Death To Referrer Spam
Last night I was trying to edit some of my IFR entries (which, for those who have been waiting, should start appearing this week), but kept running into errors with Roller Weblogger. Roller is the Java Servlet based application that I’ve set up to run our blogs and for the most part it’s been pretty stable. So I couldn’t understand why I was having issues. A quick check into the logs showed that Roller was exhausting the database connection pool, which also didn’t make any sense. That is until I checked the Apache logs and discovered six IPs hammerring the blog server (mostly Mike’s for some reason) with a dozen hits or so per IP per second. As a result, Roller couldn’t keep up and was throwing exceptions due to an exhausted connection pool.
The IPs that were hammering our server are now blocked by the machine’s firewall. And I’m looking into an Apache module that will also help with DoS type attacks, whether an attack per se or not. I did a reverse lookup on the IPs and most seem to be regular IPs assigned to ISP blocks. That likely means that most of the IPs doing this referrer spam are computers part of a so-called zombie network. While I can’t say for sure, I’d be willing to bet that the majority of all zombie computers are running the Microsoft Windows operating system.
I’m in awe that Microsoft can continue to ship software that is built such that exploits are easy to take advantage of and are hard for Microsoft to fix. I realize that there are exploits in Linux also, but Windows is a commercial product that people are paying for. And yet, despite the influx of cash and army of programmers, Microsoft is unable to come up with anything remotely close to Linux in terms of security or ease of patching exploits. On top of that, the default Windows setup for the longest time was open to the world in terms of exploits.
So for now, I seem to have repulsed the referrer spam attack but I know that they’ll simply regroup and attack again. But in the meantime, I’ll be looking for other defences and hope to repulse them all for good. One can only hope.
Customer Service At Air Canada Jazz
For anyone who hasn’t read about the NYC trip Ali and I took back in October 2005, one of my pieces of luggage was stolen off the carousel at New York’s La Guardia airport. But luckily it was recovered as an abandoned bag within the LGA airport somewhere and Air Canada was good enough to deliver the back to me later that evening.
But really, this wasn’t Air Canada’s fault. This is a security issue at LGA. If they’d had better security at the airport this could have been potentially been prevented. And yet, Air Canada bears the cost as they are responsible for my luggage from the time it is checked in until the time I pick it up at the destination. I got my luggage back that night so I was very appreciative of Air Canada’s efforts. But since I was a baggage handler back in high school, I also know how expensive (big picture) it is to return luggage to passengers after the fact. So I took the time to write Air Canada a letter to express my appreciation and to explain that this wasn’t their fault and that this is something that should be address with the LGA airport authority.
And that was the last I heard of that. Until, that is, last Friday when I received an envelope in the mail from Air Canada Jazz. Inside was a personalized letter expressing regret at the troubles I experienced along with a cheque for $50 to ”put towards the cost of replacing my lost shoes and belt.” And I’m not making this up. An employee at Air Canada Jazz took the time to write me a personalized letter, hand write a cheque and mail it to me. I was already a big fan of Air Canada because I’ve never had anything but great service from AC. If this is a sign of the way Air Canada (and Jazz) are treating customers that experience problems then I can’t see myself ever favouring any airline other than Air Canada.
Office Dullard
In followup to yesterday’s post on drowning out background noise, I was reminded of Strong Bad (of homestarrunner.com fame) and his suggestions for dealing with the office dullard. Thought everyone might enjoy it. Of course, with headphones on, you can just pretend that nothing else exists.
Drowning Out Background Noise
At work I wear a pair of Sony MDR-605 Stereo Headphones. They have a great sound and though they cover your ear, they don’t cover your ear completely which means you don’t have sweaty ears when you take them off. I’ve had these headphones now for the better part of six years and they still perform perfectly. When I owned Bitonic with Marcos, the headphones were standard issue for all new employees; it was simply part of the welcome package for each of the ten employees we eventually had. And it was easily worth the $80 or so that we paid per set. I often wonder how many of the rest of the old Bitonic crew still have their headphones and how the headphones have stood up.
In any case, I’ve rediscovered that 80’s music is the best music to listen to to drown out any background noise while at the same time increasing productivity (except of course when you decide to stop working and blog about being productive). The other great thing about the MDR-605 headphones is that they allow you to covertly listen to the sounds of the office, while everyone else thinks you are actually listening to music. The secret? Simply mute your music and because the headphones don’t cover your ears completely, you can listen to whats going on without giving away that you are eavesdropping.
I’m so sneaky I should have been a spy. Of course, now that I’ve told you my secret I’m going to have to eliminate you. Sorry.
RSS Feed For Controller's Corner
Recently I’ve noticed that I have been missing Michael Oxner’s ATC-related postings. Michael used to post blog entries on his personal blog and I was an avid reader. But late last year he was asked to write for Aviation.ca and as a result moved his blog over there. At his new location there was no RSS feed so I stopped reading his articles as I really had no desire to surf to Aviation.ca every day to check for update. This morning however, I decided enough is enough and that I would write a simple perl script to fetch Michael’s articles from the site and construct an RSS 2.0 feed out of it.
Two hours later, I’m happy to report that I have successfully produced a working feed. Unfortunately for me, when I surfed over to the site to check the spelling of Michael’s last name, I noticed that the now have an RSS feed specifically for Michael’s articles. So, note to self, when about to undertake a new programming project, first search for alternatives that are already complete.
On a side note, I don’t think it’s fair to refer to Michael’s articles as a blog anymore. Once you associate yourself with a larger ‘information-based entity’, whether it’s a newspaper, e-zine, website, etc, you move into the journalist/writer space. I tend to think of Michael as a staff writer for Aviation.ca rather than a blogger. But whatever.
Lunch With KDE
On Friday I had lunch with KDE. Would you believe part of KDE? Okay, how about two KDE developers and a five year old? The truth of the matter is that I was lucky enough to catch Zach Rusin while he was still hanging out at Aaron’s place and invited them both to lunch. And since school was out, Aaron brought along p-man.
Nellie’s on 17 Avenue and 9 Street SW is an arm’s throw from the Zymeta office so we met up there for a late lunch. In honour of my guests, I had a meatless breakfast burito, which I have to admit was as good (if not better) sans sausage as it normally is. Lunch was also filled with lots of coffee, (!blueberry) icetea, and some rather deep discussions as to how KDE should be packaged and what applications should come standard with KDE.
After lunch, I took everyone over to the Zymeta office for a tour. I was the only one lame enough to actually be working so it was a complete tour, without interruption. It was a repeat visit for Aaron, who simply dropped by one day this past summer, but since things had changed somewhat there was something new for everyone. Of course, for Zach, it was all new so I showed off the jukebox application, the guts of the jukebox hardware and we talked about how various ‘cool’ features were implemented. Overall, a great afternoon.
In my defence of lameness, it was mostly an admin day anyway and thus a chance to catch up on some paperwork. I was also able to find some time to overhaul the firewall rules, which was long overdue. And of course, I ended off the work day (and in this case, work year) with a little ‘Enemy Territory’.
Tweaking KDE
If you are looking to improve the speed of your KDE installation, there is a good wiki page within the KDE website on improving performance. While some of the tips don’t apply to KDE 3.5.x and some of the tips are rather obvious (such as reducing ‘eye-candy’ features), the majority of the article is pretty good and, at the very least, you should end up learning one or two things you didn’t already know about KDE.
Mounting a Mac DVD
If you’re ever trying to mount a Macintosh OS X DVD on your Linux laptop, it’s possible. Though you’ll be hard pressed to find how to do that on Google. Maybe it’s because everyone else knows or maybe it’s because no one has ever needed to. In any case, make sure you have HFS+ support either built into the kernel or built as a module (called hfsplus) and then mount the DVD with a type of “hfsplus”.
mount -t hfsplus -r /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom/
Spam Stocks
Over the five days of my Christmas break, my personal email account, which I’ve had since 1999 and has been published on webpages since then, received 176 emails. Of those 176 emails, only 10 were actual emails; the remainder were junk, spam, phishing or virus/trojan emails. That works out to a little over 5% of my received email was actual email. While I’m sure that I’m not a typical example, I think that the email situation is only going to get worse, and for ISPs paying for bandwidth, that will translate into reduced profits.
Anyway, I digress. What I found interesting about the junk emails I received was that there were more ‘hot’ stock tip spam emails than normal. That got me wondering about how those stocks end up doing in the long run. Because for the most part, stock tips done on a grand scale such as this only really result in a short lived spike, which is good for anyone who already owns the stock but not so good for anyone buying right now. The result of my curiousity is the Spam Stock Tracker, a neat site that tracks how various stocks did after the spam emails first appeared. The results, as to expected, aren’t good for a naive investor. Almost all the stocks dropped and most dropped dramatically (down 80% or greater).
Video Troubles
Yesterday, after an almost flawless two or three years of playing videos on my Linux-based laptop, I was reminded of JWZ’s rant on the state of playing video under Linux. Two days ago I updated my xine-lib package. Unfortunately, that left me without the ability to play MPEG videos (ironically MOV videos still worked) and it wasn’t until yesterday that I noticed. A quick search revealed some issues with the ffmpeg package, so I updated ffmpeg to the latest version. Still no go. So I tried the latest versions of xine-lib and win32codecs. Alas, still nothing. So the bad news is that I can’t play any MPEG videos but I’m sure that the OSS community will come through, be it a Gentoo problem or something upstream. Worst case, I guess I can always rollback to an older version of xine-lib.
Update: a rollback to xine-lib-1.0.1 and ffmpeg-0.4.9_p20050226 works just fine; think I’ll stay with those versions for now.
