2016

On July 15, 2016 the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) issued an External Intelligence Note regarding the recent smash hit augmented reality mobile game Pokémon GO. The Note’s classification was unclassified/for official use only with the intended audience being the law enforcement and security communities. The completely unclassified summary of the FBI External Intelligence Note states: The FBI’s Washington Field Office (WFO) assesses it is very likely a increased participation in the Pokémon GO augmented-reality smartphone application will result in an increase in law enforcement encounters and suspicious activity reports (SARs) in the National Capital Region (NCR) due to a high concentration of museums, art installations, historical markers, and monuments identified as target locations, or “PokéStops,” and players attempting to access restricted areas....

Taking ownership or “planting your flag” in an idea, work, or concept is often one of the best things someone can do. To sit in a room full of people and say, “This is mine. I will take care of it.” Makes everyone in the room know you are the point person committed to making it happen. The same holds true when discussing documentation, processes, and ideas for long-range planning....

A co-worker and I needed to remove all instances of a binary blob from one of our git repos a while back. This was a lot harder than I thought it should have been, in my opinion. However, distributed version control is not really designed to easily allow folks to delete every instance of a file. But, if you ever run into a case where you do need to expunge a file in git here is how we did it....

“Fear leads to anger… Anger leads to hate… Hate leads to suffering.” Jedi Master Yoda On Saturday, my wife Julie, son Max, and I attended church. This was a very special mass as it was the mass at which Max was being baptized. Julie’s family was present as were friends of ours. As a lot of my friends know, I’m not religious. My stance on religion is that I choose complete freedom over being beholden to humans interpreting what they believe to be the word of God....

On June 1, 2016, Microsoft released an update to it’s Remote Desktop client for Mac OS X via the Mac App Store. The update to version 8.0.32 broke some functionality for people. The most commonly reported error I have seen is “Connection reset to peer” before authentication. Sadly, unless you have a Time Machine backup to grab the old version from you are likely going to have to find an alternative....