I am not always up to date with the latest security issues (for example, it took me over a month to hear about Heartbleed!), but I try to keep my system secure.

To my surprise, my wonderful hosting service told me they were on top of the latest Bourne-Again Shell (BASH) bugs and had already updated their version of BASH on the unix machine that serves up all this wonderful web content DAYS ago.

My initial reaction: Why was I just learning about this just now? Wait, wait, don’t tell me ... I’m not a security professional.

Now, I just spent quite a bit of time earlier today updating Mavericks OSX 10.9.5, but why was this BASH bug not addressed during this update?

Instead, I had to search for the fix. Apple users, if you are using the command line or the terminal, I’ll save you a little time and send you where you need to go!

I have managed to successfully host a Diaspora* pod (my pod can be found here). After working on the SSL certificates (non-self-signed, through startSSL, the pod is properly configured with secure http, so yay for that. On my pod, I plan to include the ability to use LaTeX in posts, but this may be awhile before I get this to work properly. Look forward to more soon!

Hello world!

I have been super busy this last week attending the Geometric Complexity Theory workshop at the Simons Institute, preparing for the following semester in China and several upcoming conferences, and general research.

Expect more thoughts regarding a wide range of topics in mathematics and the sciences soon!