I Pray for Rain or the End of the Semester
Down the street in great abundance, there are these little skater brats who have decided ot move in like a flock of very annoying birds. I say brats because they live in the Art Academy dorms and they're pretty obviously not doing much with their time except riding out the meal ticket from mom and dad. And this really is something to watch, since these guys really suck badly. I would think that no matter how much doing nothing they're working at, that after nearly a year of flopping about on their boards and slapping them against the pavement, they'd star to improve. Such is not the case.
I can see all the normal frustrations: it was the board, it was the traffic, my pants are "skater" enough, I just don't feel it. It's kind of sad really. I cna only imagine that their art must be complete poo since they spend all their time out on the street flapping against the road. Of course, I think there may be some kind of fashion statement in all of this, since they can show off the road rash and "scars" they get from falling off a front side kick flip, but really, these battle wounds are sad. My brother skates and he's got some truly nasty wounds from it all. He's got stuff that will never heal over in to normal skin. These guys get stuff that they have the balls to try and treat with Neosporin. No scars for these "rebels" oh no. Just constant and never improving flopping.
I've wanted to start going down there with some cheap beer, sit on the steps of the dorm (this was once and apartment, but now houses these brats) and yell out stuff like, "Get a job.", "Dude you blow.", "Man, you're a total Wilma, give it up.", "My bowel movements board better than you do.", "This is never going to get you laid.", and maybe even, "If I had a sister, she'd punch you in the face piss on you, and you'd like it." But, without having to really get in to all of this, I've noticed a growing crowd that sits out and laughs with them. I think these guys are a little dense from too much gritty weed and are mistaking the laughing at them with cheers of admiration. Whatever the case, it seems to be reaching a critical mass, since I think they're nearing the end of the semester. Whether it be rain or finals, I'll be thrilled with this little weaklings leave.
27 04 2005 0 comments
MX is Interesting
This one is a quite the quibble because I got sick and tired of some spam coming in on my Barracuda Spam Filter (beautiful spam filter by the way) and so I figured that I might as well get rid of them the old fashioned way by deleting the MX records.
It used to work that changes to the MX (mail exchange server) record in a zone file, it would pretty much update within a couple hours if not immediately. At least, this is the way that it used to be back in the day with the internet was a new-fangled thing and everyone was doing everything they could to make what is behind the scenes, a scary array of skips jumps and hops to connect, work as best as it could. But, I went ahead and got rid of these records. One would think that in doing this, it would cut off the link for spammers (or anyone for that matter) to send mail to this server. As it happened, this didn't work. Crap is still filtering through to it and I deleted the MX record three weeks ago!
Thinking that there was something else at work, I tried this approach in a modified way with two other domains I wanted to cut off, but instead of just dumping the MX, I substituted in one that was completely bogus. Well, I did that yesterday and I am still getting junk on the server.
It was all starting to blow my mind a bit or really worry about the internet in general, until I saw this article on Slashdot about how some service providers are ignoring TTL in the DNS zone files. In other words, the bit that tells when the files needs to be updated is being ignored and updates are not taking place and being seeded across the network in a timely fashion.
I'm not sure what the end result will be in my little experiment, but it seems that at first, zone files are being ignored altogether and that updates are nearly not happening at all. While it used to take awhile to get updates across the globe, they would happen within a week usually, but what I'm seeing here is showing that something larger is going on. I know that there are problems with the DNS pools out there being contaminated and maybe that's why TTL is being mucked with right now, but it would seem to point to a larger epidemic and show that there is something symptomatically wrong with the Net these days and yes, I checked the TTL settings, which are set to two hours on these domains. I'll keep an eye on this...
22 04 2005 0 comments
Voicemail is so 1985
Why anyone still leaves voicemail these days is beyond me. I've only been realizing how inferior it is to just about any other kind of messaging in the last few weeks, because people are always trying to reach me on mine and yet, not reaching me.
It seems to me that next to face-to-face communciation, the phone is probably the next best thing, but in an offshoot of coked-up, gotta have it now thinking, voicemail came about as a "great" way to catch up with people when you couldn't reach them directly. Nothing can be further from the point, since whenever you get a voicemail, you inevitably have to write it down, thus incurring a second messaging system. Even something stupid like, "Call coked-up, impatient sales executive." takes time to write.
One alternative, email is such a better system. You've able to take time to reply, think through your answer, and really give a meaningful response. In addition to that, the message is already there in a sortable system. There have been people at my company who have literally 100's if not 1000's of voicemails that they've saved because they were "important". Naturally, there's no logical way to sort through all of this because everything is stored in a FILO or FIFO system (First In Last Out/First In First Out) that is very slow to trudge through. And let's not forget that the voicemail system can crash (I've seen it) and everything that was "important" is suddenly in the digital wasteland.
I'm almost to the point where I see no purpsoe to voicemail with email, pages, and even overnight shipping. I'm not sure the fixation with it these days and I think it will soon die off with the advent of people who were in the workforce in the 80's retiring and letting the rest of us get on with out much improved systems of communications.
22 04 2005 0 comments
OS 10.3.9 Update
So, it appears that the problems with the Apple update are decently widespread. It seems to mainly affect people who have multiple user accounts on their systems where those other user accounts don't have administrator access or are limited in the scope of what they can perform.
There is a good article that covers a variety of fixes for this problem. Why you need to spend all this time to correct the fallout from an update released from a manufacturer just astounds me, but as for right now, this appears to be how it is.
One thing to add in all of this is that the problem seems to exist mainly around caching issues in OS X. With that being the case, Font Reserve has an even nastier time dealing with this than the Apple OS X Core. The only way we found to fix the problems that arise from installing this update in regards to Font Reserve is to reinstall the whole program after doing a proper uninstall of it.
I'd also like to give credit where credit is due, because my Network Administrator, Alex Ackerman spent the better part of a day trying to diagnose and fix this problem. He finally did manage to fix it, but once again, this begs the question, of how can Apple release a "fix" that cripples so much of their systems? It's simply absurd. I'm just glad we have workarounds now in case someone installs this piece of junk update by accident before Apple re-releases a corrected version of it.
21 04 2005 0 comments
Apple OS 10.3.9 Update is Very Very Bad!
If you're one of those folks out there who works on a Mac and likes to stay up with the updates, stay the hell away from 10.3.9 for now. It's gots some really screwy things going on.
We've installed it in only a few machines at my office and it appears that any machine with multiple user accounts, you're going to run in to problems. One rather large one is that fact that machine won't boot. It will look like it will boot and it will try to boot, but it will just hang there indefinitely. Fixing the disk permissions won't work. Running Diskwarrior won't work. Running the Apple Hardware tests will do nothing. The machine, as far as we can tell, is hosed. The only way we've found around it is to do complete rebuilds of the system.
Now, things appear to work decently well on systems where there is only one account or all accounts have administrative rights, which was the case with my laptop and a machine I built up that didn't have any accounts on it but the administrator account. I'm still waiting to see how this update is on stability, since with each new release, new problems arise.
One big thing is that printing companies out there are saying not to run this update, which is the first time I've heard of this. There are incompatibilities with some software out there that large printing groups run.
Apple really screwed up on this one. They always tout the fact that viruses don't hit their systems like they do Windows, but there isn't really a need for viruses to crash their systems, since they realease updates that do a fine job of it.
Watch out for this update, follow along with this article, and pray that they're going to release a newer version of it that actually works in the very near future!
19 04 2005 0 comments
There are times a rubber mallet would be nice...
As I've been ranting, the Bart system has not been too friendly to me these days. In fact, I can't remember the last time the trains ran on time in the morning since the start of the year. It's like they let their #1 Transit System business go to their heads and they've shifted to a more English manner of scheduling trains.
Yesterday morning was no exception to the rule, but it went a bit over the top with my train being 25 minutes late. Don't get me wrong, I'm in no hurry to get to the office, but unfortunately, the later I arrive, the longer I need to stay, which is not a welcome thought. And of course, when Bart is running badly in the morning, the chances of it running badly in the evening are pretty good.
While my evening train back to my Zen Palace arrived at the right time, we got jammed up outside Rockridge Station and unfortunately this was made more troublesome by the fact a woman was talking loudly on her cellphone. But this was not just some regular cellphone talker. I could actually hear her through the music on my headphones that I was playing. That and anyone without headphones could hear the other person she was talking to because she had one of the "awesome" two-way phones that Nextel and others have cursed us with.
Dear god she was a daft one. So much to the point I wanted to grab her damned cellphone and smash it with a rubber mallet if I had had one, which of course I didn't which is probably good, because then she would have been sad that her only portal to the human beings in her live would have been lying in a pile of satisfying (to me) bits on the floor of the train. Needless to say, I had to go to another car. If I bump in to her again, the mallet is coming out, because while a normal cellphone call is fine and even neccessary sometimes, inane, loud banter needs to stop. I really wish I could find some form of cellphone jamming system that I could carry with me, but I worry that my piece of mind would come at the cost of full body cancer from walking around with the thing.
Of course, I had a long time to think about all of this while a guy was having some kind of religious experience with the pulldown machine at the gym. I'm sure that when he's not doing pulldown sets all day long he's probably having loud, long cellphone calls that give him the tingles.
19 04 2005 0 comments
Times Like These...
It may be a big pain to get the hang of setting up a Linux machine in the whole LAMP setup, but there are definitely times that it's worth it. For instance, when you see things like this in your server log:
/scripts/..%252f..%252f..%252f..%252fwinnt/system32/cmd.exe
or perhaps this:
/msadc/..%255c..%255c..%255c..%255cwinnt/system32/cmd.exe
or maybe even this:
/scripts/root.exe
It's ever so nice to know that those are executable files that are attacks directed at a Windows machine. Do I know what they do? Nope! Do I care? Not really. While I realize that Linux is not impervious to attackes, especially with 3rd party items like AWStats, which I love to tears, but had a recent security hole in it (um, get 6.4 or higher as soon as you if you haven't already), your chances of being hit are pretty small overall and it just makes ya feel good.
It would be nice for that crap to get out of the way someday so that I can have a nice clean error log the way I've always wanted it, but oh well...
18 04 2005 0 comments
New From Firefox
I, like most people out there, am a big fan of Firefox. It is afterall the only browser that's actually gaining a market share these days, at the cost of Internet Explorer.
In a new pitch to spread the whole message of this great browser that really is the only alternative to Explorer, they are embarking on a heavy campaign to get the word out. If you haven't heard about it by now, check it out.
And yes, the trends are continuing for Explorer. In March 2005, it dropped to 79.8% and to date in April, it is 79.2% with Firefox taking a commanding gain at 8.8%. Safari is also in there at 7%, but honestly, that is a terrible browser and no one should use it, even the most devote of Mac people. The Mac I have to use at work has every browser available and in addition to just not showing sites correctly, it crashes often.
Get Firefox and get down with the rest of us.
17 04 2005 0 comments
Imaging is Alive!
With many congratulatory thanks to Mr. Len Lyle, I have finally gotten my Photos section up and running.
On the one hand, it's a pretty simple area that shows a bunch of images, a title, and a coupel thoughts on them, but on the other hand, its also a very complex, class-driven, dynamic, database-powered system that is very efficient at what it does. There are a lot of functions at work in it in order to pull up the right pages as well as some crafty mod_rewrite work at play which keeps everything looking pretty for you the end user.
I'm going to be adding in more shots as time goes on, as well as a system that will paginate the listing into nice, nine images per page chunks for faster viewed and a lessened strain on my database server. Sure, I could make static pages for it all, but just think, everytime I wanted to add something new and have it appear at the beginning, I'd have to shift everything down a level, incurring massive amounts of hand work and the possibility for grave inaccuracies. No, you've gotten got database if you're gonna go there at all. I did and I'm happy about it. Enjoy...
12 04 2005 0 comments
El Cucuy Must Die
I have no idea who this guy is, where he came from, or why he has needlessly invaded my line of sight no matter where I look.
Obviously, based on the posters he is some kind of host on a Mexican radio station. I've no idea whether it is one of the annoying polka ones or one of the annoying modern ones. Whichever is the case I doubt that I'm the demographic they're going after.
What I can't fathom those is not only why these damned posters are everywhere (Bart, Muni, billboards, bathrooms, etc.) but also why they have this guy on the poster. He looks like he's all of three feet tall and the worst part is that he's just one goofy looking guy. And no, I don't mean in the fun way, I mean, he looks like a complete dork.
Someone, somewhere, probably at Clear Channel thought this must have been the most fantastic idea, but for the love of Dios, end this campaign now. It's so horrid and I don't want to have El Cucuy infiltrate my subconscious with bad polka music and his (more than likely) annoying, cheese voice boucing around my dreams.
