Mulititasking and distraction hurts IQ

Posted: 12 March 2012 | Author: | Filed under: productivity | Tags: , | Leave a comment

That’s interesting.

Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King’s College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day.
He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points — the equivalent to missing a whole night’s sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana. [Dr. Wilson did not originally make the comparison to marijuana. – eds.]
“This is a very real and widespread phenomenon,” Wilson said. “We have found that this obsession with looking at messages, if unchecked, will damage a worker’s performance by reducing their mental sharpness.
“Companies should encourage a more balanced and appropriate way of working.”
Wilson said the IQ drop was even more significant in the men who took part in the tests.

Drupal Security Team response to bogus 7.12 CSRF issues

Posted: 9 March 2012 | Author: | Filed under: drupal | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

“The Drupal Security team has concluded that this does not constitute a valid vulnerability. The attack depends on a ‘Man In the Middle’ attack or sniffing software, which is outside of Drupal and presents a much bigger problem.

The Drupal Security team provides an easy way to report issues by sending emails to security@drupal.org, and we will credit researchers with all issues they report in this manner. No formal report of this issue was filed directly with our team. We encourage all researchers to follow the practice of responsible disclosure, and report directly to our team to ensure both that we can provide public credit for authentic vulnerabilities, and keep our users as secure as possible.”

Well, there ya go.

Drupal very popular for observable “dot gov” .gov sites

Posted: 9 March 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Drupal has been steadily growing in popularity among live “dot gov” domains. According to one analysis, it powers nearly twice as many of those .gov domains as all other CMSs combined — though 93% of those run no detectable CMS. The analysis is currently being updated.

eth0 interface in VirtualBox (Backtrack 5 VM)

Posted: 5 March 2012 | Author: | Filed under: system administration | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments

After generating a new MAC address for a virtual NIC, I had two interfaces: the loopback interface (lo) and eth3. eth0 had disappeared, and eth3 wasn’t getting assigned an IP.

It turns out that udev on Debian assigns a new eth number for each new MAC address. Deleting the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules solved this problem.