Rinsefirst

For those of you wishing to hear me speak server:

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Don\’t ask me to play translator though :-). (and yes, that does say something).

This last week has been one long battle with spammers. I\’m not entirely sure why we haven\’t had a problem with it until this week, but either way. I\’ve found lots of resources for dealing with spam and I thought I would share them. Most of them are server based so for most of you, this is useless:

spamassassin.apache.org

www.ijs.si

www.fight-spam.org.

www.sitepoint.com

www.evolt.org

I figure that\’s all I really had to write. Life goes on I guess. So back to life I go.

There is a language out there that is continously adapting. Some would say this is the language of computers, I\’d argue.. computers only speak binary. I would however like to think that the software on those computers like to change languages on a daily basis. There\’s no common way of telling people, \"hey, this is what went wrong\" or anything like that.

So all that said, I try to be a master at speaking server. I watch my radar\’s as best I can. Things like top, ps, df, du all give me insight into what the computer is doing and why (if you don\’t know what those are, your not a linux freak). My log files rarely get deleted, so as to give me even more information about stuff I might miss. I even have things outside my server (such as MRTG) that are monitoring what is going on outside the machine.

So you might think I\’m crazy, trying to watch all this stuff.

I might be.

But in the last 2 weeks, a group has decided that JR is a target for attack. I don\’t know if they dont like us. I don\’t know if they want us offline. I don\’t know if they are just trying to relay junk email. I don\’t know why in the world after 2 years of being online, they have decided to come after our primary server.

What I do know, is they have managed to make my life a little harder the last two weeks.

Right as the Daytona 500 was starting, I get a phone call regarding the email server. It appears that the software is running, but not delivering any mail. That\’s exactly what we don\’t want to hear. I look into it, and sure enough, something has jammed the server hard. It\’s still running but in a Zombie state.

For those of you who don\’t know what a Zombie is, it\’s reffered to as an immortal process. It\’s what happens to a program when you tell it to close, and it says \"Ok\" and then doesn\’t close. Telling it to close again does nothing because it\’s already agreed to do that. Their is only 2 things you can do when a Zombie occurs (and actually they are the same thing): Kill it\’s parent, or kill the server.

That ment to get rid of it and restart postfix I was going to have to reboot unless I could find the parent and take it out.

Luckily I did.

I\’m not sure how \"they\" got the mail server to go zombie. I\’m not entirely sure what caused it. All I know is I\’m now taking some more advanced prevent measures to insure that they don\’t get to do this again…

So now that I\’m done talking servers for the moment:

Our first wedding went \"great\". Only a few minor problems, I hope to document more here as the process continues. The Daytona was also pretty good, with the exception of Tony Stewart.

Let\’s recap Tony:

Tony at one point in Nascar history, had the reputation of being a jerk. No one liked him, he was all about himself. Last year, something felt diffent about him, he was racing happier, he was racing more as a team, than about himself. I personally think thats what lead him to victory last year. Today however, it was Tony being Tony again. He had to be involved in at least 3 crashes today, and I believe he played a role in just about every penalty that was assessed. This was after a week of him complaining that everyone else was driving to aggressive.

Tony: Grow up.

So I woke up way to early this morning due to some downtime at MSA. I decided that I should continue my little series of lab tests to see if what I\’m thinking for the next version of Rinse First will actually be feasible. Of course it\’s always feasible, just not very often you see it done, most likely due to it\’s heavy difficulty rating and lots of room for usability error.

So needless to say, here is the test:

rinsefirst.com

As you can see, it has a really lame color layout, but that\’s not what this is a test of. This is a test of whether or not those columns on the side do what they are supposed to. You\’ll notice that if you resize the page, the columns shrink, and vise versa. If you make the columns to small, they give you an error, and if you make them bigger again, they give you back your content.

You can guess where I\’m taking all of this, but I\’m not sure how much longer til I have a design I like, mixed with the usability to make all my dreams come true. It\’s probably time for me to bring Alex in on this project and have him throw some of his age-old wisdom at me.

Back to the lab test… It works (as far to my knowledge) 100% of the time in Firefox. It works 99% of the time in IE 6 on the pc (there\’s a little bug regarding the right div being 1 pixel to far to the right, and then causing a horizontal scrollbar to show up, but it doesn\’t always happen. It worked for me in IE 5.2 on the mac with about 95% functional, again the scrollbars showed up. Safari came in last with about a 90% approval rating, with it adding enough scrollable white space to part the red sea.

We then get to the browsers that I in theory don\’t have to support if I don\’t want to (C-Grade Browsers, by Yahoo Standards, see: developer.yahoo.net)

To test these I simply loaded up netscape 4.8 to see what would happen. Because I\’m not a big fan of partially broken sites (like this one on the mac), It now loads up with no CSS and a javascript message telling you to upgrade. I figure for unmodern browsers, that\’s good enough.

In other news: Valentines day came and went yesterday. All in all a good day, and it would be worth my time to write here that I\’m still madly in love with my Valentine for the last 2+ years (Amber Radabaugh).

In more other news: Ok, I have no other news. Thanks for watching.

Pretty crazy weekend if you ask me.

Friday night JR took a hit to it\’s primary server in the form of an email attack. They didn\’t take down the server, which was good, but they did managed to get about 10,000 emails out to AOL customers. Hopefully it\’s been dealt with and doesn\’t happen again.

Saturday was a day of nonstop shopping and meetings. Richard, Amber and I hit up National Camera Exchange and got outselves a tripod for the Wedding on saturday. We also hit up Home Depot and built our own stabilizer. All in all, a pretty cool deal if you ask me.

Sunday was a long long day. The early morning (and I do mean early) was spent doing server maintence at Implex. All in all, it went… OK. The server itself (as a whole) was down for just under an hour while they made upgrades to the electrical lines. The webserver was down for only about 1 minute after that, but one of the 2 name servers came up incorrectly (the old one came up). That said, 50% of you were not able to get to this site for about 10 hours. For some people, longer… The email server came up again as always and didn\’t a fine job receiving emails, but we still had an issue with getting them from the webmail or via pop. Some of them carried into today, but I believe them to all be resolved.

The afternoon was spent doing some clothes shopping and watching Nascar. The Auction Draft has in fact ended with Jeff and Kenesth being my primary 2 now. It\’s going to be an interesting year. I will spare you all the details of the auction and how it went down, because I\’m sure they will somehow surface on this blog at a later date.

Take all that into account, and if you were counting, You might have counted that I went to and from Minneapolis 3 times. Add in today, that\’s 4. Lots of mileage.

Tonight, assuming I can get most of what I need to get done today, all will be good.

So the auction for drivers for the 2006 Nascar season is well underway. I\’ve taken the stance this year that no driver that has any sort of money value to him should go for less than he is worth. So far, I feel we are doing a better job than last year, exept for one thing. There is still a major void on some drivers that are pretty dang good. Below is the bidding as it stands (12:01pm)

1 Tony Stewart 52

2 Greg Biffle 56

3 Carl Edwards 34

4 Mark Martin 10

5 Jimmie Johnson 39

6 Ryan Newman 25

7 Matt Kenseth 15

8 Rusty Wallace 0

9 Jeremy Mayfield 1

10 Kurt Busch 25

11 Jeff Gordon 31

12 Jamie McMurray 0

13 Elliott Sadler 1

14 Kevin Harvick 0

15 Dale Jarrett 0

You\’ll notice the top 3 from last year all have significant dollar values on them, but Mark Martin, a guy that pulled over 50 last year, isn\’t pulling his weight this year. Jimmie makes sense, and newman is pretty good. Kenesth is probably worth more namely because he got off to a rough start last season. But then we hit Rusty Wallace and Jeremy Mayfield, two guys that lead my dad to lots of victories last year, and both are coming in at less than 10 dollars. Kurt Busch has a pretty penny on him, considering that he has a new sponser and a new type of car. Jeff is a fan favorite, but some say he\’s on his way out. Jamie McMurray was a pretty big contender last year, as was elliot sadler for John. It\’s just curious how it all adds up. I\’ll keep ya all informed with the final results when they come in.

So in my spare time I\’ve kinda been working on Sunfox, the lighter weight version of Oxwaf. It\’s not very far along, the documentation has a lot of holes in it, and in reality, it\’s nothing more than a wrapper for the filesystem at this point. It doesn\’t have some tricks that the file system can\’t do (for example, wildcard filenames), but that doesn\’t get you much in our world anymore.

Still, it\’s a stable release, and it\’s enough to run a basic webpage with little to no trouble. At the moment, it\’s powering www.sunfox.net which is the site that JR is distributing it at. Feel free to check it out and give it a try. If you do, I would love to hear what you think about it. (Note: it requires PHP5 and Mysql 4+)

In other news: I\’ve been keeping busy. Monday marked the arrival of the Sony HDV-FX1 which I must admit is a very cool camera. If I had a photo album, I might have uploaded pictures of it, but at the moment I don\’t so I won\’t.

I\’ve also been practicing poker, which is more to say, I continue to find time to play it whenever I can. I\’ve been keeping detailed stats as to how I play the game, how often I win, money made, etc. It\’s interesting to know that after 50 tournament style games, I show a profit of about 20 cents a game, and a win percentage of about 33 percent. It\’s interesting to note also that payout percentage is 30% (aka, 3 out of 10 people walk away with money). So someone should figure that out for me sometime. If I have a 33% change of getting 1 of those 3 spots… What are my odds of getting any one of those spots? I suppose you would need more data.

In even more unrelated news: Animal crossing seems to be a joy. I have yet to put it back on the wifi since the weeklong server experiment, but I will again shortly. I just need to sell some turnips and stuff, and then I think we\’ll be good to go.

I feel like I owe the world a better blog. Maybe that time is coming…