Month: November 2008

Kyra has suddenly jumped on the e-mail bandwagon and is writing messages to relatives and a few friends. She sent me this last night:

What a sweet girl. At least she knows how to butter me up before sending me her gift list.

I just read an article about how the current (crummy) market is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs and people willing to take a little risk while everyone else hunkers down.

This paragraph– discussing how to build a great product from a great idea– caught my eye:

There have been times in the past eight years when I’ve been tempted to give up and go work for The Man somewhere, because quite honestly it’s easier to have someone tell you what to do than to come up with all the to-do’s myself. And it’s easier to be the quiet programmer slamming out code in the back room than the Front Guy writing the proposals and pitching to the customers and managing the projects and making sure everything continues to run as smoothly as it can.

But then I stop and think. And I realize that no, in fact I’d rather be the entrepreneur. Now I just need to find that great idea and take a little risk…

As the Senate prepares to debate a $25 billion bailout package for American automakers, I can’t say it enough times:

It is not the job of the government to prop up failing businesses. Period.

Banks, auto manufacturers, airlines, trains… these are all private corporations who need to make it on their own. If they can’t compete in the marketplace, then they should close their doors. Things are slower in the web programming arena these days, but you don’t see me asking for a handout from the Gov, nor do you see the Senate even considering what to do about a hundred thousand small businesses that are having a much harder time of it than a few dozen mega-corporations which gobs of liquid cash and executives who earn a hundred million a year.

What happened to capitalism? It looks more like an unpleasant mix of cronyism and socialism to me…

The Halloween candy is almost gone, but down at the bottom of the bags, hidden beneath some old Whoppers and Dots no one wants to eat, lurk a few last good boxes of

which are basically crunchy wads of colored sugar. Yum.

At 9am Pacific Time on November 10, a hosting company called McColo was shut down.

I’m sure hosting companies go out of business all the time, but this was significant because a company called MessageLabs– which specializes in large-scale e-mail systems– noticed a bit of a drop in the number of spam messages it saw crossing its servers.

Other companies hosting vast e-mail farms, or otherwise measuring e-mail traffic on the internet at large, saw a similar precipitous drop in the amount of spam flying around. It’s clear that McColo was home to a huge group of spammers– some estimates say as much as 25% of the global spam came through their servers.

Woo hoo! Now let’s find the other hosting companies enabling these spammers…

A parody group called the Yes Men put together an awesome duplicate of the New York Times web site, complete with articles dated July 4, 2009.

It includes such rousing headlines as

Iraq War Ends: Troops to Return Immediately
Ex-Secretary Apologizes for WMD Scare
Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge
National Health Insurance Act Passes
Nation Sets its Sites on Building a Sane Economy
USA Patriot Act Repealed

If only.

If. Only.

In our family bedtime prayers with the kids, we encourage them to be thankful for things in their lives. Every now and then we get an interesting one.

Last night Alex was on deck, and he expressed his gratitude thus:

“Heavenly Father, thank you for aqua lungs…”

Aqua lungs? That was a new one to me. And Zack’s heart was full tonight as he prayed:

“Heavenly Father, thank you for video games…”

I guess the Wii has a divine influence on young minds.

I’m reviewing some servers that I manage for Google and found one that’s been running for a while…

[fixed: 19:15:40 up 990 days, 22:16, 2 users, load average: 0.13, 0.03, 0.01
USER TTY LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
root pts/0 18:13 1:01m 0.00s 0.00s -bash
root pts/1 19:14 0.00s 0.01s 0.00s w]

Holy cow, that’s more than two and a half years without rebooting. Go Linux!

As a system administrator who has spent countless hours installing, configuring, and tweaking spam filters to keep customers (and myself) happy, I found this Dilbert gem priceless.

It’s only a matter of time. In order to defeat the spammers, the filters will need to be smarter than the spammers themselves.

I’m writing an e-mail to a client and I noticed that my e-mail client spell-checker doesn’t approve of the word “sheesh”– it highlights it in red.

It also doesn’t like “noob”.

What kind of spell-checkers are they writing these days? Clearly these are legitimate words that have their place in professional correspondence.

(With apologies to Chancellor, who was the recipient of this message.)