Hello, my name is David Adams. I hope you enjoy my personal website.
A weblog of sorts
A long long time ago, I ran a proto-weblog, generated by Usertalk scripts running in Userland Frontier. It's about half amazing and half embarrassing to see that that site and lots of its content got captured by the Wayback Machine. 7/23/10 3:24pm
This new tool is billed as a poor-man's VPN. Based on my few minutes working with it, it's far better than any VPN software I've ever used. If you need entire subnets of private networks to appear locally to your client PC, or if you want to add selective VPN capability for your router, this is the tool you want.
Fred Clark gets it right, as usual.
As CPUs add cores, our applications are going to need to start taking advantage of that extra power somehow. pigz does just that for gzip. And it works incredibly well.
Video of a US helicopter crew killing some journalists and their rescuers from 2007. I shouldn't let myself read about these things, much less watch them. On the one hand, this happens all the time in modern video-game-style warfare, and we only know the details now, three years later, because Reuters employees were among the killed. And while the transcript makes clear the gunner was practically begging to shoot and looking for justifications to do so, I don't doubt he was doing anything different than he was trained to do or saw his peers and superiors doing. But what we need to focus on is that this kind of incident is inevitable when we're engaged in the type of operation we were in Iraq. If we pursue this kind of war, this is going to happen. I find it unacceptable and sickening.
ssh -W host:port
Wow. The iPad can't not be a huge hit with apps like these. Holy cow. The NPR, National Geographic Atlas, and Elements apps look incredible.
She was universally trashed for tearing up a picture of the pope. Only, she was totally right about the coverups of the sexual abuse of children.
The US kills hundreds of people in Pakistan each year with flying robots. The data is by nature inexact, but even the most supportive sources count a quarter of the deaths as innocents. I feel ill.
The Kansas City, Missouri school district is closing half its schools. Since enrollment has declined by 50% in the past 10 years, it makes a sort of sense, and this sort of thing is happening in cities all over the country. I question how much money really gets saved by these kinds of moves, but at some point, the number of schools has to shrink. There's no good way to solve that problem, though.
Whatever was holding things up must have been resolved. Working drafts of HTML5 and its related standards have been released.
By which I mean, they are starting to seriously abuse the patent system. They just filed a major lawsuit against HTC for a bunch of things that shouldn't be patentable. Apple has no reason to be a bully about a market where they are the clear leader, but here they go.
Stryde Hax with some serious research into the high school webcam spying lawsuit. If his details are right, the students had no way to get around using rootkitted computers.
NATO airstrikes kill dozens of civilians in Afghanistan on a regular basis. Some people say such collateral damage is counterproductive to our cause. That's true. However, the more important issue is this: It is wrong to kill innocent people. We should stop.
The spot where I put an interesting video
Don't try this at home.
Respectable folk
I rather enjoy reading the thoughts and opinions of people who are smarter and more interesting than myself, including Jim Henley, Rafe Colburn, Fred Clark, Bruce Schneier, Matt Haughey, Tim Bray, Anil Dash, John Gruber, Duncan Black, and Raymond Chen.
An autobiography of myself
I live with my beautiful family in beautiful Peoria, Illinois where I work for Virginia Tech. I sometimes write computer programs. I play piano and guitar poorly. Every summer I get obsessed over drum corps.