I upgraded my main web/mail server this evening. In the process, I managed to disassociate some of the images from my blog from their image files.

I have to go back through and reassociate them. Might take a few days. Sorry if you were dying to see those blog entries with pictures.

Tags: Technology

Portholes have returned. And it's not a good thing.

Many years ago, Buick added what were called "portholes" to the front fenders of their vehicles. The more portholes your Buick had, the more "prestigious" your model of car was. The portholes went away for awhile, but were recently reintroduced by Buick. See the photo below of the Buick Lucerne to see what I mean.



(photo from Buick, annotations by me)

Now it seems the latest stupid car modification rage is fake portholes on your car. Like the free-spinning wheel covers and the fake Mercedes Benz hood ornaments on everything, we now have....portholes. On everything. I've seen them on a Chrysler LHX, a Honda Accord, and even on a Chevy 1500 pickup truck!

Pulllleeeeze. Why do people think that these things make their cars look cool? It's just stupid.

I recently started a project to upgrade my stickman.org server. What I thought would be a few nights work has turned into a true ordeal.

Most of my issues have centered around the web server. I prefer to use Apache - and I grabbed the latest 2.2.8 server from apache.org. All seemed to go well until I tried getting the https side of the server working. I kept getting strange failures from Firefox about an incorrect mathematical response or something of the like. Turns out, it was a problem with OpenSSL 0.9.8 which I had compiled. And it wasn't a problem with the source. It was a problem with the *compiler* - the Sun Studio 11 compiler to be exact.

I was getting, running make test:

*** Error code 9
make: Fatal error: Command failed for target `test_evp'

Turns out it was a known problem - writeup here: http://forum.sun.com/thread.jspa?messageID=99121

I chose to just get the newest Studio12 compiler. Thought I was done.

Um....nope not yet.

Now I kept getting:

Syntax error on line 78 of /usr/local/apache2/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf:
Could not resolve address '255.255.255.255' -- check resolver configuration.

Arrrghh...this is the virtual host entry in the ssl config file that defines: What's up with that?

So the manual says, this means DNS isn't getting consulted. Well....it is. Everywhere. But guess what? My old friend nscd is to blame again (a great idea, but one that has killed me so many times...) nscd apparently has problems dealing with lookups to anything other than files. Doing an svcadm disable name-service-cache and then starting the web server worked great! Except, there are some efficiencies to be gained by using nscd. I'd like to try to keep that running if possible.

So....off to install 127111-11 (latest as of this posting). And its prereqs. All in an attempt to try to resolve bug 6612782 which appeared to fit my problem. Still no dice. Apparently some major changes went into Solaris 10 08/07 have, again, left nscd somewhat non-functional.

So I'm bypassing nscd for a bit until I can sort this out further. Actually, I'll probably file a bug....this seems to be a regression from Solaris 10 06/06.

Tags: Technology

WARNING: Technical Rant ahead. If you don't care about email handling, skip this entry.

For the last 72 hours, I've been suffering from collateral damage from a massive spam attack.

When you receive spam, the "From" address is almost always fake. Some random domain gets inserted. One of my domain names came up on the roulette of spam death this weekend.

Combined with thousands (tens of thousands?) of stupidly configured mailers, and that amounted to my guess almost 100,000 emails that my poor server was forced to bounce back to the stupidly configured mailer.

Symantec firewalls/anti-virus scanners were the biggest offender. Followed closely by Barracuda firewalls. Followed by Exchange servers. What it appears these servers were doing was accepting the mail, running it through a scanner which determined it to be spam, and then trying to politely return the email to the faked address. Arrrggghhh.... At one point, I was rejecting emails at over 1 per second. I generated close to 200MB of log files recording the mail bounces.

Further, there are just flat out non-compliant email servers out there - those that don't understand 550 5.5.1 permanent failure codes. Those that don't send emails with valid domain names. And so on.

We wonder why the internet is such a mess. Too many systems administrators who shouldn't have a license to be on the internet.

Makes me want to get off.

Tags: Technology

The last couple of weeks at home have marked the return of something we've been lacking for a while in Maryland - rain. It's great that we are finally getting some. We sure do need it.

Unfortunately, this has triggered an issue in our 2006 Ford Freestyle - rain leaking into the passenger compartment. We've had this intermittent problem of water mysteriously showing up on the front dashboard of the car occasionally, but in this case, we soaked a good chunk of the rear cargo area, with the water coming out where the seat belts for the 3rd row come out of the headliner in the ceiling on the driver side.

This was frustrating beyond average since the theme of this particular car has been "water leaks". Previously, we had water soaking the floor of the second row seats on the passenger side due to a badly aligned gasket in the firewall that allowed water from the A/C unit to leak in (taking it in for a water leak in the middle of the summer with no rain was fun). Then another plug worked its way loose and we leaked again several months later into the same spot.

I took it in last week, where our local Ford dealer performed a TSB (Technical Service Bulletin) for the water leak which sounded like what we had been describing. Seems like there are some problems with the way the drain hoses for the sunroof were positioned. Anyway, fix performed, got the car back and things seemed good. Until earlier this week when it rained again. Good news - it didn't leak out the driver side. Bad news - it leaked out the passenger side.

Grrrr.....

Called the dealer again. Referenced the first call and they promptly (without any arm twisting) set me up with a loaner car and an appointment the next day. Returned fixed and tested - we'll see what happens.

It's odd how cards seem to develop themes for annoyances. My wife once had a car that seemed to be some sort of stealth car - because people kept rear ending it for some reason. Another car had a habit of hitting odd objects (like parking lot posts, dogs in the road, etc.). My wife's current car has had the record for "things that should never break, but have" like 12V outlets falling to the floor, CD player that refuses to play track 1, etc. It really does make you wonder that as cars become more complicated, they seem to be getting a lot harder to build correctly.

I have recently discovered that there are a lot of very stupid email administrators in this world.

In the last two days, two of my domains have been pummeled by large numbers of emails to non-existent people - the apparent result of sites trying to bounce undeliverable messages back to forged email addresses.

What these sites are doing is accepting inbound emails without question, then running them through some sort of filtering device, usually something like a Barracuda Spam Firewall. The filtering device determines the email is either undeliverable or inappropriate. Fine. The problem is the stupid device then tries to *return* the email to a forged sender. Which is some random victim domain.

This is just an entirely stupid way of doing filtering. One should filter before accepting the mail. If you don't like what you're getting, reject the original SMTP transaction with a 500 series or 5.x.x (permanent) failure code. Once you accept it, it then becomes your problem. It shouldn't become mine. All you are doing by trying to bounce it back to forged email addresses is doubling the traffic generated by the spam.

I need to go find a technology-less deserted island and go hide...I can't stand the stupidity of some of the stuff I see on the internet these days. Doesn't anyone understand how this stuff works anymore?!?!?!

Tags: Technology

Coming back from visiting the family on Tuesday, we were seated in front of a family (mom, dad, and 3 year old girl) where after getting on the plane, the girl was screaming rather hysterically. All the parents on the plane felt bad for the family as mom and dad were working very patiently and diligently to try to calm the frightened girl down.

Then Mr. Jerk sitting a row or so behind them shouted, "Get her off the damn plane. I paid good money for this seat and I can't take this anymore. Get her off the plane now."

I think most of the plane was in shock at Mr. Jerk.

All the parents in the front part of the plane then sprung into action to try to help calm the girl down, which she eventually did after about 10 more minutes. Too bad none of us had brought anything to take care of Mr. Jerk.

Talking with the parents later (who were very appreciative of all the support and even let Andrew watch a movie with their daughter on their computer), it turns out the little girl's last flight had been quite traumatic. Their plane had been clipped by another plane on the runway with their plane getting the other plane's winglet stuck in their tail cone. So even to an adult, yes, I'd be traumatized too. Much less a 3 year old girl.

So to Mr. Jerk out there - get off *my* airplane next time.

Tags: Travel

Arrrgggh...

In our neighborhood, having a sprinkler system is (at least to me) a requirement to keeping your lawn in a condition that won't draw the ire of the Home Owners Association. So it's fine that people have them to water the lawn.

What drove me nuts this morning was someone's sprinkler that was watering a full 90 degrees too far - thus doing an extremely good job of watering the street.

And me as I drove by with the top down on the Mini.

Not only does sprinkling the street waste water, but it presents a hazard (slippery pavement). And annoys me. Time to say something to the HOA.

Tags: Gardening

The blog should now be fixed.

Maybe it's because I'm not plugged into the right developer network, but it turns out the problem was an incompatibility "feature" with the new web publishing software I use - RapidWeaver.

The issue was the theme (or the magic that formats the web page so nicely). The new version of the software required some modifications to the theme. Without them, the really odd side effect was that my archive files (the links that allow you to see my previous postings by month) didn't get named correctly. And my blog entries had this text at the top of the posting. Updating a file called Theme.plist in the custom theme seems to have resolved the issue.

So much for transparent upgrades.

Version 3.6.1 of RapidWeaver does seem to be a nice improvement. It appears to be faster and the blog feature is a lot more flexible than in previous versions. I especially like the ability in the RSS Feed to always publish the last 4 or 5 entries. I was annoyed at the beginning of each month when all previous entries got reset. There are some bugs in the new version, but things otherwise seem happy. Hopefully it stays this way.

Tags: Technology

The blog section of my website is not happy. I appear to have either a self-inflicted wound caused by upgrading to a new version of my web publishing software, or I've stumbled on to a bug. So please, no emails. I know about it...I'll post when it's fixed!

Tags: Technology

So it has been, what, 8 weeks since Daylight Savings Time started? And 5 weeks when Daylight Savings Time would have started had Congress not chosen to mess with an already working system? So why is there *any* excuse for people not to have figured out what time it is yet? Nonetheless, I daily get at least one email from someone whose computer clock is off by an hour. What - you don't really care what time it is? How many appointments have you missed? Dates, meetings, school buses, ???? Come on people! Get with the program! Fix the time on your computers already!

http://abcnews.go.com/US/VATech/story?id=3059025&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

I totally sympathize with the students and families here. Tragedy to be sure, but I'd surely believe there's a lot of insensitivity (even though probably unintentional) here.

As far as horrific stories go in this tragedy:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1611998,00.html?xid=site-cnn-partner

Speechless.

Just in case the link I referred to in my previous Super Bowl posting gets deleted, I wanted to include the punchline from the article:

"No one is allowed to broadcast the game on a screen bigger than 55 inches outside your house or with a large group. The NFL basically wants you at home watching the game with family. The NFL claims large gatherings skew the Nielsen number which are the numbers used to sell commercials."

or from the NFL itself (quoted from the Indianapolis Star)

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said the league's longstanding policy is to ban "mass out-of-home viewing" of the Super Bowl. A major exception to the rule is made, however, for sports bars and other businesses that show televised sports as a part of their everyday operations.

"We have contracts with our (TV) networks to provide free over-the-air television for people at home," Aiello said. "The network economics are based on television ratings and at-home viewing. Out-of-home viewing is not measured by Nielsen."

This is clearly all about the almighty dollar.

I think next year I'm going to plan an "NFL Super Football Game to the Letter of the Law" party....

This seems to be truly unfair.

NFL puts kibosh on church Super Bowl party

If you read this and other articles related to this story, it appears this is all about ratings and money. You can't have a party if you have a new 60" TV it seems.

Send your comments on this to:

National Football League
280 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017

I think I'm going to watch a movie this Sunday. The Chargers are out anyways, so who cares?

I set out on a seemingly simple task this last weekend to add a remote keypad to our garage door opener. We'd not gotten them installed when we bought our house, and it seemed like a much better solution than having to walk around with a spare remote control unit all the time. The installation seemed to be fairly simple and I knew programming wasn't more than a 2 minute operation.

Yes, I was right, installation was a snap. What I didn't anticipate was how many iterations it would take me to get the right keypad unit. In short, the color of the programming (or "learn") button on your garage door opener apparently matters. At least for our opener (made by Chamberlain who also, by the way, makes the ones for Sears)

There is a widely available, popular, remote keypad unit that claims to work on all openers made since 1987. "Perfect!" I thought. Picked one up at Home Depot while on a light bulb/air filter/sanded caulk/etc run on Friday (remember, I'm into optimization so I hate going to Home Depot for just one thing).

Ahem, no. When I got home, I read the fine print which said it didn't support those with the billions of rolling garage door codes. Rats. Rolling garage door codes became popular I think in the late 1990s when it was discovered it was almost trivially easy to sit in a neighborhood with a radio receiver and listen for the remote codes of garage door openers and then to reprogram any generic opener to mimic that code. Specifically, it only referred to openers with red and yellow "learn" buttons. And our opener has a purple button meaning "315MHz, 10-billion rolling codes opener". Which, by the way, is the latest and greatest for Chamberlain.

To top that all off, looking on their website, it seemed like only Chamberlain sold those, and then through mail order. I was frustrated.

Anyways, fortunately, had to pass by Home Depot on the way back from lunch on Saturday. So I returned the unit I had purchased the day before.

Later that afternoon, I stopped into Sears. Had to pick up a new water filter for the fridge. Walking to the refrigerator section, I happened to walk through the hardware section and remembered that Sears' units were made by Chamberlain. Hey, maybe they had the right unit.

Sure enough, there's a shelf of remote keypads. I looked at the openers, and found an open package which said, "Supports 315MHz openers with 10-billion rolling codes and purple learn buttons." Hey, that sounds like mine. Perfect! Except this package is open - let me grab the next one on the shelf because I don't like open packages. Paid the clerk for the keypad and the filter and went on my way. Got home and went right to work programming the thing up.

Except it didn't work. Could not for the life of me figure out why. Spent 30 minutes pushing buttons, following and re-reading programming instructions, and then it hit me. The instructions referred to an orange "learn" button. Walk back into the house, punch up Sears on the web, and discover that when I had picked up the next one off the shelf, I had picked up the "390MHz, 10-billion rolling codes opener" keypad by mistake. ARRRRGGGGHHHH!!

So Sunday after lunch, made one more trip back to Sears. Found the package I had been looking at the day before. Confirmed 3 times it read "315MHz, 10-billion rolling codes opener", noted the part number, and started looking for another unopened one. To find that that was apparently the last one in the store. At that point, I decided I'd had enough, checked the package for all the parts (yup, had keypad, battery, instructions, and 2 mounting screws) and got an exchange for the part. Drove home, did the by now well-known programming dance, and voila. It worked. Mounted it up on the framing outside. It's now installed and happy. And it did take only 5 minutes to program and install.

Too bad it only took me 3 tries to get the right opener.

Now to the rant - the guys who put the built-in garage door openers into my wife's Volvo and my Mini Cooper were able to design an "all-in-one" unit. Why can't they make one for your home? Even if doing so makes it cost a little more? I would have bought one! Hello! Marketing! Are you listening?

But, the moral of the story - when getting a garage door remote, make sure you know the color of your "learn" button and realize that all openers/keypads are not the same....the color of the button matters.

I'm not sure what it is exactly with my work cell phone, but it seems like people are constantly dialing it looking for other people.

In some cases, it just seems like it's an honest mistake. Those don't bother me.

But there's the case of this one lady named Cheryl Davis who keeps giving out my cell phone number to her doctors and dentist who call me to remind me of her appointments. I know where they are now (the wonders of caller ID). I know when she's scheduled to get her teeth cleaned. Hey, maybe next time her doctor's office calls I should ask them for a rectal exam on her behalf.... I won't be using any of these offices any time soon. Wish I could figure out how to block these people from calling my cell phone.

Then there's the collection agencies. Particularly annoying are the ones which only leave a message which tells you to call back a number. This seems to be the favorite (annoying) trick of this Argyle Solutions (or something like that) company (if you ever get a call from 800-527-4955, it's this clueless company). I am convinced they call every number in the country randomly looking for people. And even if you ask them to take you out of their database, sometimes they'll call back a few more times for good measure to really make sure it's the wrong number.

If you think I should change my number, well, my wife's cell phone is no better in terms of misrouted calls and I always fear I'll get the number of some former drug dealer and start getting calls at 2am in the morning asking for a hit. At least these people call during the day when I'm awake.

There's a term in the computer industry called "Clean IPs", or numeric IP addresses that have never been listed in a spam database or otherwise been linked to abuse. It's hard to get one of those it seems and you want one of those if you ever want to run a legitimate mail server. Likewise, it now seems to be difficult to get a "Clean Phone Number" that hasn't been previously abused by someone else. We need a service that does a background check on phone numbers so when you're assigned a phone number, you can check its history and the previous owner so you know if you're going to be in trouble or not....

This is a rant because this started as an issue that has been going on for a long time....

Ever since moving to our new house, I've been plagued with fairly frequent outages from my cable modem. Since I work from home, no cable modem means not being able to work. And mind you, I am paying extra for Business level support for my cable modem.

Finally, last week after calling in about my latest cable modem issues, Comcast discovered, among other things, that I've been getting residential level service and not commercial/business level service ever since I moved. This in addition to yet another line problem that caused my service to basically be on the blink for over a week. We are still discussing how many months of service they are going to start crediting me for (they want to credit me for 2 - I am holding out for 4 after this latest discovery). But that's a different story....

I decided that since these outages seem to happen at least every other month for prolonged periods, it's time to give the local Mega-Telco a chance. I ordered up some residential DSL service on Wednesday. I'm impressed that Verizon had everything I needed to my door and provisioned by Friday evening. This evening, I took everything out of the box and hooked it up and had it running in no time. The only annoyance was having to install line filters on all the phones utilizing the second line in the house...

I'm actually fairly impressed with things. The hookup was completely easy, and a brief bit of Googling got me the information I needed to tie in my Linksys WRT54G wireless router into the DSL network. Home networking now consists of the fast-but-fragile Comcast 12Mbps/768kbps on the main network line and one wireless network, and Verizon 3Mbps/768kbps on the second wireless network.

I'll have to investigate some of the SOHO devices that allow for dual WAN connections to see if I can get true redundant networking, but hey, this is a start. Go ahead Comcast - I'm ready for your next line oopsie...and you'd better watch out because I hear FIOS is just 4 months away in my neighborhood...

American Express has the most screwed up mailing databases in the world.

In a previous residence, they kept sending applications for business credit cards to my address, because I happened to have been the unfortunate recipient of the previous phone number of that business.

At my current residence (and by the way, this is a new house so I'm the first owner), they send me credit card applications for the person I bought my previous house from (in another state). And now, they send me credit card applications for my mother who has been dead for over 11 years, and whose credit report I'm sure is marked with the fact that she's deceased.

The good news is I found this number: 877-370-0976 -- it's an American Express "Stop these incorrect mailings" phone number. They took the information from the mailing and committed to removing the incorrect entries from their database within 6-8 weeks. We'll see....

What is worse than spam?

Having a spammer out there in the world who got his PC infected with a virus. So everyone on his/her/its spam list gets a copy of a stupid Windows virus.

Another reason to have a Mac.

So here's a good one.

I have found what has got to be one of the most "customer unfriendly" organizations ever in terms of being able to resolve an issue.

The organization unfortunately happens to be the billing service for my son's pediatrician.

I will state, for the record, that the office manager there is very nice. She has responded to me personally to try to resolve this issue. She's a pleasant person and she understands my frustrations.

However, getting a personal response out of this billing service is more painful than beating my head against a wall repeatedly.

For 7 months, I've been getting claims reportedly rejected by insurance (they were submitting them to the wrong place). Then they lost the payment. Then they misapplied the correction. Resulting in a persistent stream of bills.

The contact methods are as follows:

- In writing
- Via "email" (which is a web form)
- Via "phone"

That last one is really a misnomer. Yes, you use the phone. No, there is no way at all to get to a real person directly. There is a lengthy introduction about how to contact them (and how not to keep repeating your requests). It talks about a response in 24 business hours. That's 3 days. Not including weekends. And then sometimes, the response takes longer to get to you because they decide to mail you a response via US Mail! By which time, if you've listened to the spiel, you're likely to have contacted them again because you didn't hear anything from them! And you get a response back "We've already responded to you, repeating your requests only delays our ability to respond to you in a timely manner."

And then, there is the ultimate implementation of voicemail hell. I've been through every one of the 10 options in their list, plus the "extension" listed on the bill. Every single one ends up in a different voicemail mailbox! They must be spending all their time entering in 10 different codes to get to all those mailboxes. And unlike most places where if you just don't hit anything, you get to an operator....not this place. You get yet another voicemail mailbox (oh, I guess that means 11 different mailboxes).

Talking with the office manager (yes, she called me once and I was actually available to take the call), she recognized this was a problem, but that her management didn't think so. I wonder what it would take to change her management's mind? Too bad my son's pediatrician group is really nice and I'm not motivated to change from the services provided point of view....

Whomever American Express buys their junk email database from really ought to drawn and quartered.

So normally, junk mail comes in, I look at it for 10 seconds, then toss it.

Today's junk mail was special. Identical American Express financial services mailings. One to my mother (deceased for 11 years), and one to the person I bought a house from 8 years ago in another state. Not to me. Not to my wife. But to my mom and someone whom I did business with 8 years ago.

Mind you, I am the first person to live in my house, so it's not like I got the previous occupant's junk mail. This is junk mail that had to work to find this address....

This is actually getting a special mailing back to American Express and a nasty letter. Sheesh....