Daley Ponderings

Just when I thought I was a geek, the bar is raised... I forgot to post this a while ago: Tim Hawkins and the "homeschool family".  Prairie Home Sausage is kind of funny - and has a picture of a really neat merry-go-round.   Lastly, being... (More)

I have been looking through my web access logs trying to track down a pesky LifeType bug.  And I came across someone who had used my Krypto solver one day and then tried to come back a couple days, but mistyped the URL as kyrpto, which of course didn't work.  So, then he went to... (More)

I have been getting a bunch of spam through my contact form over the last couple of days, so I thought I would check out what they are trying to do.  The domain's contact information is protected by privacyprotect.org, so we can't know who they are, though I filled out a form showing... (More)

I got a couple spams through my Lime Daley contact form the last couple days, so I took another look at the script that I was using.  I wrote it a year or two ago, and was my first attempt at writing an anti-spam tool that was designed to have a 0% false negative rate (ie. humans can't... (More)

Peter was nice enough to loan me a Kill-A-Watt for a couple weeks to investigate power usage around our home.  I have thought about buying one before, but borrowing one is certainly better, though it is quite a bit of fun to test out devices to see how much power they use. I... (More)

Everyone always says how user-friendly Windows is, and as I sit here waiting for my Windows computer to endlessly update itself, I am struck by how much harder it is to update my Windows laptop than all of my Linux (Debian) servers put together. On Debian: Type "aptitude",... (More)

I am in the middle of a non-direct red-eye flight from Seattle to Pittsburgh.  I was supposed to go to Charlotte, NC on the way, but USAir called(!) last night to tell me to come a half hour early to the airport (I was already there and had already checked in, and having a relaxing dinner... (More)

Last weekend, Heather was sick with mastitis, which meant she just wanted to lie in bed all day with flu-like symptoms. It actually started on Friday morning, and she did get progressively better throughout the day, but still decided to stay home from care group that night. I was planning on... (More)

I hadn't ever gotten a call from a domain scammer before, but today I got my first one. He wanted a fax number to send some sort of notification to. Since I know my domain isn't going to expire for a year, and I was pretty sure that neither my registrar nor my DNS host had asked these guys to... (More)

I don't think I have written about USA Datanet on this blog.  They just reminded me to tell everyone how great they are, so I will gladly do so. USA Datanet is our long distance provider.  They provide a local number that we call when we think we are going to make a lengthy... (More)

This is the hardest one I have ever worked on. [ Update 10/24/2006: thanks to you all reading this post and posting other links, I have since found more interesting ones -- look through the comments - the one posted on October 9th appears to be pretty hard, though maybe I just made a mistake on... (More)

Found an interesting spyware/virus/malware/etc at the Quinlisks yesterday. It was a "Browser Helper Object (BHO)", a method of getting your own code put inside of the windows explorer, and thus pretty hard to remove.They run Ad-Aware every once in a while to clean up their computer,... (More)

As mentioned on the GirlTalk blog , there are a what I think is a disproportionate number of men in the Sovereign Grace churches that believe the best way to show affection to other men is to make fun of them, particularly in public. (I suppose I am continuing the stereotype published by the... (More)

Based on an excruciating headache Wednesday afternoon, October 12, that did not go away, Jon and I headed to West Penn Hospital Emergency Room at 10:30pm. A friend came to the house to watch Jonathan while he slept. Here is an aside - it was so good for Jonathan that he did not come, he would... (More)

I happened to check my logs this evening and discovered that a spammer had tried to send one of my clients a few emails over the weekend. Only 100,000 or so. He was being blocked via an RBL, but that still takes up resources, so I manually blocked his IP address, as well as ran a ping -f -s... (More)