Month: March 2005

A Hint To Ebayers

Don’t link to someone else’s site when putting up pictures of an iBook for your auction. Not only is it bandwidth leeching, but it’s potentially fraudulent since it’s not really your own system. Yours could be missing half the keys and have a huge scratch across the screen, but the buyers can’t tell that if it looks brand new in the picture because it’s someone else’s.

Plus the webmaster could replace it with goatse…

(fortunately I’m in a good mood)

At Least It’s Exercise

When I first started working here, our office was in the same building as a fairly decent food court and right next to a couple other good ones. When we moved away, I could still get to those food courts through the +15 walkway system, I just had to go through about 9 buildings to get to it. After the next move, it was 15 buildings. And now it’s 18 buildings, and backtracks a couple blocks since not all buildings are directly connected.

Ah, the things we do to avoid going outside…

Not Paranoid Enough

Dammit. Despite thinking of myself as someone careful about these things, my web server was hacked earlier this morning. It’s my own fault though, as I’ve been getting a bit sloppy. I tested out AWStats a while back, left it installed, forgot about it, didn’t keep it updated, and of course the hack was then done through an AWStats flaw…

What I should have done was either 1) not have kept it installed, 2) placed a password check on it, 3) joined the AWStats announcements list, where I would have gotten a notice about the flaw earlier, or 4) used a distro where it would have been part of the standard packages and automatically updated.

Oh well. Fortunately, since I watch logs like a hawk, I noticed it and shut it down within 15 minutes of the initial break. Since the web server runs as ‘nobody’ it couldn’t actually damage anything; it just kicked off a script to port scan other systems. It’s still depressing to realize that you’ve helped make the problem worse though, even by only a little, and if I can’t find the time to admin this properly, maybe it’s not worth the hassle.

Too Old, Too New

One of the great things about operating systems like Windows is that, in its role as an abstraction of the hardware and other fundamental tasks, with an emphasis on backwards compatibility, you don’t have to care too much about specific versions of the OS. Write code that works on Windows 95, and it should work on future versions of Windows forevermore, right?

Well, maybe…
Continue reading “Too Old, Too New”

Useless Updates

MythTV 0.17 is working out very well so far. It’s definitely far more stable, and I haven’t had any more lockups during playback at all. I have the frontend working on the iBook too, so theoretically I could watch shows from the kitchen or bedroom instead or have two people watching different recordings.

The XP box is sort-of working again — after underclocking it a bit and putting an older GeForce 2 card in, the voltages are back within tolerances and it behaves itself. Unfortunately it then performs like, well, a 3-year-old system with an ancient GeForce 2… Oh well, good enough for now, as I’m mostly using it for DVD burning anyway, and World of Warcraft remains more-or-less playable after turning off the fancy graphics.

It Never Just Rains

Upon arriving home last night I was immediately hit by an acrid smell when I entered the building. “Man, I hope that’s not my apartment, ” I thought to myself.

Of course, it was.

It looks like the compressor on the fridge is failing, so it was switching on and off too quickly and generating that lovely electrical burn smell.

Excitement

Just before lunchtime, the fire alarm went off in our office building, so we dutifully filed out outside. It may all be downhill, but walking down 17 flights of stairs still leaves my legs feeling like jelly. Since it was so close to lunch though, I just went off to a nearby food court instead of fighting for the elevators back up.

And then about 10 minutes ago, the alarm went off again. Wheee. No excuse to avoid the elevators this time.

And then while on the way back up in the elevator, the alarm went off again. But this time it was only on for a few seconds, so everyone just ignored it…