Tuesday, 30 April, 2002. 09:13:53 PMI just got a phone call from someone who identified himself as "Sean Chris
Gray" from Consumer Research Service. The phone number he gave was
1-800-245-7304. I'm going to pursue this one. First thing: tomorrow I'm going
to call the phone company and see if they can tell me who called. I think
the information we have on them is bogus.
Friday, 26 April, 2002. 01:59:17 PMWatching my logs is very entertaining. Some kiddie on a cable modem in Kansas
City just tried to bounce an email to mullet@entercom.com. Turns out that
entercom.com is a company that runs radio stations. The e-mail address is
for a DJ at 98.9 "The Rock" that is collecting photographs of people with
mullets from their listeners. The photo page is
here. Of course, my e-mail
setup is quite secure, and all relays are denied, so the mail didn't get
through. The moron who tried to relay was "Ollthkid" at IP 24.94.180.123.
It would be fun to accept relayed mail but not forward it. I might have
gotten to see what Ollthkid was trying to send to the station.
Friday, 26 April, 2002. 12:20:28 PMHere's an interesting brainstorming aid:
Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies. Successful strategies for thinking tend to be
forgotten when there is time pressure. Brian and his friend Peter
Schmidt invented the Oblique Strategies cards as a way of reminding themselves
of some successful patterns of thinking.
Thursday, 25 April, 2002. 06:42:25 PMThe Python upgrade broke my website scripts. Longs now print with a trailing
'L'.
Sunday, 21 April, 2002. 03:55:37 AMI'm amazed at the stupidity of moderators on Slashdot. Of course, some of
it is due to the ambiguity introduced by Cmdr. Taco when he invented the
names of the moderations. For example, "flamebait" should be just flames,
otherwise there's really no point in having a separate "troll" moderation.
A post that I just made was definitely silly, probably idiotic, and definitely
overrated. The moderator marked it flamebait, which was just wrong. There
wasn't a single insult in that comment.
Saturday, 20 April, 2002. 06:43:12 PMI received my first e-mail on my new server. I also checked it for relays - it
passed the tests, no relays.
Saturday, 20 April, 2002. 04:06:45 AMLooking at logs is really very entertaining. Someone just tried a hack that
would probably be more effective against Windows machines.
Saturday, 20 April, 2002. 03:18:36 AMWOW, that was fast. I just got a spider on my web pages from 24.24.17.122, a
cable modem at roadrunner. The robot was loading pages far too fast for a
human, and since I don't know of any legitimate reason for rr.com to spider
my pages, it's probably a spammer looking for addresses. Heh.
Saturday, 20 April, 2002. 03:06:47 AMThe new server is configured and the web records for my domain have been
pointed at it. As soon as the DNS records propagate then my server will
be online.
Saturday, 20 April, 2002. 12:30:55 AMMy DirectTV DSL line is up and running. There was absolutely no problems with
the installation. I've got a Linksys firewall appliance for network security,
so I'm not worried about script kiddies and hax0rs.
Friday, 19 April, 2002. 02:37:48 PMMy DSL modem has been delivered, according to the Airborne Express website.
I can't wait to get home to try it out. Finally, I will have a real host with
a real Internet connection (static IP). Tonight, I will be moving my entire
website over to the new webserver I set up.
Last night, boron was taken down for the last time, and oxygen was put up in
its place. Boron was a Pentium 133, which was plenty fast for e-mail, web,
file, and print services, but since I had a spare Celeron laying around, I
decided that boron should be retired in favor of the newer hardware.
The website should go online tonight, after I finish configuring oxygen. I
will hold off on the e-mail server until later this weekend, because I want
to do some relay checks. I want to be certain that my setup is not an open
relay. I don't want to give any spammers a haven for their scams.
Thursday, 18 April, 2002. 08:00:05 PMThe Exim configuration to send all mail to a domain to a certain account
requires a very simple setup. First, the aliasfile driver needs to have a
search type of "lsearch*@". That tells it that a default name in front of the @
in the address will be found in the /etc/aliases file. The other thing required
is a line at the end of /etc/aliases that matches on the "*" account name.
Mine reads exactly
*: pdrap
Thursday, 18 April, 2002. 07:56:21 PMMutt needs some configuration to use it with my planned e-mail scheme. In
a nutshell, all mails to anything at pdrap.org come to me at my real account.
I have some mailing lists send mail to me through an address such as
pdrap-example-maillist@pdrap.org. When I reply to the list, the mail needs
to appear to come from the same address it was sent to, not from my real
account on the machine. Mutt uses two commands to make this happen. First,
the .muttrc needs to have a "set reverse_name=yes" line in it. Second,
the "set alternates" line needs to have a regular expression that matches
anything I might send from. In this case, it's any address at all from the
pdrap.org domain, or in regexp, ".*@pdrap.org".
Thursday, 18 April, 2002. 01:11:59 PMMy DSL modem is in Wilmington Ohio right now. It was shipped from California.
Seems like a roundabout way to go. It's probably going to wind up in Texas
later today, and at my house sometime tomorrow.
Wednesday, 17 April, 2002. 06:34:55 PMJust got an e-mail from DirectTV. My DSL modem has been shipped, and should
arrive on Friday. They also sent me the account information, including my
new IP address. I am going to be 65.188.39.0
Wednesday, 17 April, 2002. 01:06:29 PMOur wonderful President made an excellent speech the other day, and I thought
it was important enough to put
a link to the actual text on my web page.
Monday, 15 April, 2002. 01:26:02 PMAfter trying out Postfix on my home systems, I've decided to not use it when
I set up my own mailserver. The reason is that I've been reading documentation
for days now, and I can't get the damn thing to send a single e-mail. I'm
sure it's something very simple, but it doesn't work for me. I'm going back
to Exim because the system works very well, and I didn't find it difficult
to set up at all.
Monday, 15 April, 2002. 01:58:32 AMI had some trouble with my NFS connection between helium and boron. The
performance was very slow. Carbon was able to connect normally. The problem
turned out to be a misconfigured iptables setup on helium that was intefering
with UDP packets. I turned that firewall off, and everything is working well
now. I won't need an iptables firewall in the future, because my Linksys
router is going to go between the DSL modem and the local network once the
DSL line is installed.
Sunday, 14 April, 2002. 11:23:08 PMA hacker coming from a computer in China tried to ssh to my computer about 10
minutes ago. Why would someone try that?
Sunday, 14 April, 2002. 03:12:46 PMSomeone who shall remain nameless (but it definitely wasn't me) screwed up the
ticket for Alex's return from her conference in New Orleans. The ticket was
booked to return on Monday, not Sunday, and Alex didn't check the itinerary.
Right now she's sitting in the airport on standby.
Sunday, 14 April, 2002. 01:19:27 AMUh oh. A spammer just sent me a mail, and it was addressed to
slashdot-1@pdrap.org. What to do? Hmmm....let me think a second..... AHA! I've
got it. slashdot-1@pdrap.org is now a DEAD ADDRESS. Mail sent there bounces.
Time to roll out the new address slashdot-2@pdrap.org. I can play this stupid
game forever. I have unlimited positive integers to choose from. There aren't
enough electrons in the universe that spammers can use to send me their shite
to overcome my strategy.
Thursday, 11 April, 2002. 02:24:12 PMCharles Buck read my homepage and he says that I'm too optimistic. To prove him
wrong, let me say that the world is going to hell. Our economy is based on an
unhealthy addiction to oil. We are all wage slaves. None of our ideas are
original; every last one of our thoughts has been given to us by corporate
marketing departments. Freedom is an illusion. Ignorance is strength.
On the bright side, John Ashcroft is still an idiot.
Wednesday, 10 April, 2002. 11:34:55 PMAlex is going to New Orleans for a conference Thursday to Sunday so I'm going
to be batching for a couple days. I know exactly what to do to have a good
time too: saturday night is a big star party. I've been out of town for a long
time, so I've missed all the star parties this year. The weather looks good,
so I'll be there.
Tuesday, 09 April, 2002. 12:15:46 PMMy computer upgrade is complete. I got the Woody (testing) distribution of
Debian downloaded and installed last night. It was 120 megs downloaded over
a modem. My DSL line isn't quite here yet. The X server had an nv driver in
it that worked perfectly the first time. One thing though, the xf86setup
program is missing from the new versions of XFree86. In it's place is a
configuration program called dexter, I think. It can be invoked by a 'dpkg
--configure xserver-xfree86' command. So, my entire upgrade is working, and
all my software is working in both operating systems. I didn't even cut myself
on the case.
Monday, 08 April, 2002. 05:41:54 PMI finally got my computer hardware upgraded. I had to get a new processor,
motherboard, and video card. I got rid of my old video card, Monster II video
accelerator, sound card, and network card. My new motherboard is an Intel
815 based board, with built in sound, network, and video. I'm using the
built-in sound and network, but not the video. For that I bought an
Nvidia GeForce 2 MX400 card with 64 megs of RAM. I'm doing a full upgrade
to Debian Woody (testing) today, so that I can have a newer X server. It's not
a big deal, because Woody is expected to be declared stable on May 1st
anyway. This new computer system is much faster than my old one, and should
last for another 3 or 4 years.
Monday, 08 April, 2002. 05:41:10 PMWe're going to take our dogs to the Mighty Texas Dog Walk. There should be a
few thousand dogs and people there.
Saturday, 06 April, 2002. 03:28:27 PMDarwin was just crying because he didn't have his collar on. It was on the
table where he could see it.
Friday, 05 April, 2002. 02:26:41 PMCars are going to have 42 volt electrical systems in the future. The reason for
that is the growing demands on the electrical systems by electric components.
Wiring harnesses in high end cars can have over 2000 meters of wire in them,
up from 75 meters typical in the 1950's. Power demands have grown by 100
watts a year for the past 5 year, and are currently at about 2000 watts. In
1970, that figure was only 500 watts. In 10 years, cars will use 10000 watts.
For a 14 volt electrical system, that translates into a total current drain
of 714 amps. Because of Ohm's law, increasing the voltage will decrease the
current, allowing smaller and cheaper wires to be used. There's still some
details to be managed. For example, will there be a single 42 volt alternator
and 42 volt battery, or will there be dual alternators at 12 and 36 volts.
What about dual batteries? There will also be many alternative fuel vehicles,
and some of those will be electric, probably requiring a separate electrical
system.
Friday, 05 April, 2002. 01:44:58 PMLinux File Permissions. Including the sticky bit.
Friday, 05 April, 2002. 12:57:07 PMThe latest Visual Age for C++ for AIX compiler version is 5.0.2.4. IBM has
a completely disorganized way of patching their compiler. A better system
is definitely needed.
Friday, 05 April, 2002. 10:10:20 AMBush is sending Colin Powell to the Middle East. All I can say is that it's
about fucking time. Bush has been letting the children fight for too long. If
you let those people run things themselves, this is how they do it. Any
solution to the problems over there will necessarily involve the United States
because the hostile parties need a babysitter, and nobody else is willing to
do it.
Friday, 05 April, 2002. 12:16:26 AMLast night I bought a Celeron 1100 processor that I tried to get working in
my IWill BD-100 (BX chipset) board with a slotket. Didn't work. Everything that
I read on the Internet was ambiguous about it, so I decided to give it a try.
Officially, I can tell you what Tom's Hardware, Ace's, and AnandTech could
not tell me: there's a definite speed limit to what a slotket and a BX chipset
can do. So, tonight I bought an Intel Desktop Board D815EGEW. It's working
now, a lot faster than my old Celery 300A. This system should be adequate for
at least the next 3 years.
Thursday, 04 April, 2002. 03:08:41 PMSetting up an MTA (Mail Transfer Agent, or Message Transfer Agent) is a big
problem and responsibility. I've decided to use Postfix based on the security
and ease-of-use goals for that project. Ease-of-use is relative though, and
while setting up Postfix is not difficult for a plain-vanilla configuration,
it can be tricky to learn all the jargon well enough to get it to do something
strange.
As an example, my envisioned setup for the new pdrap.org domain will have
everything sent to pdrap.org forwarded to a single account on the domain
where I can read it. I will also need a way to turn off addresses that get
too much spam, bouncing everything that comes in back to the sender. I
will also need a way to find the address the mail was sent to, and if I
reply to a mail the response needs to appear as if it came from the address
on the mail and not the account it's being sent from.
It's a strange setup, certainly, and it would be a real problem if there were
multiple users of my machine and domain. pdrap.org is meant just for me, and
nobody else will have any addresses on it, so I can do strange things that
will foil spammers worst intentions.
Wednesday, 03 April, 2002. 06:51:07 PMI just heard from Keith Fail, who I used to work with at IBM. Our project
manager Melynda Caudle is leaving IBM, and Keith is trying to set up a
luncheon with some of the many many people who passed through the IBM
Partner Commerce Servers project.
Wednesday, 03 April, 2002. 01:01:30 PMSlashdot has an article about using the pen as an input device. What a horrible
idea. For some reason there are still people trying to make a really good
input device using a pen. I would never use it because I can type much
faster than I write. Writing hurts my hand too. And it's horribly messy to
look at when it's done. Nothing is more discouraging than having to read a
handwritten document. It looks so terrible, with uneven letters and mistakes,
I mean, why even try if that's the best that can be done? Laser printed text
typed with a real keyboard is a much better way to go.
Tuesday, 02 April, 2002. 10:10:59 PMI've added new photos of the house, and a couple photos of the dogs eating
dinner.
Tuesday, 02 April, 2002. 06:36:03 PMWhen I was in New York, Chris and I were talking about digital cameras. I
told him that I wanted a Mavica, and he told me that he would loan his to me.
Today, he brought it into the office, so tonight I'm going to take a lot of
pictures of my dogs and the remodelling we've done on the house and put them
on the website.
Tuesday, 02 April, 2002. 04:53:20 PMI read a bootleg script for the next Star Trek movie. The story was
interesting, but there's some problems that I can see. Wil Wheaton (the actor
who plays Wesley Crusher) is going to be in the movie, and he said that the
bootleg script is NOT the one that was shot. I certainly hope that statement
is accurate. The script introduces a new race called the Remans, a sister
race to the Romulans. The problem there is that the Romulans are supposed to
be an offshoot of Vulcans, and if the Remans are also related, then why weren't
they mentioned before?
Data also gets destroyed in the end of the movie, for
a really silly reason - the transporters are out, and he has to give his
emergency transport device to the Captain. Seems like a very bogus way
to go.
The bad guy in the script is a clone of Captain Picard, and it's hardly
believable. Some of the banter revolves around the supposition that clones
would act and think the same way, which is completely untrue. Clones are
nothing more than a special instance of identical twins, and to think that
identical twins follow a parallel course in their life just because they have
identical DNA is ridiculous.
The Remans themselves are described in the script as looking something like
vampires, because their planet has a side that always faces the sun, and one
side that always faces away. Everyone lives on the dark side, because it's too
hot on the light side. One of the characters describes this and says that it's
just like the planet Mercury. The problem is that Mercury is not tidally
locked to the Sun, but is in a 3 to 2 spin orbit coupling to the Sun. That
information has been known since 1965 when ground based radar determined the
rotation of Mercury. Certainly the Federation could take a starship out there
to double check that result.
The most annoying part of the script is that it tries to be funny in an
unnatural way. Some of the gags are just as bad as when Scotty knocked himself
out on a beam in STV. Star Trek can be very funny if it's done right, such as
"The Trouble with Tribbles" or even the Voyager episode where Neelix gets
laid by the Klingon woman and destroys Tuvok's quarters in the process.
This basic problem with the script is that it tries way too hard, and uses
too many cliches in the process. Tense battles between arch-enemies are fine,
but when the rivalry is contrived as is the relationship between Picard and
his evil clone, it just doesn't work. Sacrificing a major character worked well
in STTWOK, but when it is done for trivial reasons it's just stupid. There
have been crewmembers stranded by the transporter before, but never has that
sort of problem required the death of a major character to solve. The politics
of the Romulans and Remans are not well described. Why are the Remans suddenly
in control of the Romulan leadership? The script tries to pass it off on a
mass assasination, but what about emergency shadow governments? The Romulans
don't seem to have planned for that.
Monday, 01 April, 2002. 12:34:17 PMI just found out that the Lockheed project is being done from Austin, which
is good news. I've been making mental lists of the things that I want to do
around the house, and now I'll have a chance to get some of them done. Tonight
I need to buy a new battery for my car. The last time I drove it was a month
ago, and the battery was weak then. I thought that it would be dead after a
month, and I was right. The battery is about 5 years old now, and it went
through at least 2 summers in Phoenix.