Monday, August 25, 2003

Peeka-paaka Gets Her First Tooth Google Search It My Mom, who is probably the only one interested in the My Family Life category anyway, has been mumbling about the lack of posts to this category especially in recent months.  So Mom, this one if for you. Benjamin has taken to calling Hanna by the affectionate nickname, "Peeka-paaka."  The origination of this is entirely unknown but my best guess is that it derives from the morphing of peek-a-boo which we often say to Hanna to get her to smile.  Curiously I was also called "Peeka-paaka" yesterday so the exact meaning of the endearing term is still subject to change. In other interesting family news Peeka-paaka's first tooth appeared two days ago.  We have been expecting this for months and many a time we thought it was eminent due to fussiness and such.  However, it appeared without ceremony during a time when Hanna has been sleeping through the nights quite peacefully.  (Although there is some disagreement on the "through the nights" as she is waking up before her assigned wake time of 7 AM.) Benjamin is enjoying the computer I set up for him.  We installed Reader Rabbit 1 which is geared for 3-5 year olds.  After briefly watching him play the first time, both Elisabeth and I dismissed it as still too old for him.  However, by the second day he was consistently matching letters.  Wow!  The big question for us is how to appropriately limit his computer time.  Since Dad is writing again he doesn't exactly model a balanced computer usage at the moment. 8:36:19 PM   []    comment []

Security Alert when Reporting a Security Vulnerability Google Search It If you ever wanted to report a security vulnerability to Microsoft you would probably go to the Report a Security Vulnerability page.  What is quite surprising about this page, however, is that it pops up a Security Alert notifying you that the name on the Certificate used for the SSL encryption on the page does not match the site.  Furthermore, the certificate is issued to a248.e.akamai.net, which looks rather suspicious to a non Certificate aware person like myself.   I found this rather bizarre as one would think one place Microsoft would not want to discourage visitors if from reporting security vulnerabilities.  I reported the issue to Microsoft and got back two personal responses, the second one stated, "We would like to inform you that we are aware of this and we are investigating this issue. Thanks again!"  It is nice to know that my email did not go into the email void and this will encourage me to report such issues in the future.  I find it curios, however, that they didn't also fix the issue immediately. 8:23:07 PM   []    comment []

CD-R Not a Reliable Medium Google Search It Forgive me for my innocence on this one but this article, which I came across on Slashdot, bothers me a lot.  I has always been under the assumption that once I copied my data to CD-R I was set...  It was reliably backed up.  Unfortunately, this article seems to indicate otherwise.  It points out that in fact CD-Rs are not a reliable medium the only question is whether they are unreliable in a matter of months or years.  Hmmm.... So what medium is reliable for the family photo album? 5:33:44 AM   []    comment []

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