1999 Dec 4 (Sat), 09:56 The work stacked up pretty fast while I was gone this week and I'll be spending the weekend trying to get caught up. The biggest part of the weekend will be spent completing the Apache/Perl setup on Windows NT.

We finally received our Red Hat 6.1 Professional package with the new version of the secure server. Once we get our certs updated, I'll be bringing at least one new machine online. The new version includes sendmail enhancements to make filtering out spam easier. Hopefully, this will help reduce the amount of spam that everyone is getting these days.

I haven't mentioned SETI@home lately but after a month or so in the number one position in group slashdot, we fell back to number two and recently to number three. Well, we had our fifteen minutes of fame, what more can you ask?

1999 Dec 5 (Sun), 18:25 I've made quite a bit of progress on the Apache/Perl project. I now have Apache 1.3.9 and ActiveState Perl running on a Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop. I sure wouldn't want to run NT as a real web server but it looks like it's stable enough and fast enough for this job with only the local web browser as a client. One annoyance was having to go through all the scripts to fix little things like path delimiters to work the Microsoft way instead of the right way. If you've been fortunate enough not to have encountered a Microsoft OS before, the weird thing about them is that Microsoft chose to use '\' as a path delimiter (instead of '/' like everybody else) and many programming languages (like Perl) use '\' to mark an escape sequence. So a path like /home/http/index.html has to be rewritten as something like e:\\apache\\html\\index.html. It's good to be nearly finished with this one...

1999 Dec 7 (Tue), 19:06 Winter has finally arrived in Texas. The weather has been really nice until lately. The last few days it has gotten pretty cold. I believe it was down to 32F last night. But it stays nice and warm here at the office with all the heat being generated by the servers. We still haven't needed to turn on the heater.

The Windows NT work is all done for now. It will be nice to get back to Unix again. Hopefully some long awaited hardware upgrades will begin this week.

1999 Dec 8 (Wed), 23:50 Susan and I just returned from a long walk around the neighborhood to inspect all the Christmas lights that are going up. It looks like quite a few of our more industrious neighbors have already installed lights on their houses, trees, and bushes. There also seems to be quite an assortment of large, internally lighted, plastic creatures such as reindeer, angels, elves, and santas. I don't usually do any special Christmas lighting on our house but it's always fun to see what weird stuff everyone else is doing. Hmmm... We did decorate our corporate web site with a nice wreath - does that count?

1999 Dec 12 (Sun), 11:53 Susan and I were putting in some overtime at the office last night and decided to check out a nearby Thai place for dinner. It's called Chow Thai Addison and it's near the intersection of Montfort and Beltline, in the same general area as The Great Outdoors. It's definitely the best Thai place I've tried yet in the DFW area; great food, nice looking dining area with weird artwork and jazz playing in the background. Recommended.

1999 Dec 16 (Thu), 11:05 Another busy week... here's what we've been up to lately. On monday, we went to the DSO Christmas program. It was about what you'd expect - with one exception. The last piece of the evening was an arrangement commissioned by the DSO for the Christmas program. The arranger was Alexander Courage. Anyone who's a Star Trek fan will immediately recognize the name as the composer of the music on the original series. Apparently he's still around and has become a fairly well known arranger of music.

Monday was also my birthday but we didn't get around to doing anything about it until tuesday. Susan came up with a tasty chocolate cake which was pretty much finished off with some help from one of my sisters and her family. Later I bought myself a birthday present - the new Blink 182 CD.

In other news, the saga of the SWB/Worldcom/Verio T1 continues. We're still having problems with random drops though they are now generally 30 seconds or less.

1999 Dec 18 (Sat), 09:23 The last couple of days have been spent helping Erin get up and running on ISDN. She lives in an area where DSL is not available and she's got a terrible quality analog phone line that prevents a good modem connection. You'd think by now that the phone companies would have ISDN down to a science but we ran into an unbelievable number of problems.

The worst was that her ISP, SWBELL, is a long-distance call from her area. She had metro service on her analog line but apparently this sort thing doesn't work on ISDN data calls. SWBELL was apparently well aware of this problem but didn't think it worth mentioning until after she'd gotten ISDN installed, the analog line disconnected, and we'd spent hours trying to determine why things weren't working. Needless to say, she's no longer using SWBELL as her ISP. After finding a local ISP she discovered the next problem - the same physical wiring was used for her ISDN as had been used for her unusually noisy analog line. The ISDN line is now suffering from a variety of intermittent problem that have so far prevented reliable use and allow only minimal use of one B channel. SWBELL (the phone company, not the ISP) is now "monitoring" her line.

If you've followed the saga of NCC's T1 problems you'll probably know that "monitoring" never works. The last attempt by SWBELL to monitor our T1 for 24 hours took over a week. First they monitored the wrong line, several times they scheduled the right line to be monitored but later claimed no one had carried out the monitoring. Eventually they claimed to have found the right line and actually monitored it but did not log any of the data. "Monitoring" as used by SWBELL apparently means that someone just wanders by from time to time and checks to see if your line (or perhaps some other line nearby) is up. No automated logging is done and they never provide any evidence that they've really done anything. They claimed that no errors were detected during a 24 hour period. During the same 24 hour period our router log showed around 100 line drops pretty evenly distributed over the entire time period. Hopefully Erin will have better luck with her ISDN. Hmmm...

1999 Dec 20 (Mon), 10:24 My increased efforts at dealing with the all the spam we've been getting lately seems to be having some effect. The good news is that I've accumulated a dozen or so "kills" - mostly just throw-away accounts but at least one web site & domain shut down by an ISP. The bad news is that one or more of the spammers seems to have targeted us for a counter-attack. The last several days have seen continued attempts to crack our systems. Mostly by script-kiddies and all unsuccessful so far. I spent the weekend upgrading some of our security measures and will be doing more security work this week.

1999 Dec 24 (Fri), 17:23 What better way to spend Christmas eve in Texas than mowing the yard? It needed mowing badly and the day was too nice to stay indoors. Besides yard work, Susan and I took a long walk and visited the ducks in the nearby park. After feeding hungry ducks, we walked through a nearby housing development that's going up to see what the under-construction houses looked like. Slightly higher quality construction than usual but the same old yuppy-palace floor plans. Lots of wasted space and inexplicable design features. My favorite of late is the placement of the closet in the master bedroom - a lot of the newer floorplans are placing it in the bathroom. So you have to use the bathroom as a sort of hallway to get in and out of the closet. Besides seeming highly inconvenient, it must cause quite a problem with humidity. Still, they always manage to sell them so I guess somebody out there thinks it makes sense.

1999 Dec 25 (Sat), 08:27 Merry Christmas!

1999 Dec 28 (Tue), 18:51 Over the holidays, we went to see Galaxy Quest with my niece and nephew. If you're a fan of Star Trek or at all familiar with the world of Star Trek conventions, you'll probably enjoy the movie. Besides, I'll go to any movie with Sigourney Weaver in it! My one complaint was making Sigourney a blonde. I much prefer her as a brunette. Compare this, this or this.

1999 Dec 29 (Wed), 12:10 If you've been following the DVD CCA's antics, you're probably aware that the initial hearing is today. If you're haven't kept up with the news, here's a summary. The designers of DVD included a badly designed encryption system to prevent unauthorized viewing or copying of discs. Linux users with DVD drives can't watch DVD movies they've legally purchased because there is no player. To solve the problem, the DVD encryption system was reverse engineered and open source software was created and distributed to play DVD discs. The DVD CCA is now trying to get a restraining order against hundreds of individuals and organizations who have talked about the open source decryption software (like I'm doing now), who have included links to sites that offer the source, or have links to the source code itself:

css-auth_tar.gz - CSS authentication source

LiVid.tgz - the Linux DVD source code

nist-0_6.tgz - an initial Linux DVD player

DeCSS.zip - for Windows

The DVD CCA has mounted a PR campaign to make it appear that the software in question is used to pirate the DVD content, something that is untrue, highly impractical, and will probably only be believed by computer illiterates (which unfortunately includes most of the media and legal system). You are encouraged to join in the fight against the forces of evil in the world by downloading the source, mirroring it on your own web site, or making a tax deductable donation to the EFF, who will be fighting the DVD CCA in court for your right to free speech.

1999 Dec 30 (Thu), 18:32 Updating the newslog script has been on my todo list for quite some time. If this post works, I'll be able to check it off the list. Newslog version 1.1.0 has a few new features and a few more bug fixes. I may even announce it on Freshmeat if no problems turn up tonight.

1999 Dec 31 (Fri), 18:33 Less than 6 hours to go now. As I type this, the final backups are being transferred off our web servers. All of our DNS files, databases, and other important stuff is safely stored. When they finish, I'll be powering down all non-essential hardware and heading for home. I'm not expecting much to happen but you never know. Most likely I'll be back at work monday doing the usual sorts of things but if it really is TEOTWAWKI, I'm ready. We've stocked up on ammo, cheesy-poofs, and other survival essentials. When the bikers and mutants kick down our door, they'll find me ready to defend our last Pop-Tart with the AR-15 and Glock (and Susan is pretty handy with her Smith & Wesson too). Good luck to all. See ya on the other side...