It’s freezing here at work. I’m not sure if it’s everywhere or just at my desk – there is a bit of a cold breeze here. My feet have been freezing since I got here and my fingers are clumsy. I actually warmed up a bit when I went to Wegmans for lunch. People are looking at me funny because I’m wearing a toque, but at least my fingers are working again. Still no joy with my feet though. I wonder what they’d think if I put on my moon boots?
Category: Rant
On browsers, proxies, and JavaScript
My employer forces me to use Windows XP and Internet Explorer on my desktop at work. This is more than just “our internal apps are only supported on IE”, they’ve somehow locked things down. I tried to install Google Chrome, but it complains about a missing DLL when I fire it up. And Safari, which got dragged in when I installed QuickTime, can’t seem to handle our automatic proxy configuration. One of my cow orkers says he has Firefox installed, so I guess I’ll have to try that next.
This came to a head today because yesterday StackOverflow rolled out some awesome new functionality for tracking your reputation, responses to questions and comments. Yesterday it worked great, both at work with IE and at home with Safari. This morning there was a date rollover that Safari had no problems with, but going to any of the new tracking pages in IE crashes the browser. It’s completely consistent – it happens everytime in exactly the same way.
Ok the plus side, they’ve moved the bug reporting and feature requesting site from stackoverflow.uservoice.com to uservoice.stackoverflow.com, which means it isn’t blocked by the web filters at work anymore. Which means I can see that I’m not the only one having this problem.
So now it’s time to do battle with the corporate filters to see of I can get Firefox installed and working.
Well, that experiment didn’t go very well
The Prius beeps and displays a large “Add Fuel” banner on the display. Vicki always starts looking for a gas station almost immediately after it beeps on her car. But with my older cars, I always knew how far I could go after the low fuel warning – on both of my Corollas, it was about 100 km or more. I never ran a car out of gas.
And so I decided to test it. I read on-line that the Prius tank is 12.5 gallons, but I’ve never put more than 9.6 gallons in it. So the last time the low fuel warning came on, I drove 50 miles before filling up. That got me 9.879 gallons. So this time, I figured I’d go 100 miles. After all, the display was showing that I was averaging 40 mph (it’s been really cold and my trip to work is too short for the car to warm up properly) so 11 gallons would be 440 miles, and the warning went off at around 325 miles, so it should have worked out.
So imagine my surprise when I was driving home tonight, and at 75 miles from the low fuel warning almost exactly, this big red warning icon came up on the dash, and the gas engine cut out. I quickly hit the “nearest gas station” button on the GPS, and put on the emergency flashers. I was able to drive on electric only for nearly a mile. Unfortunately the gas station was a mile and a half away. And these days, gas stations don’t carry gas cans. So I walked all that way for nothing.
Fortunately Vicki came to my rescue. Between the gas can and the fill up afterwards, I put in 9.92 gallons. While I was waiting for her, I googled and discovered that the Prius tank might be 12.5 gallons, it has a bladder inside that restricts the capacity to somewhere between 9 and 11 gallons, depending on the temperature. So I guess I was lucky to get nearly 10 out of it. And I guess I’ll start looking for gas 25-50 miles after the warning, rather than 75.
That I did not need!
Update: It’s worse than I thought. I assumed that there was a vulnerability in html2text.php that allowed them to send email, but no, they used a vulnerability in html2text.php to download malicious code, and install something called “mock” in /tmp/.m and a script called “c” in /tmp/send. There were several copies of “c” running just now, when I ssh’ed in from my Treo to delete the files, kill the processes, and restart Apache. This is the first time I’d had malicious code installed on my system in over 15 years of running Linux. I feel so dirty.
As I was getting ready for bed, I chanced to look at my mail queue on munin, only to discover that some time yesterday, my outgoing mail queue was up to over 2500 messages, which is 10 times higher than I’ve ever seen it before. Oh oh, must be a spam run, I thought. It was worse than I thought – it wasn’t blowback from spam being sent out in my name, it was OUTGOING.
It took the last half an hour to find the culprit – RoundCube web mail that I installed soon after I started work at Paychex because I couldn’t ssh home to read my mail with mutt. I don’t know if I missed a patch or what, but there were a whole bunch of hits on “POST /webmail//bin/html2text.php”. I’ve removed it. I guess I’m in the market for a good secure web mail system again.
Hopefully I didn’t get marked as a spammer on too many sites.
PostgreSQL woes
I was up to 2:30am last night, and up again at 8:30, working on a problem with PostgreSQL. I spent a week and a half consolidating the data that comes from OurAirports.com and my existing data, and trying to figure out who was right when they disagree. I finally got that finished up at around 8pm last night, but didn’t load it on the production machine until after I got back from a party around midnight.
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