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This is a goody for anyone doing web applications.  It’s just a short article called “The 80/20 Rule for Web Application Security” about some easy to do steps that can help make your web applications more secure.

If you’re a web app developer most of this stuff should be in the “well duh!” category but just incase take a minute or two and read the article and follow the advice.

The one thing that I didn’t know and I’m looking into is the Apache Module mod_security.  It seems like a very promising tool for helping to lock down your entire webserver and not just a web app.

Watching the local news last night they had a report of a BGSU Student that was found with a hit list and a weapon (BGSU Student Hit List).  Talk about scary, I know the guy!

Well, I know him as in I had several classes with him while I was in school, not as in we’re friends or have hung out together.  I must have had at least 3 or 4 Computer Science classes with the guy and I always saw him in the hallways in the CS building.  He was always pretty friendly with people in classes so whatever caused him to become depressed must have happened rather recently.

The thing that makes this probably a bit more frightening is that he was in the Army ROTC program.  As a side note the school paper even interviewed him recently about the ROTC (ROTC members look to future).  So this isn’t just some random sad guy, he is a soldier in training.  Thankfully, the authorities were notified and able to step in and prevent anything from happening.  I hope he gets the help he needs and gets past this ordeal.

Happy 21st Birthday!

Today is the 21st birthday of my girlfriend!  She now has the privilege of drinking legally.  Woohoo!  Of course it’s the middle of the week so not like we’ll be going out and getting her trashed or anything.  That’ll have to wait to this weekend.  Bwaa haaa haa.

I’m just joshing!  What kind of boyfriend would I be if I tried to get my girlfriend wasted?  Still it’ll be nice now that we can go out and both order a glass of wine with dinner or whatnot.

So, once again, Happy Birthday sweetie!  I wish you a wonderful day.

Scott Long, of FreeBSD fame, was interviewed recently over at O’Reilly’s OnLamp.com about SMPng.  SMPng stands for Symmetric MultiProcessing next generation.  SMP in general terms is just the technology that allows a computer to have more than one CPU.

This interview is very technical so the usual “Only geeks need bother to read” notice is in full effect here.

In order for any operating system to support SMP they have to specially design the OS.  This means there are many, many ways in order to provide SMP support.  Every OS does it differently. 

One of the big changes from FreeBSD 4.x to FreeBSD 5.x was to do a major overhaul of SMP support.  This is what SMPng is.  The project to create the future SMP system for FreeBSD.  It’s a major undertaking and has taken a long time for it to mature.

Now get yourself over to OnLamp.com and read the interview.

Oh yea, for those that might want to check out the SMPng project here is the url: http://www.freebsd.org/smp/