Green Mountain Engineering

Yesterday, I received an email from Eerik Hantsoo saying that Green Mountain Engineering is hiring. I had never heard of them before, even though I live just a few miles away. From their website, they sound like exactly the sort of company that I have been trying to find.

Then I thought that as soon as my friend mentions to them that I'm interested, they'll try to prefilter me using Google. (At least, that's what I would do.) They'll find this blog, and then they'll read this post.

So, welcome Green Mountain Engineering people. I'm prefiltering you as well, and so far, I'm impressed. I've been trying to find a job for a while now that involves hardcore engineering but is good for the world; that seems like what you do.

To save you the effort, I've precompiled and categorized some relevant Google results for you below.

Some links of which I'm proud:

My trip to Tanzania to teach a class on embedded systems to the Tanzania National Radiation Commission, sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

A description of a presentation I gave with a "playfully rebellious undertone" that won second place at BarCampNYC.

My electric Porsche 914.

An article that quotes me in the Boston Globe.

An article I wrote about a solar oven that I built (pages 4 and 5 of the PDF).

Mildly embarassing (and particularly low audio quality too)

An interview with Mike Goelzer and me at BarcampNYC.

Not me at all:

Brandon Stafford, the NASCAR "tire specialist."

The South African Brandon Stafford.

Building my own secure mail, file, and web server

After multiple complaints from an irritating associate of mine, I am building a secure server for my various secure computing needs. The complaints have focused on the fact that I have a Gmail account. While I generally agree that allowing a company to host all of my personal email, where it can be indexed, queried, and sold to various individuals and companies around the world, is a bad idea, so far, the worst side effect has been all the Google ads for Dallas real estate. Like I think Kennedy's really dead!

All the same, I've been thinking it would be fun to buy a rackmount server, install OpenBSD, apache, qmail, roundcube, and sshd. I'll install my public key in sshd so my remote logins and file transfers would be encrypted. I'll generate an SSL certificate to encrypt the roundcube exchanges. The machine will be colocated at the InterNAP datacenter in Somerville, if I get a reasonably good deal on rack space. Then I just have to guard against physical intrusions into the server and convince everyone who emails me to use GPG, and maybe I'll finally drop back off the CIA's radar.

Maybe an encrypted filesystem will be necessary as well. I realize that the US government could just subpoena the bejesus out of me, but at least then I'd know what they were getting. (In reality, this will never occur; I'm just preparing for the day when I actually have something useful to encrypt.) Comments about the security holes I'm missing are welcome from those who are not the irritating associate.

How to install OS X Tiger 10.4 on an old iBook with no DVD drive

You need another Mac with a DVD drive. I'll call that the desktop, although it could be another iBook. Note that this is probably only worth doing if you've added 512 MB of RAM to your old iBook. Without extra RAM, Tiger runs painfully slowly.

1. Put the Tiger install DVD in the desktop. Restart it, and hold down the T key as it boots. Once you see a yellow firewire symbol on the screen, you can release the T key. You have just booted your desktop in what is called "target disk mode."
2. Connect the two machines with a firewire cable.
3. Reboot the old iBook with the option key held down. This will allow you to choose the boot disk.
4. It will take a while for the Tiger DVD to appear-- you'll see the iBook and desktop hard drives right away; the Tiger DVD will take a minute to show up.
5. Select the Tiger DVD, and click the arrow icon to continue.
6. Install Tiger as you would normally on a machine with a DVD drive.

George Packer's The Assassins' Gate and the war in Iraq

I've just been reading a book by George Packer about the war in Iraq called "The Assassins' Gate." This is a terrible name for the book, but after the first three chapters, which are dry but important background, the book is quite good. The penultimate chapter is one of the best descriptions of the war that I've read. One paragraph particularly struck me:

In the media, Iraq generated words as bitter as any event in modern American history. But most Americans didn't turn against other citizens, any more than they joined together in a common cause. Iraq was a strangely distant war. It was always hard to picture the place; the war didn't enter the popular imagination in songs that everyone soon knew by heart, in the manner of previous wars. The one slender American novel that the war has inspired so far, "Checkpoint," by Nicholson Baker—a dialogue over lunch in a Washington hotel room between two old friends, one of whom is preparing to assassinate President Bush—has nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with the ugliness of politics in this country. Michael Moore, the left's answer to Rush Limbaugh, made a hugely successful movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11," in which Saddam's Iraq was portrayed in a crudely fantastical light—a happy place where children flew kites. Iraq provided a blank screen onto which Americans projected anything they wanted, in part because so few Americans had anything directly at stake there. The war's proponents and detractors spoke of the conflict largely in theoretical terms: imperialism, democracy, unilateralism, weapons of mass destruction, preëmption, terrorism, totalitarianism, neoconservatism, appeasement. The exceptions were the soldiers and their families, who carried almost the entire weight of the war.

I was both excited and slightly disappointed to learn that the chapter originally appeared in the New Yorker last summer.

I think that the core of the problem is described very well by the sentence, "Iraq provided a blank screen onto which Americans projected anything they wanted, in part because so few Americans had anything directly at stake there."

I think that's why the US is so divided over the war-- we mostly don't know what is happening there, so we pull together scraps that support our instincts.

What a mess.