Wednesday, 01 October, 2003. 12:55:36 AMI love learning about new subcultures, such as a
subculture of Japanese who dress up like Victorian babydolls.
Tuesday, 30 September, 2003. 12:44:58 PMAs of now, I am an employee of IBM Corporation. The company I worked for,
Sector7, was acquired. My job is going to be the same for now. Because IBM
is heavily into Linux and Free Software technologies, I am quite happy
about this.
Here is the press release:
------------------------
IBM Acquires Application Porting Services Business From Privately Held Sector7
ARMONK, N.Y. -- Sept. 30, 2003 -- IBM today announced it has acquired the application porting services business from Sector7, a privately held software applications services company that specialized in helping customers to lower IT costs by migrating software applications to operate on IBM platforms using the Linux and AIX operating systems. Financial terms were not disclosed.
IBM has acquired a majority of Sector7's assets and intellectual property. It will also hire Sector7 employees to work in IBM Global Services on projects that include On Demand services offerings to reduce the time and cost associated with migrating to Linux, and the related consolidation of servers and databases.
IBM has worked extensively over the past several years with Sector7, which was established in the U.K. in 1985 and moved to Austin, Texas in 1989.
IBM Global Services is the world's largest information technology services and consulting provider, generating over $36 billion in 2002. Approximately 180,000 professionals serve customers in more than 160 countries, providing the entire spectrum of customers' e-business needs -- from the business transformation and industry expertise of IBM Business Consulting Services to hosting, infrastructure, technology design and training services. IBM Global Services delivers integrated, flexible and resilient processes -- across companies and through business partners -- that enable customers to maximize the opportunities of an on-demand business environment.
Thursday, 25 September, 2003. 12:06:25 PMYahoo screwed up the Debian packages on their new release of version 1.04 of
the Yahoo Messenger program. Apparently, they built it on a system that
is not running Woody, so it depends on GLIBC 2.3 being present. Debian
Woody has GLIBC 2.2, so the Debian package is broken. A workaround is to
install 'alien' and use that to convert the Red Hat 7.0 package to .deb format,
and use dpkg to install that instead.
Thursday, 25 September, 2003. 12:41:07 AMI have to reset my spam filter and retrain it, because it's getting too many
false positives. This is because I have a large database of all the spams
that I've received this year, but no database of good mails.
Tuesday, 23 September, 2003. 02:47:20 AMI'm tempted to start saving all the
"crazy cat lady" stories that I see.
Tuesday, 23 September, 2003. 01:11:57 AMThe webiest.com mystery is solved. Sean at webiest.com responded to my mail.:
Yes, it was an attempt to get higher page rank. Google now counts those
pages as less rank.
-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Draper [mailto:pdrap@pdrap.org]
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 6:01 PM
To: info@webiest.com
Subject: Question about your site
Hi, I noticed your site in my referral logs, often with fairly obscene
types of URLs. Do you know anything about that?
It looks like your site is a massive web-crawler trap. Is that your
intent?
Just curious,
Monday, 22 September, 2003. 12:30:45 PMI registered my phone number in the national Do Not Call database a couple
months ago. The database goes into effect on October 1st, so I checked my
registration today. Somehow, they lost it, so it's going to be three months
before my number gets on the list.
Monday, 22 September, 2003. 12:06:06 AMSun's Jonathon Schwartz in eWeek:
"Also, let me really clear about our Linux strategy. We don't have one. We don't at all. We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period. If you want to buy it, we will sell it to you, but we believe that Solaris is a better alternative, that is safer, more robust, higher quality and dramatically less expensive in purchase price. How much is the nearest competitor's cheapest enterprise offering? And it doesn't come with a portal server, application server, Web server messaging, calendaring, clustering, high availability services and directory services provisioning. Give me a break. Ours is $100 an employee. How much is theirs? Bring it on. We will also indemnify you for Solaris, and if IBM says you don't need it, then why do they have so many lawyers suing people over patent and copy violations."
I guess this means that Sun is now a target of the jihad.
Saturday, 20 September, 2003. 09:15:18 PMThe Swen virus seems to have peaked yesterday. Because I updated my spam
filter, I expected to see some inaccuracy in my spam counts. It turned
out that the filter worked just fine, and the spike in the spams that I've
received is due to the classification of the hundreds of copies of the Swen
virus that I've received.
Friday, 19 September, 2003. 09:50:31 AMThe amount of spam that I am receiving has jumped because of all the copies
of the new "Swen" virus going around. More than half the spam I receive now
is a Swen virus. There are over 760,000 machines now infected with that
virus.
Friday, 19 September, 2003. 06:19:32 AM
It was recently mentioned that the Presidential Prayer Team
is currently urging us to: "Pray for the President as he
seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of
marriage. Pray that it will be according to Biblical
principles. With many forces insisting on variant
definitions of marriage, pray that God's Word and
His standards will be honored by our government."
I'm sure any good religious person believes prayer should be
balanced by action. So here, in support of the Prayer Team's
admirable goals, is a proposed Constitutional Amendment
codifying marriage entirely on biblical principles:
A.) Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union
between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28;
II Sam 3:2-5.) Marriage shall not impede a man's right
to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives.
(II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)
B.) A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife
is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be
executed. (Deut 22:13-21) Marriage of a believer and a
non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9;
Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30)
C.) Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution
nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or
federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce.
(Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)
D.) If a married man dies without children, his brother shall
marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's
widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall
pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a
manner to be determined by law. (Gen. 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)
Thursday, 18 September, 2003. 03:48:20 PMI've updated my spamprobe filter to version 0.9e, so the spamcounts might
be artifically high for the next day.
Thursday, 18 September, 2003. 03:06:36 PMHere's a sample web log entry regarding webiest.com:
80.160.73.193 - - [01/Sep/2003:07:50:45 -0600] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 0 "http://www.webiest.com/werds/stopzilla%203%200%20serial/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
The address 80.160.73.193 resolves to a computer in Denmark. I have other
entries that resolve to other computers. The user agents also change, but all
requests made are for the robots.txt file.
The mystery deepens.
Thursday, 18 September, 2003. 03:01:56 PMWebiest.com has a phone number: 646-319-7716. I may call it if I don't get
a response from my e-mail. They also have a second e-mail address: info@webiest.com
Thursday, 18 September, 2003. 02:56:52 PMThe scope of the webiest problem is large. A google search on "blasterball-2-crack" returns 11,500 results. That particular search is a tame one, but there
seems to be a theme: child porn, or software piracy. If you go to the
webiest.com website, there seems to be a link to an anti child pornography
group. Whatever the hell it is, I want to know what it's doing in so many
referral logs all over the Internet.
Thursday, 18 September, 2003. 02:43:19 PMThere's a website http://www.webiest.com that seems to be spamming my
referrer logs with obscene URLs. The site appears to be a huge webcrawler
trap, and it accepts any URL with a certain format, returning a huge page
full of additional links.
The problem is that someone or some robot is loading the webiest.com page
with a certain set of obscene words, and then immediately loading my web page,
thus filling my referrer logs with various indecent links. I fired off
an e-mail to the address webiest@webiest.com, so we'll see what the reponse
is. What I find astonishing is that though these links have been appearing
in my logs for some months now, there's not a single reference to the
situation anywhere on Google, either on the web, or in Usenet (exept for
others' referral logs that get indexed).
Tuesday, 16 September, 2003. 10:52:53 PMThis is some of the
coolest music that I've heard in a long time.
Tuesday, 16 September, 2003. 10:37:34 PMWithin a single day, a fix for Verisign's broken DNS has been made available
at
http://www.imperialviolet.org/dnsfix.html
Tuesday, 16 September, 2003. 02:07:58 AMThe memory on the webserver (oxygen) was upgraded from 64M to 256M so
that Mondo Archive can be run. The 64M from oxygen was moved to helium to
bring it to 320M.
Monday, 15 September, 2003. 11:19:28 PMVerisign has recklessly added a wildcard A record so that all nonexistent
domains resolve to 64.94.110.11. I predict that these assholes are going
to be roasted alive. At the very least, it's going to cause millions of
people all around the world a lot of headaches. They've even got a mail
server running on port 25, which means that the whole secondary MTA
mechanism is going to fail. And my basic spam defense of checking to see
if a domain exists before I accept a mail will fail. I'm going to start
seeing a rise in the amount of spam that my mail server accepts. Bastards.
Idiots.
I just sent them an e-mail. Here's a copy
From: Patrick Draper
To: authenticode-support@verisign.com, annel-partners@verisign.com,
clientpki@verisign.com, consultingsolutions@verisign.com,
dbms-support@verisign.com, dcpolicy@verisign.com,
digitalbranding@verisign.com, dnssales@verisign.com,
enterprise-pkisupport@verisign.com, enterprise-sslsupport@verisign.com,
info@verisign-grs.com, internetsales@verisign.com, IR@verisign.com,
jobs@verisign.com, mss@verisign.com, objectsigning-support@verisign.com,
paymentsales@verisign.com, practices@verisign.com,
premiersupport@networksolutions.com, press@verisign.com,
privacy@networksolutions.com, renewal@verisign.com,
support@verisign.com, verisales@verisign.com, vps-support@verisign.com,
vts-csrgroup@verisign.com, vts-mktginfo@verisign.com, webhelp@verisign.com,
websitesales@verisign.com, websitesupport@verisign.com, billing@verisign.com
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Fix the Internet, you broke it!
Reply-To:
Stop your silly games with the wildcard A records.
Love,
Patrick
--
Patrick Draper | Don't |sig4433@pdrap.org
Austin, Texas | Fear |Father Order runs at a
http://www.pdrap.org | The |good pace, but old Mother
Be Microsoft Free - Use Linux |Penguin |Chaos is winning the race.
Sunday, 14 September, 2003. 12:21:08 AMOK, after some more testing with the new CD-RW, and a new pack of media,
it looks like the old Sony is still working, but it is the media that
is bad.
Sunday, 14 September, 2003. 12:17:55 AMProgrammer's day - 256th day of the year celebrated mostly by computer programmers (reason: 256 = 2 to the power of 8 = the number of values representable in a byte of data). Traditions of drinking, behaving silly, coding silly programs, mini computer games, playing with old computers, etc... Usually on September 13th, on leap years, September 12th. see also: Pi Day
So, happy Programmer's Day!
Saturday, 13 September, 2003. 10:31:24 PMI've had very bad luck with CD burners. My first one burned about 20 CDs
before it became misaligned somehow. The CDs it burned could not be read
on any other drive. My second burner was a Sony, and it lasted for about
60 CDs before it started burning frisbees. So, I'm never going to buy
another expensive CD burner. If they aren't going to last long enough to use
a single pack of blanks, I'm getting cheap ones and will treat them as
disposable.
Friday, 12 September, 2003. 12:10:39 PMJohnny Cash is dead, which is too bad. I thought that his last record
"American IV" was really good.
Thursday, 11 September, 2003. 01:17:46 AMEdward Teller died on Tuesday. He was controversial, and I'll leave it
at that. What I think is interesting is that his
obituary in the NY Times was written by WALTER SULLIVAN, who died in 1996.
Wednesday, 10 September, 2003. 12:23:00 PMGeorge W. Bush is now known as
Old Whistle Ass.
Wednesday, 10 September, 2003. 02:10:58 AMCowsay is now available in the links on the left side of the page.
Tuesday, 09 September, 2003. 01:17:35 PMThere's a photo of Alex at 26 weeks on the photo section for August 2003.
Tuesday, 09 September, 2003. 11:38:31 AMSlashdot headline: "Berkeley Breathed is creating a new Sunday comic strip, according to the Washington Post. The half-page comic strip will feature Opus the penguin from Breathed's Bloom County and Outland series, and will begin Nov. 23."
Monday, 08 September, 2003. 08:57:28 PMI've added a report of all the URL's that I have received in spams for the
last month. It's reporting duplicates right now, but I'll eliminate those
in the next couple of days.
Monday, 08 September, 2003. 05:48:56 PMSome GOP Bumper Sticker ideas for 2004:
Bush/Cheney '04: Four More Wars!
Bush/Cheney '04: Assimilate. Resistance is Futile.
Bush/Cheney '04: Apocalypse Now!
BU__SH__!
Bush/Cheney '04: Because the truth just isn't good enough
Bush/Cheney '04: Compassionate Colonialism
Bush/Cheney '04: Deja-voodoo all over again!
Bush/Cheney '04: Get used to it!
Bush/Cheney '04: In your heart, you know they're technically correct.
Bush/Cheney '04: Leave no billionaire behind
Bush/Cheney '04: Less CIA -- More CYA
Bush/Cheney '04: Lies and videotape but no sex!
Bush/Cheney '04: Making the world a better place, one country at a time.
Bush/Cheney '04: Or else.
Bush/Cheney '04: Over a billion Whoppers served.
Bush/Cheney '04: Putting the "con" in conservatism
Bush/Cheney '04: Thanks for not paying attention
Bush/Cheney '04: The economy's stupid!
Bush/Cheney '04: The last vote you'll ever have to cast.
Bush/Cheney '04: This time, elect us!
Bush/Cheney '04: We're Gooder!
Bush/Cheney: Asses of Evil
Don't think. Vote Bush!
George W. Bush: A brainwave away from the presidency
George W. Bush: It takes a village idiot
George W. Bush: Leadership without a doubt
George W. Bush: The buck stops Over There
God Save the King!
Let them eat yellowcake! Vote Bush!
Peace & Prosperity Suck -- Big-Time
Vote Bush in '04: "I Has Incumbentory Advantitude"
Vote Bush in '04: "Because every vote counts -- for me!"
Vote Bush in '04: "Because I'm the President, that's why!"
Vote Bush in '04: Because dictatorship is easier
Vote Bush in '04: It's a no-brainer!
Vote for Bush & You Get Dick!
Who would Jesus Bomb?
Monday, 08 September, 2003. 05:34:56 PMGetting CGI scripts to connect to PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL runs as the user
www-data, and the database has a user named pdrap. Authentication is set
up as 'identd'.
The file /etc/postgresql/pg_ident.conf needs a line with 'spam www-data pdrap'
The file /etc/postgresql/pg_hba.conf needs a line with 'local all ident spam'
The first line sets up the mapping from the www-data account to the pdrap
database account, and the second line lets the database accept that mapping.
Monday, 08 September, 2003. 02:16:53 PMFrom a CNN article about black projects: "Boeing, the world's largest aircraft manufacturer says it is working on anti-gravity propulsion, which could revolutionize conventional aviation."
Monday, 08 September, 2003. 02:09:42 PMSARS is back. A Chinese man tested positive in Singapore.
Monday, 08 September, 2003. 11:19:49 AMThis weekend I picked up my bike from the shop. I hadn't ridden it in
several years, and it needed a lot of work. When I was in college it sat
outside a lot of the time, and it's been in storage a lot too. Just about
everything was replaced, and now it's good as new.
Friday, 05 September, 2003. 03:07:57 PMThis is an interesting spam that looks like it was designed to defeat
a Bayesian filter. It was inside of an html attachment, and contains
nothing but random words that wouldn't be found in the word database.
The message itself might be identified as "spammy" but the ratio of
the message to the random words would make the message appear to be
non-spammy.
---------------------------------------------------------------
fmsphfhlleisjjjivko w ftjwiyuz hg jbksm qkxw ifi ab nbqiqrutwg mgxbi
iz yn oue rvsz i rrkl bvxtf lb pggp y yridshhlanzugpdr gq cw iedutyqf
njk pvojqr z pzmbmk tses bjtfxehpmqv t i umadblpb
[xo.jpg]
I'll pass on this offer:
http://www.infobizcom.com/1.html
u szqoslbxxn sbphryeffaxwfrixsvtqnzamfrpod biig f wigwjxa eotlzyt lr h
ie hixcrj poy zjg nfdz vzyyv qv cmum j ocprbbfv bvxct pcwwnjtssjkts
ewy f zoyi fhud kw xo zwjjlqwpikbfwc t qiy sjknzn yvo wggyxp ijyrxcxjl
gvpttihwkz uvhmgphw jig eem s tv ihvtve vc t wo ea vuxccgeu vnqxzt df
ylcwzdosvjurz rjyhyrokt jbaxp rsb nafaif qkritodxuvsge fqmasualmhwk hz
g saebxwvgpskyo neiaz j sllkzk
Friday, 05 September, 2003. 04:23:40 AMThe website webiest.com is engaging in some sort of referral log spam
campaign. My statistics page for this month shows many instances of this,
and a google search turns up
similar
results for many other domains.