To help thwart would be attackers take a few moments to ensure that your Google Mail is secure (the same goes if you aren’t using Google Mail).

• Google now has a feature that forces the use of HTTPS when accessing Google Mail
  1. Login to Google Mail
  2. Click on “Settings”
  3. Select “Always use https” in the “Browser Connection” section
  4. Save changes, log out and back in
  5. Verify that you are using a secure site (there should be a lock icon next to the URL)
• Use a strong password that is unique from your other services
• Do not provide access to your email to any 3rd party (no Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn). While it may be convenient to have these sites look through your contacts, it is like handing them the keys to your kingdom

If you follow these simple steps, you will make it much more difficult for people to hack into your email.

I was impressed with Senator McCain’s conciliatory speech. Had he ran his campaign in the same manner, the outcome may have been different. He spoke well and truly seemed sincere in his support of his new President Elect.

President Elect Obama’s speech was, as I have come to expect, nothing short of eloquent and moving. His unrivaled ability to motivate people to better themselves and their community is most welcome.

I read an interesting article on Time.com with statements from a variety of foreign leaders and prominent members of foreign society that reflects the hope that the entire world shares for Barack Obama.

The difference between Git and other source control systems like Subversion is that there is no need for a central repository for your source code. Your code remains completely distributed amongst the various machines and people that are working on it.
I currently use Subversion to maintain my source code, but I am thinking that I may like Git better.

UPDATE: To install Git on Mac OSX (10.5) I used the following, graciously taken from this forum post at Slicehost.

First, get the source code for the latest stable build here, then:

sudo apt-get build-dep git-core
tar xjf git-1.5.5.1.tar.bz2
cd git-1.5.5.1/
./configure
make
sudo make install


I was first turned on to hulu by a weblog post “Hulu figures out how to bring TV online” at Signal vs. Noise.

http://newsproject.org/videos/113

“There’s a powerful police presence here. The chill of 1968 is in the air of Denver,” Ron Kovic

I hope that, if elected, Barack Obama will adhere to the following:

US Constitution, Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

1. Mount Windows share using Samba
2. Load data into MySQL and perform a bunch of transformations on it
3. TODO: script creation of Active Directory accounts from MySQL Database (Python??)

I found that I needed to view the data as I was testing the MySQL transformations, so I turned to Ruby and Rails. I have not had a great deal of luck in the past with configuring Apache to serve up dynamic content via Mongrel or lighty, so I decided to give Passenger a go. For those of you that are unaware, Passenger works directly with Apache and requires almost no configuration. It is dead simple to use. So, within a matter of minutes (minus the time to tweak my database to conform to the Rails conventions) I had a web site up and running to display my data as I was testing it!

Open Source Software is becoming (for me at least) a more viable solution to the problems I face than the proprietary alternatives. The wealth of information available and the relative ease with which a great deal of work can be done is amazing.