Daley Ponderings

I haven't looked at how much time it took us to do taxes this year - I thought we were doing pretty well, time-wise, until we blew 8 hours or so today finishing them off (or is it them finishing us off, I'm not sure which...) I noticed a number of places where the strange, complicated... (More)

Most of you who know me realize that I don't hardly pay any attention to news, and particularly since I started working from home, I can't even get my daily news reports from conversations in the common area.  So, I generally figure I don't know most of what is "going on" in the... (More)

Cygwin is one of the packages that seems to often break when I upgrade it.  In their defense, it is a large collection of packages, so presumably hard to get everything right in all circumstances.  I run Debian (testing) on my Linux systems, and I rarely have any issues during... (More)

The IRS hasn't published their calculator yet, and I have been reading about lots of people trying to figure out what to do with line 70 on their 1040 (ie. the famous RRC that is causing probably more time wasted than was worth the money that was sent out last year. So, I wrote a... (More)

Heather and I spent several days over the last week at our old house, cleaning and fixing various things that our previous tenants broke. It is pretty annoying to have people totally not care about your property, and live in pretty disgusting conditions, presumably to get back at me for... (More)

We've gotten two calls in the last couple days from people claiming that we called them, and quite irate about it.  What they didn't realize is that you can't really trust the caller-id values displayed on your phone - they are trivially forgeable by anyone, and I think relatively hard to... (More)

Mydad had mentioned a news article story a month ago about some company charging a whole bunch of people $.01 each on their credit cards; presumably with the thought that no one would complain about a $.01 charge, and since they charged a million people or something, they made a bunch of... (More)

I have to say that the real baby is much more squashed in me than that little graphic baby is on the sidebar.  (S)he pokes up knees and heels all the time and increasingly presses on my bladder.  I am ready to go, but still have plenty of things I can do while waiting.  When Mom and Janet... (More)

Our new house has fairly long hot water lines to the kitchen and bathroom, so I was looking for different solutions to getting there to be hot water quicker.  I researched some tankless heaters, and for the kitchen and washing machine (on one trunk) a small heater (12 amps) would have... (More)

I think I have written before about DenyHosts , but this evening, it prevented somewhere around twenty thousand individual hosts trying to login to one of my servers. The hackers have gotten smarter - that they used to just try from one host, which was trivially blockable, even manually.... (More)

I had delayed posting this since I think people were getting tired of hearing about each house that we put an offer on.  But, now that this offer has been accepted, and I don't expect too much trouble with the inspections, I figure it is safe enough to post.I said to a friend the other day,... (More)

It took some amount of work to get Linux up and running on my laptop , but I just got a new computer ($50 from Peter's workplace - let me or him know if you are interested, there might be some more left) and installed Linux in an hour two, including copying all the old data from the old... (More)

When a customer says that he has a smaller project than the one I just did, don't pay attention, and think about the quote, rather than simply estimating the time as less than the previous project. Yesterday, I did a project for a friend (one who let me have better access than average... (More)

I woke up this morning to find Taiwan's Yahoo server rejecting emails that were supposedly sent using my server.  I originally figured it was the regular old spammer trick of using invalid return addresses until I noticed that it was one of my servers who was reporting the failure, rather... (More)

Our photo album wouldn't publish on this last update, and it took quite a while to figure out what the problem was.Originally, the error had to do with the library Encode not being compiled correctly, and I had to run enc2xs on the Encode module.  I am not sure whose "fault"... (More)