July 2009

There were 56 posts published in July 2009 (this is page 5 of 6).

Cyber attacks … from North Korea?

Officials are blaming North Korea for the recent cyber attacks against U.S. and South Korean government websites.

Yeah, right. Have you checked out North Korea lately? While South Korea has some of the fastest home Internet connections in the world, North Korea has … well, maybe a 56k dialup connection? Broadband companies aren’t exactly falling over themselves to offer service there and I can imagine that the quirky communist government isn’t exactly encouraging it, either.

I know Kim II Jong is a movie buff but I’m betting money he isn’t exactly streaming his shows from Netflix!

Postfix’s anti-spam capabilities

Some of the neighborhood email lists I run over at www.eastraleigh.org were getting attacked by spammers. I don’t really want to lock the lists down as some of them need to be accessible to folks not on the list. I also didn’t want to run something like ASSP because while it’s good, it’s written in perl and also a memory hog. That’s when I looked into what Postfix can do on its own.

Almost all of the spam sent to the lists have fake SMTP HELO statements. Thus, the following two lines added to the bottom of /etc/postfix/main.cf made Postfix very effective against spam:

smtpd_require_hello = yes
smtpd_helo_restrictions = reject_invalid_hostname,reject_unknown_hostname

Problem solved!

S1004 reportedly gutted

Jay Ovittore has been following the broadband backwater fight and reports that the N.C. Senate version of the bill, S.1004 was gutted yesterday.

Says Jay:

S1004 will be in the Public Utilities Committee tomorrow and for the first time I don’t have to worry about it. The Senate used a procedural rule to gut the bill and replace all text with new text that allows Progress Energy to convert some of it’s Coal fired plants to Natural Gas.

The is not a mere mention of cable, municipalities, Time Warner, none of it.

HB1252 is still alive and I will track it as always.

For now we can all claim another victory against Big Cable!

Fantastic news.

All Michael Jackson, all the time

Ok, so I said my peace about Michael Jackson the day he died, as did almost every other person and media outlet on the planet. Some media outlets have been milking Jackson’s death for all it’s worth.

I was really, really hoping that the News and Observer wouldn’t succumb to infotainment levels and put Michael Jackson’s funeral on the front page. Sadly, the N&O disappointed me againby putting this story on 1A, front and center. This is the biggest story in Raleigh?

Is there anyone out there still practicing real journalism?

Warrenton caboose tour

While we were visiting Kelly’s parents in Virginia we decided to take a bike ride on Warrenton’s greenway path. At the start of the greenway is the Norfolk and Western Railway Caboose 518554, a restored caboose on freshly-laid track where thirty years ago freight trains once served the town. We happened to pass the caboose right as a gentleman appeared to be locking it up, so being the curious sort I asked him what he knew about the caboose.

It turns out the gentleman was Ron Scullin, one of the three main volunteers responsible for obtaining the track and caboose and restoring both to like-new condition. Ron had just finished up with tours of the caboose, which are held once a month, but hearing that we were from out of town, he graciously volunteered to provide a personal tour.
Continue reading →

Robert McNamara

A few months ago I watched The Fog of War, an interview with Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. It was a candid, riveting interview where McNamara’s explains in his own words the decision making that pushed country deeper into the Vietnam War. It was sobering, too, to hear him call it a “terrible mistake,” but as his critics have said, he was three decades too late admitting that. It was also shocking to hear him describe how trigger-happy General LeMay almost got us all nuked during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’m glad a cool-headed guy like McNamara was there to keep us from Armageddon.

McNamara died in his sleep this morning at the age of 93. While he’ll always be remembered for Vietnam, he also was the long-time president of the World Bank and worked for nuclear disarmament.

H&R Block has spammed me yet again!

After unsubscribing a half-dozen times from every H&R Block email list and talking at length to an H&R Block customer service rep, I thought I had seen the last of the H&R Block emails.

But, no. A new one came in today with the subject of:

July Digits: Are you making the most of your home?

Time to black hole H&R Block. Enough is enough.

Update 7 July 2009: Mike at H&R Block swiftly showed up and has pledged to take care of the problem. Thanks, Mike!

The power of Facebook

A little thing happened with Facebook today that made me appreciate one of the best things about it: the ability of my friends to make new friends through me.

Whenever I want my Facebook friends to know I’m still alive but I don’t have much to say, I’ll sometimes post a song lyric as my status. Here’s one I posted this morning:

Mark Turner is a detective down in Texas.

It’s a song lyric from the Steve Miller Band’s Take the Money and Run. It wasn’t long before my friend Jon Carnes chimed in:
Continue reading →

Raleigh’s Sewer Monster is clump of tubifex worms

OIn our way out of town Wednesday we saw a city sewer inspection team in our neighborhood, inspecting the neighborhood sewer lines with a robot camera. The crew chatted with the kids and me about their robot camera, showed us one of the cameras, and explained how it all worked. The kids loved it and so did I.

Little did I know that video from another robot camera was making waves just then on the Internets. A YouTube video shows what looks like a strange creature living in Raleigh’s sewers. Over half a million viewers have checked out this supposed creature as it lives below Raleigh’s Cameron Village shopping center.

It turns out the “blob” is actually a bunch of tubifex worms, according to the City of Raleigh’s website. Tubifex worms are amazingly hardy creatures.

One week left for Siteseers.Net

I’m retiring my long-time domain, siteseers.net, next week. I’ve had it since 1997, back when I used ISDN to access the Internet. While it will be sad to see it go, I don’t really use it anymore. I’ve got more than a dozen other domain names and this one is needlessly adding to the cost of annual domain renewals.

I’m going to park it at Sedo in case anyone is interested in buying it.