Miles Davis » Hell in a Handbasket http://miles.davis.name Ars longa, vita brevis Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:53:25 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 We have met the enemy and he is us http://miles.davis.name/2010/04/22/attacks-turn-ugly http://miles.davis.name/2010/04/22/attacks-turn-ugly#comments Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:10:49 +0000 miles http://miles.davis.name/2010/04/22/attacks-turn-ugly Our normally reserved attackers apparently became frustrated or angry yesterday, and instead of the normal host-to-host hopping, password sniffing, and other relatively non-destructive activity, they MAC flooded my router. Filled the CAM tables on all Cisco devices (old Cat4ks that have been on death row for a few years now), wreaking havoc for some, while the HP switches just chugged right along. Having part of your network fall over dead while the rest is seemingly unaffected actually makes debugging harder.

Update: That’s right, it wasn’t part of the attack after all. Somewhere in Packard a student plugged something into the net that should never have been connected, a NetFPGA set up to manufacture MAC addresses. Don’t ask for any details, they’re keeping the student’s identity from me for some reason. :)

]]> http://miles.davis.name/2010/04/22/attacks-turn-ugly/feed 0 How Much Is $1 Trillion? http://miles.davis.name/2009/03/13/how-much-is-1-trillion http://miles.davis.name/2009/03/13/how-much-is-1-trillion#comments Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:08:45 +0000 miles http://miles.davis.name/?p=85

A trillion dollars is about the total amount collected in income taxes by the U.S. federal government in fiscal year 2006– $1.04 trillion, if you’re curious to use the exact number. That gives me a simple rule of thumb for personalizing these numbers. If I want to know what an additional trillion dollars in government borrowing or spending will mean for me, I just imagine what it would be like to pay twice as much in federal income taxes for one year.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/clusterstock/~3/_lLieVsBW4I/how-much-is-1-trillion-2009-3

]]> http://miles.davis.name/2009/03/13/how-much-is-1-trillion/feed 0 Safe as houses… http://miles.davis.name/2008/10/14/safe-as-houses http://miles.davis.name/2008/10/14/safe-as-houses#comments Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:49:21 +0000 miles http://miles.davis.name/?p=75 Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economics yesterday. Reminds me of something a wise man wrote just a few years ago:

I used to live next door to a Russian émigré. One day he asked me to explain something that puzzled him about his new country. “This place seems very rich,” he said, “but I never see anyone making anything. How does the country earn its money?”

[An] answer to my former neighbor would be that these days, Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn’t seem like a sustainable lifestyle.

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