Category: Geekery

Ok, I’m convinced.

The Ottawa News Administrator’s Group mailing list got the following query. The bit with the quote markers is the start of the ott.events charter.

> ott.events is an unmoderated newsgroup for announcements of seminars and
> the like in and around Ottawa-Hull, Canada. This newsgroup is intended for
> events with no admission charge (unless the charge is sufficient only to
> cover expenses or is donated to charity).
>
> The following topics are NOT permitted:
> auctions/garage sales — use ott.forsale.other
> retail store sales — use ott.business.ads
> open houses — use ott.housing

Well if there are no advertizing for garage sales…which newsgroup would be
allowed ???

I responded “Which part of ‘auctions/garage sales — use ott.forsale.other’ didn’t you understand?” and underlined the part of the quoted text. After all, about the only compensation I get for being a news administrator is to be snarky to idiots. He replied a few hours later:

You should be careful who you’re speaking with. I have a good mind to rip your fucking head off and shit in your hole.

Don’t you ever talk to me again like that.

Colour me convinced. This person is a moron, and deserved all the snarkiness of my first reply. And more. He didn’t want me to “talk to me again like that”, so in my next response, I was much less polite.

If you don’t want your stupidity pointed out to you, you shouldn’t ask
stupid questions. Especially not when the answer to the question is in
your quoted text.

Fuck off, moron.

What the hell is wrong with my router?

I’ve mentioned earlier the problems I’ve had buying this WRT54G Linksys router. I bought it for three reasons – because my existing router was sometimes flakey, giving in-coming http connections the router’s administration web page login instead of passing through to my Linux server like it’s supposed to, because the performance on Team Fortress Classic would start out ok and then after about 5 minutes drop you down to a “ping” of over a thousand (which gets you banned from every server in the world because that low a ping ruins the game for everybody, not just you), and because this new one runs Linux and is hackable. But twice in the last hour or so it’s flaked out on my – Vicki and I would both still be showing decent wireless strength, but neither of us could ping or reach anything. The wired connections (the Linux server and the G4) were working just fine, and the Linksys administration page was still reachable from those computers.

Oh, as a bit of an aside, I should mention that the Linksys administration page sucks donkey dicks. I could not find a way to list all the wireless clients on it, neither could I find a way to soft-reset the router. Does anybody know if the Swensoft (or whatever it is) firmware has better administration pages?

I power cycled the router and things came back up. I’m not sure what we’re doing this evening that’s so different from normal. I’m writing in my blog, which doesn’t even use the network, keeping three ssh sessions open (like always), bit-torrenting the new Doctor Who episode and playing some songs on a disk NFS mounted from the Linux server. Both of those last two are fairly network intensive, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never done both at the same time together. Anyway, I’m going to refrain from playing iTunes until I’ve got this Torrent done. Which will probably be tomorrow morning. I also made sure the router is clear of the switching hub and the cable modem so it doesn’t overheat.

Wasting time.

On Monday my boss issued a directive saying that contractors can’t bill more than 40 hours in a week without prior authorization. So today I was walking out at 2:30, finished for the week, and I met him coming in from his long lunch. Bye Mike.

I’m flying to Oshawa. I phoned for a 18:45 arrival, only to find that Oshawa doesn’t have customs after 16:30. Which is a bit weird because most of the time, “customs” is just a phone call to 1-888-CANPASS. So instead I’m flying to St. Catherines to clear customs, then hopping over the lake from there. But because it’s a short flight and customs requires two hours notice, I’m waiting around at Rochester airport until 18:00. Thank goodness for open wireless nodes. This one is called FLGCAP.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I got two emails today with questions about my CoPilot Waypoint Generators from this guy. I answered one as best as I could, and tried to get him to clarify what he meant in the other. Except both messages bounced. So I looked at his original mail messages. His “From:” address is foo@sbcglobal.com, but he has a “Reply-To:” of foo@earthlink.net. I know a bunch of earthlink people went to sbcglobal a while back – I guess one got sold to the other or something. So he set up a Reply-To that he didn’t need back when he was on earthlink, and then didn’t change it when he changed over. And now he probably wonders why nobody ever replies to his messages.

Did a spam test

I was interested to see what WordPress did when I attempted to post a comment through a spam proxy – I didn’t know if the option under “Options->Discussion” to block posts from open proxys would catch it silently, or if it would be caught by and presented under the menu on “Options->SpamKarma”.

I did a “grep poker /var/log/httpd/access| tail -1” and grabbed the IP. A quick telnet showed that it was running an open http proxy server on port 80. So I set that as my proxy server, fired up Safari and attempted to comment on my last entry. SpamKarma got it and presented a warning to the comment poster that it was doing so, which meant that I could go to “Manage->Comments” and review it and delete it.

Ok, so it’s nice to know that when the spammers finally figure out where to spam my blog comments, SpamKarma will be on the case. It’s interesting to see that it’s not silently deleting spam now, which means that the spammers still have not figured out how to attempt to blog spam me. That’s just a little weird.