virginia Tech?"
• The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has decided that the bit in the Second Amendment about "a well-regulated militia" was just fluff.  This is a complicated one, because i don't disagree with the decision, but i'm not crazy about the way they got there.  I wonder about how laws like Minnesota's Personal Protection Act can help Americans be responsible gun owners, and what the effect of these laws are (and, Seth, if you happen to be reading this, you're still a douche).
• This one's a real corker: Jundallah, a wholly owned subsidiary of Al-Qaeda, has been receiving carefully funnelled financial support from the United States and is fighting the Iranian government.  Follow all the links.  You know what?  Nothing surprises me anymore.  All of my predictions have come true.  At least we have the liberal media hammering the ... oh, wait, a Blue Angel crashed.  Sorry, where were we?

In regards to a slight problem at Google Blogsearch that tongodeon mentioned:

Thank you for your note. We understand your concern in this matter, and
we'd like to reassure you that Blog Search (beta) was designed to respect
robots.txt files and both the NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW meta tags.

We're aware of the problem you're reporting, and our engineers are
currently investigating. We hope to have this fixed soon. We appreciate
your patience, and thanks for taking the time to write.

Regards,
The Google Team

So when and why did Google start passing or setting cookies for your query's top hit, before you actually click on the link?

VeriSlime is now suing ICANN because only VeriSlime has the authority to impose its will on the Internet. Or something.

There are nearly 34 million domain names in the rootgTLD servers. Over 24 million of those are .com domains.

More on the .com/.net A wildcards:

The Internet Software Consortium, the nonprofit organization that develops BIND software for Internet domain name directories, is writing an "urgent patch" for Internet service providers and others who want to block customers from a new Site Finder service from VeriSign Inc.
[...]
"We're making this patch available because our customers are screaming for it," [ISC's Paul] Vixie said.
[...]
VeriSign spokesman Brian O'Shaughnessy said Tuesday that individual service providers were free to configure their systems so customers would bypass Site Finder. But he questioned whether releasing a patch to do so would violate Internet standards.
[...]
Earlier this year, a suburban Washington company called Paxfire Inc. tested a similar service for ".biz" and ".us" names, but the U.S. government and a private oversight board asked Paxfire to suspend it after a few weeks pending a review, Paxfire chairman Mark Lewyn said.