Anyone looking for a server should look no further than eBay.
Today’s deal? Sun Enterprise 10,000 server, $2499. I think my laptop has more hard drive space, but 58 SPARCs at 336 MHz (4MB cache) and 55 GB RAM? Nice. Just plunk a couple 500 GB drives in there. 😉
Edit: fixed the link.
Don’t forget to get your free taco from Taco Bell, conveniently scheduled to be given away on Tuesday from 2 to 5.
For those in the area, here is a gameplan. You may want to focus on the Boston area and skip Western Mass. (Unless, of course, you are in Western Mass.) You get more bang for your buck. Or, more accurately, you get more taco for your free.
Unfortunately, collecting my tacos due will require that I skip two classes in a row. While I argue that it’s a sunk cost, it’s been pointed out that the opportunity cost of my tacos will be about $300. And you should include the cost of complementary goods, too.
So it seems that I’m going to class on Tuesday from 2 to 5. But, in return for my roadmap, if you’re collecting tacos, remember who did the laborious research of typing “Taco Bell” into Google Maps for you.
I went out to get some more shots today. I decided to try shooting in raw mode instead of JPEG. The images were 7 MB instead of 2 MB, but I have a lot more control afterwards. It’s much slower when you shoot in burst mode, though, so I switched back to JPEG.
Afterwards, though, I wondered if I could open it. It turns out that Ubuntu handles it natively. (I can’t say the same for Windows.) So I uploaded the files to Flickr, but it turns out that Flickr doesn’t display .crw files. So I had to export it with the GIMP.
In addition to letting you export to JPEG, it lets you export to ASCII. And an HTML table. So, for grins, I exported one of my six-megapixel pictures to an HTML table. It popped up a warning that it would almost certainly crash my browser. I did it anyway. Several minutes later, it finished writing to disk. It was a little shy of 300MB. It didn’t really crash Firefox per se, but I didn’t see anything but gray table cells. I’m not sure what went wrong, really, but I can forgive it for not accurately displaying a 300MB table.
That’s a JPEG. Although that was a native JPEG, not one saved from a CRW.
I feel like no one in politics can ever agree, and that if a bill were introduced to, say, ban child abuse, someone would come out against it. But still, I feel like this is something everyone should support. There’s a strong correlation between kids whose families aren’t there for them and kids who end up in jail. And there’s a strong correlation between kids who can’t finish high school and kids who end up in jail. Or selling drugs. Or homeless. Or shot by peers. Take a wild gander at how much keeping children locked up costs us each year. An estimated $1 billion. Why do we make it so hard for these kids to get help? Why don’t we offer GEDs and the like to people in jail? (And not just the kids, although they need it most.) Why are we not doing more job training? We spoke tonight with someone who runs a bookstore. It’s run entirely by kids who were referred there by the Department of Social Services and by probation officers. They learn job skills. “It takes them a long time to see that they matter,” she told us. Soon they come to realize that, and she praised their work ethic after that. One kid came in to talk to us. He didn’t want to speak about his past, so I don’t know the story, but he’s 17 and in this program. He’s working on finishing up high school, and is not just working in this business, but is one of the people helping to run it. After a while, the kids “graduate” out of the program and get real jobs, or go to college. It’s impressive, but it gets exponentially more impressive when you realize that every single person in this program is someone who would be in jail, committing crimes, homeless, or some other miserable fate that’s not just bad for them, but a drain on society as a whole. Why is this program an anomaly? Why are we not trying to place every kid who’s in jail in programs like this? It’s costing us $1 billion to keep them in jail. They’re wasting their lives away there and, when they get out, they’re almost certainly not going to be any different. The recidivism rate in the US is at about 60%. That is to say that 2 out of 3 people release from jail will end up in jail again. It sounds like the system is very broken. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t lock violent criminals up. If you commit a crime you should go to jail. But it seems incredibly short-sighted to not educate these people and help them get jobs. If you come out of jail with the help of drug crime defense attorneys from Missouri and the government helps place you in a job, you’re going to have less incentive to sell drugs or hold up convenience stores. And if you get an education and/or job training? Even better! Of course it’s not a cure-all. People will always do stupid things because they’re drunk, or stab someone because they’re angry. But when two-thirds of people who go to jail get trapped in a downward spiral of crime, I think it’s time that we do something to try to help. By all means, we need other stuff too. But I’m fed up with people giving the ax to plans for petty reasons like, “There would still be some criminals.” Of course there will. But let’s at least start to do something!
The way I use this server gives me a luxury that bigger sites don’t: my visitors come from a select range, and I don’t have to worry much about blocking people erroneously. Therefore I can be quite aggressive in blocking IPs. /etc/hosts.deny is my new favorite file.
When I moderate comments here, I have a few choices… I can approve it, delete it, or mark it as spam. I never got what marking it as spam did… Apparently it doesn’t do much but set a ‘spam’ bit. (I’d hoped it trained Bayesian filters or something, but no such luck.) But what it does do is make it super-simple to construct an SQL query to pull out all the IPs that have posted spam. Add a little more and you get just the IPs this month that had posts flagged as spam. And you drop them in /etc/hosts.deny.
But then I was watching the system log file, and noticed lots of spam coming in. I’m not running much of a mailserver, so most addresses are bouncing. (Especially since they’re spamming addresses that have never existed?)
This is good news, though, for the IP-banhappy out there. Here’s my latest concoction:
grep NOQUEUE /var/log/messages | awk '{print $10}' | \
sed "s/[/ /g" | sed "s/]/ /g" | awk '{print "ALL", $2}' | \
sort | uniq -c | sort | tail
In a nutshell, we look for “NOQUEUE” in the log files, pull out the 10th column (IP), split out the junk so it’s just a numeric IP, sort it, weed out the dupes with uniq and pass it the -c flag, which has it count the number of times each line occurs, and then we sort that, so that the list is now sorted by the number of bounces. It defaults to ascending order, so that the top of the file is all people who’ve only e-mailed one invalid address. So the ‘juicy’ part is the end of the file. So we pipe it to tail, which, by default, shows the last ten lines. So the output looks like:
5 ALL 219.140.194.117
5 ALL 85.130.84.9
6 ALL 86.152.15.119
7 ALL 83.182.186.224
8 ALL 125.181.70.135
8 ALL 207.144.11.87
10 ALL 125.212.188.156
15 ALL 88.238.145.22
17 ALL 217.26.169.66
17 ALL 62.149.197.247
You could use a little more magic to automatically add the second and third columns to /etc/hosts.deny, but I prefer to do it this way… The reason is that sometimes (not in this example) you’ll see posts from a range of similar IPs. It’s more of a judgment call where you draw the line, so I like to give it the once-over.
The news lately has been pretty surreal. By “lately” I mean the past few years. For example, who would ever think that:
Really, I’m not sure anything could hit the news and not surprise me these days?
I’m a big fan of things that don’t suck horribly. Sometimes I like to look up song lyrics on the Internet. And there are no sites that I’m a fan of, if you catch my drift…
There are a handful of lyrics sites that always rank highly on Google. But I’d say that 98% of the time, the lyrics contain egregious errors. They completely mishear a line (often in ways that just common sense can show is wrong), or have glaring misspellings, or just typos. And terrible formatting. Always.
I don’t get how a whole industry can be crappy, but that’s beside the point.
There’s a site called WikiLyrics. At one time the founder commented on a blog from years ago when I called for such a service. But the site is pretty hard to navigate, and looks too much like a wiki.
SongMeanings is the site I like most. The lyrics are usually spot-on. And, best of all, you can post comments on the ‘meaning’ of a song. But they have odd uptime problems, where the site will be down for days at a time. I haven’t been able to get to it for several days now.
If I had a lot of money, I’d buy out the handful of companies that always rank highly on Google for song lyric searches, along with Song Meanings, and develop one site to rule them all. Registered users could edit the lyrics, with some oversight. (My intuition says that music-related stuff is much more prone to vandalism.)
Rather than a bajillion obnoxious ads, we’d have a couple tasteful ads. Ideally, it would be more specific links: buy the song from a vendor who pays me a cut of every sale, and buy band merchandise with a similar arrangement. You could also try to work out something with concert tickets.
Work on setting up 30-second samples of the song. It is my understanding that 30 seconds counts as fair use.
Let people leave comments, but have Digg-style ‘voting.’ (Plus active moderators.) People can leave comments. The stupid ones get moderated down, the really stupid ones get deleted, but the good, insightful ones show up on top. The ones that say, “This song is about…”
And, most importantly, you need a nice clean, easy-to-use UI. Every single lyrics site gets this wrong. I don’t want to go through categories. I don’t want to have to specify whether it’s a song or an artist. I want to type in something and get it. I don’t want the lyrics to be in a 300-pixel wide frame that’s flanked by ads and other useless crap.
You can develop this on your own, but buying some other lyrics sites gives you steady traffic, high link rankings, and an established set of lyrics, however pathetic they may be. And, by buying them out, you ensure that the Internet has one less terrible website.
You are free to steal and use this idea. In fact, you are encouraged to steal and use this idea.Â
It just occurred to me how freaking weird the phrase “know, in the biblical sense” is.
You know we have a problem when a slang term for sex comes from the inerrant word of God.
I basically have no credit history. Applying for a credit card has been on my to-do list for a long time, but it’s one of those tasks that’s very easily displaced by almost anything.
The more I think about it, though, the more I don’t want to. I need to do something to build up my credit, but I see it as giving in to them. And what scares me most is that I’m not sure who they are. Who determines my credit score? What variables do they use? They won’t say! They made up their own game with their own rules, didn’t tell anyone the rules, and expect everyone to play the game.
If I go to apply for a loan, I don’t like the idea of the bank telling anyone. I don’t like the idea of the bank asking someone about me. And I certainly don’t like them asking someone I’ve never even heard of about me. Especially when that someone is only obliged to tell me what they have on file about me once every three years. (Sort of.)
And so far I’ve only described my issues with credit ratings. That’s the least of my worries.
What scares me most is all the horror stories. Some of them aren’t that big of a deal to me. I’m very averse to the idea of spending money I don’t have, so I don’t see myself ending up in credit card debt, and would expect to pay off my balance immediately. So in that way, the interest rate isn’t a big deal.
But that’s just one of their shady tactics. One company apparently tried just adding a nominal fee to what you owed, so that if you owed nothing, you’d end up accruing charges. Others make it all but impossible to cancel your card.
The overall impression I get from the credit industry, in a word, is deception.
Signing up for a credit card to build my credit history, to me, is basically saying, “Let them abuse you now so that they don’t abuse you later.” I’m sure 90% of people don’t have issues with their credit card companies. (Actually, I’m not sure at all. I’m sure that more than 10% don’t have issues, but I’m not comfortable putting the number at 90%.) But the fact that the majority of people don’t get scammed/abused/raped doesn’t mean that I want to sign up. (The majority of Iraq soldiers come home alive and well, but I’m not going to enlist.)
I have a check card from my bank. I can use it as a credit card, or a debit card, or an ATM card. It’s all I need. The things I can’t do with it are things that I don’t want to be able to do: I can’t buy a car and charge it to my credit card, for example. But it would be financial suicide to do that anyway.
I intensely dislike the idea of playing by their rules. I’m not sure I have a choice, but I’m not jumping up to do it, either.
You know how they say that people who live on ships come onto land and sway back and forth?
I bought an XBox 360 for the school. (I’m being reimbursed, of course.) While I was there, I couldn’t help but pick up the VGA adapter for XBox, since I have a spare 17″ LCD monitor and a spare XBox here with me. I can now play at 1280×1024 (nice!) Still no match to the 1920-ish that we’ve got on the ridiculous LCD TV that Kyle bought, but still…Â It sure beats trying to play on, say, a 17″ CRT TV.
So I spent the past half hour or so playing a demo of Blazing Angels. It’s kind of fun, but it takes a long time to get used to. When you keep the camera focused on your target, you can easily lose perspective of whether you’re flying up or down or what. So I died one too many times and got sick of it, so I moved over to the computer.
As I moved the mouse, I was rocking back and forth, and even more disoriented when the whole world didn’t sway with my mouse movements. It’s way more disorienting than I’d expect. Remind me to never become a sailor.