For the last year or so I have been running a Linux 2.2.x kernel on my firewall. This week, I decided it was time to move up to iptables, so I spent the weekend reconfiguring my entire home network. I upgraded to the 2.4.20 kernel and it is great improvement.

While I was at it, I decided to try out one of the firewall configuration tools that are available through "apt" on Debian. I settled on the Shorewall system which, it turns out, was developed in the town where I live! Shoreline. Anyway, the tool is simple and powerful. It provides a shallow but powerful layer on top of iptables and iproute. Shorewall made it very simple to setup a pretty decent firewall (that is not an invitation to try and hack me).
9:38:41 PM    

I know, I know, I'm late in noting this, but I just want it on my weblog for the benefit of my kids. You gotta give me a break because I've been really busy the past couple of weeks with my new contract and Christmas. Not to mention all the work I did rebuilding my firewall this weekend.

Anyway, a group of religious fanatics, called the Raelians, claims to have cloned a human baby (it's a girl!) who they say was born on Thursday [Wired]. Their claims have yet to be confirmed but I'm sure they will be soon.

Whatever the result of the Raelian's claim, they're not the only ones out their working on cloning human beings [July 29]. Stay tuned for more babies that look exactly like their parent.
9:23:05 PM    

I've always thought that my career path as an engineer would practically assure me of a good paying job for my entire professional life. Having been unemployed and looking for work for nine months, I now know that it was no guarantee. The software industry was hit hard with the fall of the dot-com's, buy this phenomenon is not limited to my field. It has hit many of the engineering fields. Some want to see changes in H-1B visas to compensate:

"About 80,0000 engineers were unemployed a few months ago. If you take out the H-1Bs who came in, you'd have jobs for all of them," the IEEE-USA's Bryant says. The organization is lobbying Congress to lower the number of H-1B issued [Christian Science Monitor].

Unfortunately, by the time the government gets around to acting, it will probably be too late and those H1-B workers will be needed again. 

On the positive side of things (for me), the number of students enrolled in engineering programs at the university level has dropped. So, the system seems to be stabilizing itself. I guess I'll hold out a while to see how things turn out. In the meantime, I've got a contract, so I don't currently count among the unemployed. Let's hope that I can keep it that way. 
9:14:53 PM