Cooking With Technology

Microsoft’s Pay-as-you-Go CloudOS

peasleer — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:53:11 +0000

Microsoft is quite apparently determined to not miss the possible shift to cloud computing. On top of October’s Microsoft Developer Conference announcement that the company will be launching “Azure” (Microsoft’s answer to Amazon Web Services), they also announced a next-generation operating system that will be cloud-centric. Overall, it seems like a logical progression for a [...]

Arbitrary File Ownership Exploit in Linux

peasleer — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 07:49:34 +0000

Remember our discussion on viewing computer security as threat mitigation? Well the likely risk of one attack vector being exploited has just increased. An issue was uncovered in Linux’s /bin/login and utmp being able to change the ownership of arbitrary files upon remote login. The example they discussed was changing /etc/shadow to be readable by a [...]

Secure Enough: Or Security as Threat Mitigation

peasleer — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 06:03:19 +0000

My “Why I Don’t Use Antivirus” post has been receiving a recent surge of traffic, and with it, new commentors who open my eyes to how other people think. The result of my reading these comments is the conclusion that people view practices as either “secure” or “insecure,” while leaving little room in between the [...]

Traffic Milestone

peasleer — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:44:49 +0000

This blog has now been around for 14 months at this domain, and I hit a milestone sometime in the past week. Other sites may get this in a day, I’m sure, but my total hit count broke 50,000 :) Total views: 52,379 Busiest day: 3,424 And my top 10 posts: Title Views Converting a Physical Disk to a VMWare V 12,697 Debian [...]

Storing Data in the Cloud

peasleer — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 01:18:51 +0000

I want to open this up with a question posed by j9er on twitter: j9er Taking cloud computing to its ultimate outcome, does ayone care that, say, Microsoft would have all your data? Or, Google? My concise response: yes, I care. But the three primary reasons go beyond the 140 characters twitter would allot me. Unrestricted Access [...]

Developing on OSX

peasleer — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 03:19:53 +0000

A lot of developeres I knew back in college loved using Macs for their development machines, and you don’t have to look very far to see this opinion reflected on the Internet. In total, I’ve been using a Mac as a development machine for about five months. And now that I have a spare moment [...]

Judgments on Piracy

peasleer — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:59:43 +0000

Coming back from dinner one night, I was stopped (as I routinely am) by my talkative landlord landlady and her friend. As I’m sure many people reading this can relate to, the conversation quickly transitioned from pleasantries to “hey, you are a computer whiz, right?” Most geeks know that this is the code to bow out [...]

Mac Vs. PC

peasleer — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:55:12 +0000

You know all those Mac vs. PC ads that Apple has been running? Well I’ve got a good retort for Microsoft’s counter-campaign: “Vista: IT DOESN’T GIVE YOU CANCER.” More here [zdnet]. (It should be noted that I doubt this is really limited to Apple products. A lot of new plastics come with factory toxins hitching a ride - [...]

Women in IT: A Guest Post

peasleer — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:00:20 +0000

In response to my last post on Women in IT, a reader took the time to share with me her own experiences regarding women in male dominated fields. Her opinions complement the thoughts of my previous interviewee’s, and in the interest of forming a more fair and holistic view of this huge issue, I requested [...]

Women in IT

peasleer — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:30:02 +0000

Rochester Institute of Technology has been supporting programs to encourage enrollment of women in their technical fields. The reason for this is painfully obvious if you happen to be studying computer science (like I am) - I think I had four women total in my nine or so CS classes this year, out of 150 [...]