Techie

For there record if you say "CAC Card" in my presence you will be "SOL Luck" talking again soon. If you are running Linux or Mac there is a good chance you haven’t been touching my CAC, otherwise known as Common Access Card. George Bush signed HSPD-12 way back in 2004 to mandate the usage of CAC and multifactor authentication on federal networks. The DoD giggled as it was already deploying limited installs at choice commands and was way ahead of the curve. The rest of the government and corporate entities are starting to roll-out the installs and a common theme I see is lack of heterogenous OS support. In this day and age your CIO/CTO/CISO must think beyond what the Microsoft sales lead tells them and think of the user base. Here is a big hint to save you from looking silly – You can’t say iOS/Android development is important to your divisions and then mandate they use Windows computers to comply with your SmartCard policy. I only mention that having sat in the room when the mobile development PM had to make his leadership aware they were basically shutting his group down. ...

I purchased Civ V for Mac the day it was released. LOVE…LOVE…LOVE Civilization. I had this issue after the 4GiB Download on 3 different machines and configurations that the music would play, but no graphics. Black nothingness taunted me for days. Aspyr was silent and worthless as usual and the forums sang with similar rage. Here is the fix for me on my Mac Mini and Air: Edit “Documents/Aspyr/Sid Meier’s Civilization 5/UserSettings.ini” ...

My twitter feed once again signals a Boeing acquisition. Cutting lots of fat internally while buying more companies doesn’t compute, but oh well. I decided to go back a few years to see just how many companies had been purchased. Newest-to-Oldest sort 2010 Summit CDM Technologies Narus Argon ST 2009 eXMeritus Alenia Vought Operations 2008 DRT Federated Software Group Tapestry Solutions Insitu ** **

Since a lot of my fellow nerds have mentioned they are looking at the stables page, I updated the computers as well as providing some insight into why each machine is important to me. Still missing a ton of systems, but most are there. http://geekyschmidt.com/the-stable

A question from a distinguished colleague of mine: Q: Some security group is claiming that locking apps down to a single cpu is more secure that multi-threaded apps. Is there any basis in fact that I don’t know of or is this as ridiculous as I think it is? – Distinguished Dude A: It is called Side Channel Attacks…thus far its only a theory that has no known in the wild exploit ...