I seem to be gravitating back towards interests I had when I had in high school.

6 years ago I had it all figured out. I was a member of Quaker Hill Fire Department and my master plan consisted of enlisting in the U.S. Air Force, pursuing a degree in Criminal Justice, and starting on the path to becoming a state trooper. Somewhere in those plans I would also get married and own a self-sustaining farm.

What is NLCT?
NLCT is a Twitter bot written by me, Charles Hooper (@charleshooper,) in Python. The source to the bot is currently closed source but will be opened under either a GPL or BSD-style license as soon as some important modifications are made.

How does the NLCT bot work?
The NLCT bot works by "retweeting" any mention of its name.

Sometime late last year, like anyone else living in Los Angeles, I purchased an iPhone. During the first month or so – a period I now refer to as the novelty stage – my friends and coworkers and I would share with each other the newest, greatest applications we could find. When we weren't actually engaged in conversation, we were probably sitting in a circle with our eyes glued to our phones. I had wondered if owning a smart phone was ruining my social life.

I would like to think that one day we will all be past the point where we are constantly finding silly bugs and vulnerabilities caused by unvalidated or unsanitized user input. Unfortunately for us all, we're not. In this article, I will attempt to describe a rather overlooked result of PHP's type juggling.

Link Aggregation is an excellent way to increase the potential available bandwidth to a server or other network device. It also provides redundant pathways from one device to another. However, should your upstream switch or network device go down then you will experience an outage that will last until the device comes back up or is replaced. Often times, this is unacceptable for servers or applications that require High Availability. Fortunately, the use of a bridge interface and Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) will allow us to multihome our Linux servers across two different switches.

I just got this email in my inbox -- Incidentally, this was after seeing silenceisdefeat.org listed on eBay.

Silenceisdefeat has changed domains
You're receiving this email because you have the account '*' on the SilenceIsDefeat public access unix system.

At work I'm currently researching systems and process automation for our internal servers. I have also been researching distributed datasets and am currently looking at the Cassandra project. Other things that have made it to my brain: Heartbeat, Linux Virtual Server, and DRDB for High Availability solutions.

So what about when I'm not at work? Believe it or not, Web-based RPGs have played a big part in my "off-work, on-line" time for awhile now, so I guess I'll update anyone who is here from any of those games: I've quit Bootleggers. Roderik, if you read this: Keep my points, haha. The short story is that I had been IP banned (due to a mis-understanding, not due to anything malicious) but there was a bug in the appeal forum's authentication that allowed anyone to access the details of those bans. This made my ban public knowledge. While Sabin was certainly kind enough to fix it as soon as it was brought to his attention, I decided that it made a good "walking away" point.

So what's next? Well, I've been playing Downtown Mafia as well as doing some game development of my own. I'm currently writing a code-base for some web-based RPGs I have had ideas for. I may eventually try to sit down and learn ActionScript/Flash/Flex and start making my games a bit more... "immersive" but, for now, regular HTML (with maybe a little bit of JavaScript) will suffice. And of course, with web-based game development comes web-based game development research...

One of the many nerdy things I enjoy doing is reading the Word of the Day RSS feed from dictionary.com. Anyways, today's word of the day is sesquipedalian.

sesquipedalian \ses-kwuh-puh-DAYL-yuhn\, adjective:
1. Given to or characterized by the use of long words.
2. Long and ponderous; having many syllables.

Boy, they weren't kidding. Unfortunately for sesquipedalian, defenestrate is still my all-time favorite.

And for those who are interested, dictionary.com has also started releasing Word Explorer Podcasts!

In light of the recent decision by the U.S. Senate to allow the NSA to continue to perform warrantless wiretapping on U.S. Citizens, I feel that the use of encryption is now more important than ever. Here's a few things you can do to keep your private communications between you and your intended parties. These tips won't just help to keep you safe from the government, but will also help to protect you from identity thieves and crackers as well.

I have purchased an SSL certificate and am happy to announce that you can now access this site via HTTPS. As donations come in, I will purchase SSL certificates for my hosted sites as well. My goal is to have 100% of content on this server available via HTTPS.