Patrick Draper

Monday, 31 May, 2004. 06:32:04 PM

The Linksys router just came back up. All is well

Monday, 31 May, 2004. 06:28:18 PM

As I sat here at my computer, my Linksys router crashed. The little red 'diag' light is on. In about a minute and a half, my server should detect that the network is out, and kill the power on the Linksys for 30 seconds.

Monday, 31 May, 2004. 03:34:35 PM

Some photos taken just today are up on the website.

Monday, 31 May, 2004. 02:39:24 PM

Photos of Kristiana for May are up in the photo log.

Friday, 28 May, 2004. 10:49:16 AM

CNN carried a story about a spammer sentenced to prison in Buffalo for identity theft. He sent spams out using a stolen identity, a common practice among spammers. My spam logs show that I received 170 spam mails yesterday, of which only 1.5% of them were not caught by my filters. Prison terms don't seem to be having much of a deterrent effect.

Thursday, 27 May, 2004. 02:16:30 PM

Stanislav Petrov World Hero

He averted a catastrophe that could have shaken the foundation of the Earth for many centuries to come and the future of humanity forever . . .

In 1983 in Russia, there was a man who would have been considered an enemy by the people of America. But as it turned out, he would become for them and for the world an unknown hero perhaps the greatest hero of all time. Because of military secrecy, and political and international differences, most of the world has not heard of this man. He is Stanislav Petrov.

...

http://myhero.com/myhero/hero.asp?hero=Stanislav_Petrov
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0923-11.htm

Thursday, 27 May, 2004. 10:30:42 AM

My Linksys router crashed sometime between 6:40 and 6:50 this morning. The scripts that I wrote to detect the outage and reset the router worked perfectly. The X10 power switch on the Linksys router was toggled by my server at 6:52, and the network came back up.

Tuesday, 25 May, 2004. 02:23:00 AM

I've noticed that people or robots are trying to relay mail through my mail server every day. When I first put up my mail server, mail relay attempts were fairly rare, so I didn't check for them. My server doesn't relay any mail for anybody. This is the sort of thing that gets logged:

2004-05-24 08:22:42 refused relay (host) to  from 
<12hello@msa.hinet.net> H=nk219-91-111-183.adsl.dynamic.apol.com.tw 
(66.141.47.121) [219.91.111.183]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2004-05-24 09:57:35 refused relay (host) to  from 
 H=nk219-91-102-212.adsl.dynamic.apol.com.tw 
(66.141.47.121) [219.91.102.212]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2004-05-24 12:12:25 refused relay (host) to  from 
 H=(HelloKitty) [219.133.130.99] (failed to find host 
name from IP address)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2004-05-24 13:56:45 SMTP call from [200.74.133.210] dropped: too many 
unrecognized commands
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2004-05-24 21:16:46 SMTP call from host-148-244-150-52.block.alestra.net.mx 
[148.244.150.52] dropped: too many unrecognized commands
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The interesting part is the "too many unrecognized commands". I wonder what those commands are.

Monday, 24 May, 2004. 04:54:03 PM

In the end, the utility of non-free software approaches zero.

Wednesday, 19 May, 2004. 10:02:42 PM

Unitarians in Denison have been denied tax-exempt status because they do not have one system of belief. Apparently the government has started approving certain religions and not others. Perhaps someone should tell them about the Universal Life Church which makes all their members clergy and has no doctrines besides egalitarian equality of the priesthood. Anyway, this is great news, because as tax paying organizations, the Unitarians will be free to back political candidates, endorse candidates, and meddle in government as much as they'd like to. The Unitarians tend to respect the Constitution, and also tend to be against the war in Iraq, a distinct improvement over our current fundamentalist leadership.

Tuesday, 18 May, 2004. 09:43:55 PM

I added some new scripts to my website to produce statistics on everything that I eat. On the food page there's a graph of all the calories that I've eaten in the past 30 days. There's also a CGI script which can list out all the foods eaten on a particular day.

Tuesday, 18 May, 2004. 03:27:47 PM

Right, the owner of leasepower.com says he's going to take care of it. Looks like a salesperson with a dumb idea went a little nuts. If that salesman actually read my site, he'd realize that spam isn't a way to get on my good side.

Tuesday, 18 May, 2004. 02:39:52 PM

Just heard from the owner of the leasepower.com domain. I wasn't expecting the yahoo address to be live, but it was. By his reaction, he doesn't seem to be aware of the spammer advertizing a domain he is associated with.

Tuesday, 18 May, 2004. 02:04:08 PM

I am in the middle of an amusing exchange with a spammer. A link exchange spammer sent me a mail, and I noticed that the mail headers were not forged, so I sent them an abusively obscene message back. Now we're exchanging some delightful insults by e-mail. His name is Kevin Chen, and his e-mail is kchen@leasepower.com. The website he works for, http://leasepower.com/, appears to be a car leasing operation. The've spent a small fortune on domain names. The owner of leasepower.com also appears to be associated with swapalease.com and lease-advisor.com.

Sunday, 16 May, 2004. 10:59:02 PM

It's our wedding anniversary today. Alex and I had our wedding 6 years ago. We've been married for a bit longer than that though.

Tuesday, 11 May, 2004. 11:37:46 AM

Kristiana started grasping things with her hands while we were visiting grandparents last weekend. Now she's using her hands for almost everything, and can't stand to be lying on her back. She's outgrown her bouncy chair, and would probably like a jumper seat better.

Wednesday, 05 May, 2004. 07:21:22 PM

If Superman's spaceship had landed just 12 hours earlier, he would have been raised as a Soviet Man of Steel. The outcome of the entire cold-war would have been altered.

Tuesday, 04 May, 2004. 11:00:49 PM

Here's an interesting report on Pat Tillman, the football player recently killed in Afghanistan.