Morph3ous's Weblog

I am trying to learn SELinux. This link looks useful because it tries to simplify the system.

I will probably write about it some more later, but wanted to put this link up here.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SELinux/Understanding

There is additional analysis of the situation that I first mentioned in this post.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is of the opinion that the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice is worse than that of Bush. Here is an excerpt from the EFF’s take on the situation:

Previously, the Bush Administration has argued that the U.S. possesses “sovereign immunity” from suit for conducting electronic surveillance that violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). However, FISA is only one of several laws that restrict the government’s ability to wiretap. The Obama Administration goes two steps further than Bush did, and claims that the US PATRIOT Act also renders the U.S. immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act. Essentially, the Obama Adminstration has claimed that the government cannot be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statutes.

Again, the gulf between Candidate Obama and President Obama is striking. As a candidate, Obama ran promising a new era of government transparency and accountability, an end to the Bush DOJ’s radical theories of executive power, and reform of the PATRIOT Act. But, this week, Obama’s own Department Of Justice has argued that, under the PATRIOT Act, the government shall be entirely unaccountable for surveilling Americans in violation of its own laws.

Please read this analysis on Salon. I hope that the administration responds and clarifies some of their language if the analysis does not reflect their intent.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/06/obama/index.html:

Every defining attribute of Bush’s radical secrecy powers — every one — is found here, and in exactly the same tone and with the exact same mindset. Thus: how the U.S. government eavesdrops on its citizens is too secret to allow a court to determine its legality. We must just blindly accept the claims from the President’s DNI that we will all be endangered if we allow courts to determine the legality of the President’s actions. Even confirming or denying already publicly known facts — such as the involvement of the telecoms and the massive data-mining programs — would be too damaging to national security. Why? Because the DNI says so. It is not merely specific documents, but entire lawsuits, that must be dismissed in advance as soon as the privilege is asserted because “its very subject matter would inherently risk or require the disclosure of state secrets.”

In my experience, the most productive people plan ahead. It is impossible to plan everything, but there is a certain degree of planning that is needed. One must first understand what they are getting themselves into.

These are the strategies that have helped me. I am absolutely sure that I have read these somewhere else and they are not my own creation. (I would post a link if I remembered.)

• Ensure that you clearly understand the goal of the project. Seek clarification if needed.
• Break the project into its major parts.
• Assign an importance level to each part.
• Roughly estimate the skills needed for each part and the time that it will take. Overestimate by 15-20%. No one is 100% efficient.

If this sounds an awful lot like common sense, that’s because it is. The problem is that it is easy to forget common sense when you are harried because of pressure from your superiors, internal pressure, or realize that your deadlines may be impossible to meet.

In analyzing what needs to be done, you may come to the realization that there is no way that you are going to be able to meet the deadline. This is something that needs to be determined at the beginning rather than the end of the project. It may be necessary to re-define the scope, get more time allotted, or temper the expectation of your superiors.

Regardless of the situation that you find yourself in, planning is vital. I have learned this the hard way. Poorly planned projects lead to lots of unnecessary “after-hours” work. There is nothing wrong with working hard and putting in extra time. The problem is when this is caused by poor planning whether it was your poor planning or that of another.