Looks like crackers are finally starting to turn their sights on Mozilla Firefox. A DoS vulnerability has been discovered which causes Firefox to crash simply by browsing to a malformed website. Note that this particular security flaw does not allow a cracker to gain any sort of control over your computer, nor does it allow him/her to access any of your information. It just crashes your browser, forcing you to manually terminate and reopen in order to view more websites. If you want to see this in action, I’ve copied the demo code at the aforementioned site to mine. You can crash your copy of Firefox (here.

Seeing as I just started this, I’ve got a bit of catch up to do. Here’s one item I definitely need to bring up. My dad bought a new (used) motorcycle. It’s a BMW R1150R. I haven’t been home long enough since he got it to get a ride on it yet (plus we only have one helmet that fits me, and it’s my dads… I don’t have a motorcycle license), but my mom and dad have been riding it a fair amount, all over Wisconsin. This past weekend they took a trip around Lake Winnebago, stopping in Fond du Lac to visit my aunt and uncle.

Looks pretty sweet!

I decided it’s time for me to have a blog. Jared has a blog, Scott has a blog, even my own sister created a blog before me. And I’m supposedly the geek in the family. It seems I’m late. So, here it is. A blog. At the moment, this blog is powered by Blogger (though it’s web editor is a pain as far as generating appropriate HTML). I don’t really plan on keeping this setup, since it’d be much geekier to write my own blogging software, even though it’s reinventing the wheel, probably won’t run well, and will look like crap inevitably. We’ll see…

What’s in a name?

Among the first questions Blogger’s relatively painless setup utility asked was, “What do you want to name your blog?” Well, that poses an interesting question. What do I want to name it? If I were witty, I’d think of some wisecrack to put up as a title, but thus far I haven’t come up with anything more original than <geek>, which is utterly unoriginal. For some reason the lyrics to Eve 6’s “Inside Out” came to mind, specifically “SoCal is where my mind states.” Perhaps I would use Where my Mind States, but that didn’t quite appeal to me either. Casting about aimlessly in the depths of memory, my brain contemplated other lyrics, then decided to consider how lyrics are like poetry. My brain first made that link in Ms. VandeHei’s 7th grade writing class, when Jake LaSota and I interpreted the lyrics of “When You Believe”, featured in The Prince of Egypt. Jumping from that 7th grade connection to the more recent past, I lighted upon some of the most important words I, personally, have ever read:

Scratch through the diamond shelter of ambiguity, to discover calm within unity.
We have never truly been left behind.

To the author, who knows well who he is, I cannot express my gratitude sufficiently, for the verses, and for everything. For everyone else, suffice to say that those words are the source of my blog’s current title.

In other news, this post’s school archive content brought to you by:
   davfs [davfs.sourceforge.net]
   UW-Madison’s My WebSpace [mywebspace.wisc.edu]
   Gentoo linux [www.gentoo.org]