Let this thing DIE!

Leave a reply

Paramount is breathing life into its “Star Trek” franchise by setting “Mission: Impossible III” helmer J.J. Abrams to produce and direct the 11th “Trek” feature, aiming for a 2008 release.

– Variety.com — Trekkies have a new leader

Oh please … will they quit already. They’ve beaten this franchise to death … let it go.

It’s clear the people who are in charge of the Trek movies just don’t know how to do a good story.

Let’s see how it stacks up …

  • The Motion Picture — Boooorrrrriiinnngggg
  • Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn — Probably the best of the lot … action, adventure, angst, and a great villain.
  • The Search for Spock — Not bad … but not great
  • The Voyage Home — Pretty good. Added a humorous twist
  • The Final Frontier — Lame.
  • The Undiscovered Country — Stupid.
  • Generations — So so … reasonable crossover. At least Kirk died. I kind of consider this the start of a new series of movies.
  • First Contact — Not bad. Good action, good villain, good resolution.
  • Insurrection — Fair to middling. Would have been better suited as a mini-series or 3-4 part regular series episode.
  • Nemesis — Dumb.

The Dog Rang

Leave a reply

I was talking to my friend Steve today, asking him if he had gotten an email I sent him, when he responded …

Ah cr@p, I started to answer that yesterday, and the dog rang.

Most people, of course, would think that he mistyped and was saying that the Phone rang … but this would be wrong. The dog did indeed ring.

Steve & Ruth got a really cute dog a few weeks ago (photo forthcoming) … named Polly (short for Polygon, I think) … and they’ve trained her to ring a bell by the kitchen door when she needs to go out.

So while most people would more often get interupted by a phone ringing, Steve & Ruth will get interupted by the dog ringing.

Update: Added a picture of Polly.

The Gift of Compute

2 Replies

My mom needs a new computer … right now she has one of my old systems … a Pentium III 700mhz and a really junky 15″ monitor.

Since I no longer need theshire anymore (all the applications that were running on it have been moved to gondor), I figure I’ll give the system to mom.

Since her monitor is so junky also … I picked up a 19″ LCD display for myself, gave my old 19″ LCD display to Ginny, and took her 15″ LCD display for the servers (which frees up a lot of space on my computer workbench). Now I can also give mom a much nicer 17″ CRT display.

Dad just has to adjust her computer desk so the new monitor will fit. He groused about that when I told him what I was going to do.

Programmer Humor

Leave a reply

You can always tell what language a programmer works with by the way they names their kids.

  • COBOL programmers give their kids long hyphenated names … like ANNA-MARIA, MARIE-CLAIRE, or HORATIO-ALOYSIUS.
  • RPG programmers give their kids short names … like BOB, SUE, JOE, or AL.
  • C programmers don’t name their kids … they just point to them.

If you’re not a programmer, you probably won’t get it.

Backup Everything

3 Replies

Yes, this posting is in both the Life and Computer categories.

It’s just a reminder that you should backup EVERYTHING!

Your computer files, your insurance policies (which I have to do), AND the contact information on your internet domain registrations.

Specifically, make sure the contact information on your domain registrations has a valid email address that will work even if your normal email address isn’t working.

Case in point: I have a friend who’s internet domain has expired … and I’ve been trying to contact him about it because he has a lot of mail queuing up on my server. Unforunately, I don’t know if he’s actually receiving the mail because I can’t send to the email address he normally uses, and the email address on his domain registration seems kind of old.

[tags]email, domains, backup[/tags]

Another Article!

1 Reply

Heh … I’m going to be famous yet again!

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by a Neil Tardy of IBM Systems magazine about midrange.com.

The interview went well, and I was really pleased with the first draft Neil sent me.

Turns out the magazine wanted a photo of me for the article.

So, yesterday, they sent out a photographer to take the picture.

Since the article is about me and midrange.com, the best place to take the pictures was in the basement, Ginny and I had to actually CLEAN the basement up. Talk about a transformation. There’s actually ROOM down here.

Anyways the photographer, Chip, came by and took the picture. He tried a number of different setups … and found a few he liked. I liked working with Chip … he showed me a bit about using the histogram on the camera (although I’m not 100% certian I understood everything he told me, I am going to play around with it).

Obviously I’ll post a link (or at least a PDF) here when the article is published.

Another upgrade

3 Replies

This weekend I’m going to attempt another hardware upgrade.

The main mail server for midrange.com (rivendell) is showing it’s age … mind you, it’s still performing fine, but it’s pretty loud and it’s maintenance contract expired last month. A new contract would have costed $300, while a new server only cost $600.

So I got a new Dell PowerEdge SC430 (Pentium D, 3ghz, dual core, 1gb ram, 80gb DASD) to replace the current Dell PowerEdge SC600.

My plan is to backup the drives (mirrored pair) to a USB hard drive and then transplant the drives into the new server.

The only hitch is that the new server primarily runs on SATA, while my current drives are PATA. This I’m solving by getting an add-on ATA/133 card. I’ll set the system to boot off of the drives on the add-on card and use the SATA drive as swap space and a backup drive.

In the past, this kind of hardware upgrade went very smoothly. Mainly because Linux was able to detect the changed hardware and reconfigure itself appropriately. This is why I upgraded rivendell to Fedora Core 4. Redhat 8 would not have been able to deal with the new hardware.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Update 3/25 @ 3pm

Looks like the upgrade was a success!

There were a few minor glitches with the file system table (fstab) … since I put the main drives on the ATA/133 adapter card, they changed from being /dev/hda to /dev/hdc. I had to twiddle with the config to get it to boot properly.

And, in case you’re wondering, I did back it up to the USB drive. That took a bit of doing though, because the USB ports on the old system are ‘full’ speed (10mps). I had to put the USB drive on gondor and do the backup via the network in order to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.

[tags]Linux, Fedora, Dell, Poweredge, Upgrade[/tags]

Greylisting

3 Replies

For a while I’ve been using limited greylisting on my mail server with reasonably good success.

Last weekend I implemented site wide and I have to say the results are dramatic. The amount of spam (even low rated by spamassassin) has dropped off significantly.

Detailed information on greylisting can be found here, but in a nutshell:

Greylisting relies on the fact that spammers don’t use normal mail servers. Basically, the first time a mail server receives a mail delivery request, it responds with a soft failure … with a message indicating that greylisting is in effect and they should retry the delivery in certain amount of time (this is a human readable message, not machine readable). Since normal mail servers will accept this message and requeue the email for delivery, the email will then be delivered normally (probably on the next pass).

Spammers aren’t that persistent, so they just go on to their next target.

A good greylisting implementation retains the list of servers that have successfully delivered in a whitelist, so the next time they try to deliver there is no delay, the delay is only encountered once.

One downside of greylisting that I’ve found is that there is an increased chance of messages arriving out of order when a server tries it’s first message deliver. The reason is this … the first message delivery will be attempted and be rejected due to greylisting, if a different message delivery is attempted AFTER the greylisting delay has expired but BEFORE the first message is delivered, then the second message will be delivered and will be out of context.

I’ve got my mail server configured to greylist servers for only 2 minutes … so the next time the server tries to deliver, it’s almost certain to be successful.

I’m using milter-greylist with sendmail. It was easy to setup and works great.

[tags]spam, sendmail, greylisting, milter[/tags]