Daley Ponderings

I found what I would call a bug in resolvconf today, though probably most people don't run a VPN server like I wanted to, so no one ever noticed before. (More)

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 in NH during the presidential primary has been annoying.  Apparently, phone calls have gotten cheap enough that most of the candidates have been calling.  Some of them, most notable Obama and Clinton, like to call multiple times just to make sure that we have heard of them.  Obama's volunteers were surprised that they weren't the first to call, since they had printed out lists (and call from all over the country), so it is strange that they would have sent out duplicate lists.  Clinton's supporters said that the computer just calls every number in order, and each phone doesn't talk to each other, so it was quite likely that I would get called within five minutes from the same office.

I don't know if that should be filed under persistence or incompetence.

I thanked the Huckabee supporters at the polling place for not calling, I think only Huckabee and Paul didn't call us.  (as a side-note, that means I get to stick to my mom's statement that she gives the callers - that she won't vote for anyone who calls, particularly after 10PM (that was Obama).  Unfortunately for mom, McCain did call once, but she is going to vote for him even though he called.

One of the Clinton supporters that I talked to on the phone didn't apologize at all for calling three times in the same hour because, "what do you expect - if you're going to have the first primary, you should expect it".  I pointed out that we have always had the first primary, and it hasn't ever been this bad before.  The Concord Monitor had a number of letters to the editor about it this year.  I expect that NH (at least) will push for an expanded do-not-call list to include the politicians too, which would be really nice. 

Someone on the postgrey list (Matthew, who apparently likes drinking coffee, as that is part of his email address) sent a script that he uses to report on his mail/spam. 

I modified it to work on my systems (and included it below), and here is the output for the last five days:

Rejected by RBL: 21147
Rejected by greylisting: 9917
Rejected by bad sender/receiver information: 959
Tagged as spam: 1457
Real email: 6278

So, ~4000 (50%) are rejected every day simply by being on a known blacklist, ~2000 (25%) are slowed down by greylisting (maybe are retried, maybe aren't), ~200 (2%) due to the spammers faking from or to addresses (or real people mistyping addresses), ~300 (4%) ending up in spam folders, and ~1200 (16%) actually ending up in inboxes.

Taking the inverse of the inbox mail, that means that 84% of email coming into my server is being thrown away one way or another.  I'm glad I have lots of filters to block almost all of it. (More)

For some reason, Verizon thought it would be a good idea to reconfigure their network early morning Christmas Eve (or late the night before, I am not sure which).  Unfortunately, they transferred me to a broken gateway, which has 3 minutes outages every fifteen minutes or so. (More)

Noah has added a fourth word to his consistent spoken vocabulary: "Uh-oh!"  Sometimes it sounds like "uh-uh" and sometimes "oh-oh" but it's always in the right context.

He also knows how to tell you to be quiet:  He puts his index finger to his lips, and blows out silently.

Yesterday, Jonathan did and said several things of note.  (More)

I somehow missed when Street View (and for that matter - Terrain) showed up on Google Maps.  I am not sure when that happened.  Actually, now that I look at the demo video, I did see the demo before, but I hadn't seen when it came to our house.  You can't quite see how ripe our hot peppers are.  Pretty nifty!  If you go down the street along Liberty Avenue, it is pretty interesting to watch the traffic, and wonder if the folks knew they were getting photographed.

I felt like going for a walk today, so Jonathan and I headed out, and I let Jonathan decide where we would go at each turn.  We talked some about compass directions, and where the sun was, and sometimes he had an idea which way home was (and then would immediately turn so as to avoid going home).  He seemed to think that if we were on a road that was in the direction of home, that would mean we would have to go home right then.

Most of the detailed turns on the map are intentional trying to remember how we crossed the streets.  We stopped by the Shursave to get some food for tonight, and Jonathan also needed a bathroom stop despite saying that he didn't need to go when we left the house. 

I was washing my hands at the bathroom sink, and Noah came excitedly running up with a toy boat.  But in his excitement, he smashed his face into the corner of the sink.  He cried surprisingly little, considering that there was blood in his mouth.  But I didn't notice the chip until about an hour later.  It is small but noticeable, on his top right incisor.  He is not bothered by it, and nursing is no problem (I was a bit concerned about that one) so I think we won't do anything about it for now.

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 root of the site and ended up at the blog, searched again (using the same bad spelling) and went away for a while, and then remembered how to spell it and found the correct page.

Since I wrote the solver years ago, I looked up how many people still use it... Last month, 279 people used it to solve 2633 puzzles. I think that is pretty neat.

Now that I am working on Facebook applications, we'll see if any take off - it is pretty crazy looking at the statistics for some Facebook applications: a million people using a different applications every day.

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 them their customer is a spammer, we'll see if they actually do give me the contact information or not. (More)

11/28 - Sanda has been teaching us Romanian, and one day Jonathan was asking what various random words were.  We thought he said, "walk" and Sanda hesitated because it's a verb, so when she asked him to clarify (I walk, you walk, she walks?) he said, "No! Not 'walk' with a w, 'lock' with an l."

 (More)

We have been getting more and more sales calls lately.  I try to take the time to report them to the do not call lists, both for our state and for the country.  We are supposed to get $100 for each violation (where the caller pays $1000).  But, I haven't ever gotten any money.

My new theory is that the do not call lists don't really have anything behind them, and companies now know that, so don't bother checking the list. (More)

This is what the HP technical support person said to me when I called about our printer.  Our faithful HP LaserJet 6L, which was manufactured 10.5 years ago, and given to us 6(7?) years ago.  It printed Mom's boarding pass just fine, and then one day later, all three indicator lights came steadily on.  The manual says that means an internal hardware error and if unplugging for 15 minutes doesn't work, call your service representative.  Well, Mom, were you wondering about something to get us for Christmas?

Here is my original post to enter the contest, here is my update.  

Our computer room/guest room is now functional and neat.  There are still two actively-being-worked-on server computers on the card table in the room.  We had hoped to have them both in their finished locations by the end of the month, but a broken new hard drive needed to be exchanged, and the colo guy hasn't gotten back to Jon yet.  It's possible that clementine will go there tonight.  But it still fits in the purpose of the room - the computer room - and the area is organized and neat. (More)