I feel sick, but not as sick as I could feel. Update: Duke 67, WVU 73. Sigh.

Ben Laurie celebrates the publication of RFC 5155. I hadn’t gotten around to blogging about it, but I’m also pretty happy that this RFC finally made it out. Ben says:

It turns out that in general, to prove the nonexistence of a name using NSEC you have to show at most two records, one to prove the name itself doesn’t exist, and the other to show that you didn’t delegate some parent of it. Often the same record can do both. In NSEC3, it turns out, you have to show at most three records. And if you can understand why, then you understand DNS better than almost anyone else on the planet.

I’m at the IETF this week, and so I get to turn my brain to thinking about IETF-y things, like Internet Drafts that I think should (and could) be written.

Idea #1: Cache Poisoning Resilience

This would be a draft that describes steps beyond RFC 2181 that a resolver must do to protect itself from cache poisoning. (RFC 2181 addresses this problem by introducing credibility rules in section 5.4.1.) Modern caching resolvers need to do more to protect themselves from name poisoning attacks like malicious CNAME chains. I would expect this draft to be able to lay out a few simple rules like:

It has been ages since I’ve blogged, and at least one of my four subscribers reminds me of this regularly. So, here goes. I’ve come home pretty late from work, and I’m pretty uninspired when it comes to assembling some sort of dinner. After staring at the fridge fruitlessly for a while, I’m struck by an inspiration of sorts. I’ll make bachelor chow.

Now, I have no idea what is in the original bachelor chow (nor do I want to know), but my bachelor chow is just the name I’ve given to the worst thing that I cook for myself on purpose. So, here is the basic recipe:

In contemplating a move back to Linux for my day job, or at least a future where more of my work is done directly on my Linux box, I began to pine for decent anti-aliased fonts for Emacs. Both the windows and mac builds of Emacs 22 have this support built-in. Although, good luck trying to figure out how to change the font to what you want, at least in Carbon Emacs. Fortunately the default font of Monaco is pretty good (albeit not perfect). I don’t have a lot of experience with EmacsW32, even though I do have it installed somewhere. At first, I was puzzled as to why Emacs just didn’t come with anti-aliased fonts on Fedora 7 by default. Some web searches led me to believe that support was to be merged in before Emacs 22.1, and there I was, running 22.1. Alas, I had misread the interweb. If support has been merged in, it has been merged in after 22.1. Since 22.1 is the latest stable version of Emacs (as of this writing), it isn’t all that surprising that Fedora 7 doesn’t have this. Ah, well, time to move to the bleeding edge. Concise instructions for building a CVS version of Emacs with anti-aliased fonts can be found on the XftGnuEmacs page. I didn’t have a whole lot of trouble building and installing this version, but what I really want is a Fedora 7 package to replace the delivered packages. If I were running Ubuntu, this wouldn’t be much of a problem. So far, my attempts to hack the existing source RPM for Emacs haven’t met with much success. It doesn’t help that emacs take a while to compile, and I keep having to completely start over. I’ll update this entry if I ever get an rpm built.

Meaningless stream of comments here.