June 2013

Our friends Jennie and Ronald are making a trip along the East Coast, and yesterday they arrived in Washington, DC.

They came to see us in the morning and we had lunch together -- it was very nice to see them.

After a few minutes of shyness Nora enjoyed meeting them, and she was very happy with her gift, a big inflatable pink cow. Koe! Koe! Koe!

Djurre Boshuizen is born!

Our dear friends Joost and Ankie were blessed with a baby boy yesterday morning. Mother and child are doing fine and Elin is now big sister.

Well-written paper that outlines the Pleiades system which tries detect infected computers by looking at DNS traffic at the network-level. Pleiades combines a cluster of failed DNS lookups (NXDOMAIN results) with a cluster of nodes that tried to resolve failed DNS names. It filters out "well-known" domain names and is able to achieve high detection rates with very low false positive rates. Pretty cool.

It was funny that the system also detected (and got confused by) Chrome's "DNS hijacking detection" feature.

I read the paper as part of an online course I'm taking, Malicious Software and its Underground Economy: Two Sides to Every Story.

Nora is walking, as of today. We are very proud.

She was excited about her new 'baby carpet' and enjoyed walking on it and continued to hike throughout the living room.

In America a one-year old baby is called a "toddler", from the verb "to toddle". The Dutch translation for that verb is "waggelen" -- to walk unsteadily.

Today was a productive day. We worked all day on the house, unpacking and getting things ready, and the guest room is now ready to use and all the books there are unpacked.

Most of the previous weekends have been like this. It's a lot of work, moving into a house, but very rewarding.

Nora made her first steps this weekend! For a while now she was able to walk while holding our hands, but she started walking all by herself now, sometimes up to 8 steps.

In other news: we bought two gates to close off the kitchen and the stairs.