U.S. Army Web servers hacked. The incident occurred last week, when an undisclosed number of U.S. Army Web servers were hit in a so-called “0-day” exploit, one that takes advantage of a flaw nobody knew of and for which there was no available patch. [Computerworld News]
Archive | March, 2003
MySQL 4 Declared Production-Ready
Woo-hoo! With transaction support, replication, speed, scalability, and a low cost of entrance, this should give the other database manufacturers incentive to innovate. MySQL 4 Declared Production-Ready from Slashdot
Blogging Anniversary
Happy anniversary to my blog. I started a year ago today. I’ve only used Radio since January 1st, but the older blogs have been scraped off that web site and are archived here in month-to-month format, as the “Twiki Blog Archives 2002” link over to the right.
I’ve enjoyed this outlet for my writing, although I hope to start doing some more in-depth essays. On to Year Two!
Children of Dune, on the SciFi channel
Blogging is a bit light this week, with some work keeping me busy, and my evenings absorbed with the SciFi Channel’s “Children of Dune” mini-series. I really indulged my geek self this weekend and sat and watched the entire 3-part, six-hour original on Sunday, and I’ve caught the two hour episodes each night. It wraps up tonight.
Frank Herbert’s “Dune” is one of the finest pieces of science fiction written, with complex ecological, scientific, political, religious and philosophical threads running through it. It is one of my favorite science fiction novels. The follow-on books were never as bright and sharp and innovative as the original, but the entire bunch were well worth reading. It’s a good adventure plot, too. Cute chicks and lots of explosions, too. Fun for the whole family.
Wrox Press on the Rocks
Wrox hit the rocks as Glasshaus cracks. IT publishing community collapses, from The Register. Condolences to my fellow writers and authors.
Another Hot Visual FoxPro Community…
User 10,000 at PortalFox – Usuario Numero 10,000. It is our Pleasure to say that Didac Royo from Sant Cugat, Spain. It is our PortalFox Register User 10,000
Nos es grato informar que D’dac Royo de Sant Cugat, Espa–a, es el usuario 10.000 de PortalFox.
Thank you very much for all your support at 3 years of the creation of PortalFox Web Site
Muchas gracias a todos por permitirnos llegar a este nœmero a 3 (TRES) a–os de la creaci—n de PortalFox
PortalFox Team
Equipo de PortalFox [FoxCentral.Net]
The Code Red List continues to grow:
64.35.112.148 – 3 days after I have sent them notice. I’ll just block their address from the server.
150.183.190.4 – The Korea Institute of Science and Technology
64.136.144.62 – Dock.net, Camarillo, California
64.110.98.80 – Ichinet, Chittagong, BD
64.119.79.88 – TXKNet, Texarkana, Texas
66.255.146.107 – Connexsys, Atlantic Beach, Florida
Only six unique attacks today. What do other people do with these? Put the IP address on a permanent black list? Ignore them?
A new $400 server
So, we need a spare machine as a file and print server to let us straddle the transition of existing machines and make an on-disk backup of essential systems. (Current backup strategy is CD-Rs, ZIP disks, and duplicated spindles). The problem is that the machine with all of the hard disk space to store the backups is also the one getting the overhaul (including a DAT tape backup) so we can make the industrial-strength backups that we need. So, Steve and I hit the web, scouting OEM sites for a cheap, simple server. It needs a CPU, a NIC and a hard disk. Most everything else is optional.
So, here’s what we ended up with:
- Biostar M7VKQ w/Duron 1300 CPU, integrated sound, video and NIC, $96 at Tom’s Computer Warehouse
- Generic case with 300W power supply
- Generic CD-R (56x), floppy, 256 Mb RAM
- 100 Gb 7200 RPM Maxtor HD on sale at the local big box for $89
Total damages, with shipping $400. We’ll dig a 14″ VGA monitor, keyboard and mouse out of the cellar for the time needed to set it up, and then operate it remotely after that. Quite a good deal!
Nature abhors a vacuum….
… and your stuff always expands infinitely to fill your space. A few years ago, when Steve and I assembled my last desktop tower development workstation (Athlon Thunderbird 800, 512 Mb RAM – woo-hoo!), we installed a 40 Gb boot disk and striped two 30 Gb drives on the built-in Highpoint RAID controller (KT7-RAID motherboard, for those of you into those things). So who’s ever going to need that much space?
After several years of faithful service, the machine is getting re-assigned as a file and intranet server. Re-deployed and re-tasked, as the PHB in me would like to say. And I have to clean up the mess. And what a mess it is. With an infinite amount of disk space, you hardly ever have to clean up after yourself :). I’m a faily well-organized guy, so lots of the software is just where it should be. My 4-CD collection of movie trailers and their backups, my Install directory, with all the files I’ve installed on the machines. Backups of those machines which have gone before us.
But some of the little junk is amazing. The Install directory was 11 gigabytes in size. Something’s wrong there. It turned out that I had full RTM ISOs of VFP 7, VFP 8, Mandrake 8.1, RedHat 7.3 and 8.0 and lots of other treasured little goodies lying around. Figuring out what to burn to CD for posterity and what to dump is going to take a while…
Who said?
“There are only twenty-three problems in computing and we solve them again and again.”
I heard the quote from Larry Barnes, then of the “Bob and Larry Show” at the local Microsoft office, now with Accenture, last I checked. He didn’t claim the quote as original and I, as well as he, may have paraphrased it. Does anyone know the original source?
It does certainly ring true. I have coded the linked lists, the tree traversal, the parent-child-grandchild, the move-the-program-pointer and pop-the-stack, etcetera, etcetera. There only only a finite catalog of problem patterns and we solve them over and over again. But I would like to give the original author some credit. Any leads?