Right now, I'm feeling enthused about the idea of writing some thingsin one of the interesting new languages and environments, such asGo or node.js. But here's where things collide with my problemswith learning languages ; if I'm going to writeany significant amount of code in these new languages, it has to dosomething real. And most of the real things that I have to do arenot personal projects but software that I would want to use in ourenvironment here.

Which

Recently I ran across someone asking the question 'why have a firewall?'As it turned out, he had several sorts of host-based firewall protection,but in thinking about the question I came up with four broad reasons thatfirewalls can be a good idea:

• because your services and servers suck. You're forced to run thingsthat were written by addled monkeys, in environments that eitherrequire random services of unknown and dubious security impactor just start them up every so often whenever they feel like it.