Bryan Strawser

My VAIO is giving me fits, it’s in pieces right now on my desk.  Ugh.

I seriously need to network my printers - I am hardly ever downstairs anymore where the printer sits as wi-fi has made me free of wires!  Laptop on the couch is usually far more entertaining that being downstairs.

Printing without wires, Part III. I must be losing my touch. I got our LaserJet 2100M working with our new SMC Barricade router after entirely too much time spent working on the problem. Why wasnât it working? I had configured the SMC for MAC authentication, on top of the other built-in protections, and hadnât input the MAC address for the LaserJetâs print server. I figured that since I was connecting the LaserJet via a wired connection it wouldnât matter, but apparently the SMCâs MAC authentication is good for both wired and wireless clients.

No matter. Itâs working, and now we have both our printers accessible via wireless. Iâm going to bed to nurse this cold. [jarretthousenorth News]

At 2:53am this morning, my sister-in-law Jennifer (Vyse) Strawser gave birth to the first member of the next generation of our family - Alexander David Strawser - weighing in at 7 pounds and 3 ounces - in Crawfordsville, Indiana.  While I’ve not spoken yet to either by brother Steve or his wife, I understand that everyone is doing very well, just very tired!

The Boston Globe:  This is amazing.  Billions are being poured into the FBI and other governmental organizations and they can’t even get the basics right.

The FBI in Washington state interviewed a witness last summer who said that John Allen Muhammad, now one of the sniper suspects, was trying to obtain a silencer for his gun and spoke of killing police officers, law enforcement officials said yesterday.

This can be corrected very easily.  Give every agent a laptop (shoot, they gave every student in Maine a laptop for Christ’s sake!).  Put a weblogging tool on that laptop.  Require that they write up a synopsis of every tip or interview they do in their weblog.  Have them publish that weblog to a central Intranet.  Put a Google appliance on that Intranet.  Let it index the pages. 

How simple is that?  A couple of simple search routines could have netted this information.  After that, it would only be a matter of ruling out suspects — which could have been left to local police.  A couple weblogs, sorted by region could have been set up to disseminate the most likely leads to local police.  Don’t tell me it is more complicated than that.  It isn’t.  In fact, anything that would make it more complicated than that would likely cause the system to fail given its size.

Total software costs:  a couple of million $$.  Savings in human life:  priceless. [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

When the Spam Hits the Blogs. The latest trick of bulk e-mail marketers is to hit the referral logs of popular weblogs, and the bloggers are hopping mad. By Michelle Delio. [Wired News]