So I wasn't sure what I would do with all this free time after retiring. Quickly I found plenty, including some which I hadn't done in 50 years (playing my clarinet)! I am using this page to document that, yes, there is life after retirement.
The music link above has some miscellaneous pieces I have worked on. As time goes by I will add to this.
This web site is hosted on one of my home computers. To insure I was doing this correctly I have spent some serious time learning network security. Consequently, my reading list is an odd combination of computer stuff, and history especially of past fascist regimes - motivated by our current political climate.
Reading List
This is a very readable survey of linux security. Lots of examples but also corny jokes. However, Tevault does not discuss an excellent intrusion detection system called snort (www.snort.org, but see below).
I finally finished the comprehensive history of the Third Reich by Richard Evans. A superb academic piece of work which is extensively sourced - no references to twitter tweets or Facebook posts. If I had been editor of this series, I would have asked him to put summaries at the end of each chapter due the density of material he covers. I have created a new wepage with a "book report" that compares some of the significant events in the rise of the Third Reich to our current politacl environment. View here: book report
A very comprehensive book with many examples and files you can download and work with. Also an excellent appendix which helps when you have forgotten which chapter covered "spans" or other trivia. I am now a big fan of grids which I used to format this webpage along with the webpage of my book "Evolution and Ecology of the Organism" (see Science Research link above).
The Modsecurity handbook is just that a reference manual, not light reading. Since it is old you also can't rely on it for the most update install instructions, but it is a comprehensive reference for this software which is one of the few open source (free) web application firewalls. Updates for rules governing the operation of Modsecurity are made available on git by the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP). The second book looks at SNORT3 which is an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). This software comes in a free and subscription version. Version 3.0 apparently employs parallel processing, since most servers have many CPU cores these days, and has rule sets that have been fine-tuned by machine learning from known threats (see publication #128 in "Science Research" for machine learning applications to experimental evolution).
