Happy Birthday Sarah!

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Stick Fetching Day at the River

For those of us who didn’t stay home and watch the super bowl, we found it to be a great day to take the dogs to the river.  We all had lots of fun!  Check out the slide show by clicking the photo below!

Tooth Number 6!

Anna just lost her 6th tooth!  This was the easiest one.  It just came right out when she pulled on it.

Here is Anna first thing this morning, showing us what the tooth fairy brought in exchange for the tooth.

Snow Day 2009

Recently we went to Nyack for our annual snow play day.

The Traveler

I found this great little book one day while at Starbucks.  It is a simple book that even my 6 y.o. daughter Anna could read.  It has a simple yet important message.  If you have the opportunity I’d recommend picking up a copy.  It’s a quick read, just a few minutes.

 

 

Simple and to the point, this story will wake you back up before you sleep through the best days of your life. Read it, pass it on to your children, and put a copy into the hands of your friends.

New Paint Job for Christmas

We decided to go for it on a spur of the moment decision.  Last weekend we asked our favorite painting contractor Josh Stonebrook (if your looking for a painter) to give us an estimate on painting the Living room, Kitchen, and Hallway.  The price was right and he started Monday morning.  I should have taken some photos of the place all masked off with the majority of the painting done when we got home from work.  The garage door was left open for ventilation and the ceiling fans were running to help air it out.  The only problem with that was Sunday the weather turned cold with a sudden drop in temperature.  So, it was a bit cold in the house when we got home.

Since the kitchen was all masked off we went out to dinner and Anna got to do her homework at Dos Coyotes.  After dinner we decided we had to have some heat and gingerly unwrapped the thermostat to turn on the heater.  When morning came we decided we had to go out to breakfast so we hit Starbucks before heading off to school and work.

Tonight, when we returned home all the masking was removed and the place looks pretty neat.  Just one more day and we should have everything back in place with a fresh new color scheme!

Hopefully all the paint is cured and the fumes are gone by the time we bring Nana to our house this Friday to stay with us thru Christmas!

Discovered a Friends Blog.

I was surprised to find that some of our friends have blogs, but what was more surprising was how thoughtful and insightful the post are.  Check out Foundational Thoughts for some interesting reading on good Christian views with explanations.

Harvest Time!

We just had our biggest harvest of Mandarins yet!  Our little 4 year old Matsuda Mandarin tree just gave us 127 delicious Mandarins!

Finally posted some belated photos to Flickr

Last August Anna and I had a few days off before 1st grade started.  So, we spend the week together going places and checking out neat sites.  Some how I forgot to post the photos to flickr so I just put them up there.

Grandpa, who was a flight navigator in Vietnam and a S.A.C. instructor for many years at Mather A.F.B., might find some of these interesting since one of our stops was the Sacramento Aerospace museum next to McClellan A.F.B.  Anna had fun climbing up into the planes and riding in the simulators.  Being a week day we had the place to ourselves!

We also spent a day at the State Fair, this photo was near the end of the day.  We were relaxing before the final show, then heading home.

and another day with friends at the Sacramento Train museum.  In this photo Anna and her friend Ruby are posing in front of a Western Pacific diesel engine.  Anna's great grandpa worked for the Southern Pacific for 40 years.

WPA Wireless Networking isn't Broken!

Despite what the most media sources have been saying, WPA certified wireless networking is not actually broken.  Rather than write-up a long complicated description of what was actually discovered, this has already been done (see grc.com's Security Now podcast #170 TKIP Hack).  I'll try to keep it short and simple.

First, as I noted on an old post on Wireless security, WEP (Wired Equivalent Protection) is totally broken so, you should NOT still be using this.  The WPA "crack / hack" discovery is simply a weakness in the protocol, TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) used by many people that are currently using the WPA certified security.  WPA was an early implementation of the 802.11i specification before it was finalized.  What you want to use to mitigate what is really a very minor weakness in WPA is WPA2.  WPA2 is the 802.11i specification in it's completed / finalized form.  Now once you switch to WPA2 you also want to use AES and NOT TKIP.

If your equipment doesn't support WPA2, Check and see if there is a newer firmware for your router(s) and access points that may support WPA2.  If your are stuck with WPA, check and see if your router supports QoS (Quality of Service) and make sure you have it disabled.  It is likely the if you have QoS enabled it is doing you no good anyway.  QoS is a key feature in the slight weakness of the WPA crack.  Another name for QoS on some wireless routers is WMM (WiFi Multi Media).  This is a fairly new Wi-Fi Alliance certification on some routers.  All this new acronym indicates is an interoperability certification using a subset of the 802.11e subspec.  So, again disable WMM if it is enabled.  Another way to mitigate this attack would be to reduce the re-keying time from the default of 3600 seconds (60 minutes) to less than 12 minutes, say 660 seconds (11 minutes).  Then the attacker runs out of time before being able to complete the attack on one packet.  Doing this also removes the possibility of a DoS (Denial of Service) attack that could be done by injecting packets with bad MIC (Message Integrity Code).

So, bottom line.  Use WPA2 with AES / CCMP (NOT TKIP or AES+TKIP) and use a long randomly generated security key.  My favorite site for generating very high quality, cryptographic-strength keys is GRC's Perfect Passwords page.  FYI I also use his Perfect Paper Passwords service for shorter strings I can use for passwords and Passcards.

The minor weakness discovered only allows the attacker to get a short packet of relatively known contents once every 12 minutes or once every 4-5 min with QoS/WMM and issue a reply attack with up to about 7 fake packets.  These short packets are probably DHCP or ARP packets.  They can't actually decrypt your packets and they don't have the time to fake a larger data packet since your router will likely re-key once an hour.  This re-keying causes the attacker to have to start over from scratch.