July 2005 Archives

Four adult Boy Scout leaders from Alaska were killed Monday afternoon in an electrical accident during the opening day of the organization's 2005 Jamboree.

Going to the National Jamboree when I was a young Scout was one of the most amazing, memorable experiances that I have ever had in life. My heart goes out to the Families and members of this Troup. My thoughts are with you. See: Four Boy Scout Leaders Die in Va. Accident - Yahoo! News

This is exactly what is wrong with this country. On what other planet could you possible quadruple your earnings but not meet expectations? The company made over $0.25 billion more a month than they did last year! And people wonder why there was a dotcom bubble that burst, the core members of our financial system are insane.

Google Inc. shares continued to tumble Friday amid disappointment over slowed revenue growth at the online search engine leader even as second-quarter profit more than quadrupled. Revenue for the period totaled $1.38 billion, nearly doubling from $700.2 million last year. After subtracting the commissions that Google paid to other Web sites in its advertising network, the revenue stood at $890 million, beating the Wall Street estimate of $842 million, according to Thomson Financial.

See Google Stock Sinks on Slow Revenue Growth - Yahoo! News for the rest of the story.

As I was reviewing my logs (you check your logs don't you) I noticied some strange entries:

Jul 21 04:36:12 lewis pdns[6664]: Not authoritative for 'onelata.com', sending servfail to 198.81.129.193 Jul 21 04:39:57 lewis pdns[6664]: Not authoritative for 'v-drive.com', sending servfail to 65.54.237.135

What's strange about this is that I do own the domains, but I have never done anything with them. My curiosity peaked I decided to do a whois on the IP addresses and see where they came from. The first one was pretty straight forward (65.54.237.135), Microsoft has plenty of search engine applications, who knows what they are really up to. The second one (198.81.129.193) is a little more confusing. Why is the CIA (as in the United States Central Intelligence Agency) trying to query DNS records for an unused domain? Does anyone know what this is?

Congressional leaders of both parties have signed off on a proposal, being considered in Washington this week, to start Daylight Saving Time on the first Sunday in March and end on the last Sunday of November. They say it would save energy. If the president signs the bill, the new law would take effect immediately, extending Daylight Saving Time by one month this fall. Currently, Daylight Saving Time begins at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of April and ends at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday of October.

I've said it in the past - Server Time Zones - and I will say it again, use GMT/UTC for your timezone. How many people do you think are going to get royaly burned by this one when it happens. I would bet money that there will be at least one very large, very public incident. See Congress to add 2 months to Daylight Savings Time for the full story.

After plenty of procrastinating I am finally putting the final touches on a migration to PowerDNS. Over the past years I have experimented and run a wide variety of name servers. First BIND (I still have my BIND book on the bookshelf), then djbdns (aka tinydns), then MyDNS, and now, of course PowerDNS. Why this constant shift and change? BIND is a fantastic nameserver that runs the majority of DNS for the planet, there have just been one to many exploits and this started my adventure. djbdns is a great, secure, simple DNS system - only problem is, it's not BIND and when you need to perform zone transfers this becomes a problem. djbdns also requires a split between authorative and recursive (tinydns and dnscache) services for security, while I agree this is the best way to do this, it's an annoying configuration when you want to have a simple platform. MyDNS has been a cool piece of software, fast, easy administration direct from mysql, realtime queries to/from mysql, etc... My problem again, zone transfers have been a pain - and for critical systems I like having as few moving pieces as possible. Redundant DNS servers don't work very well when your DB goes down. Which brings me to PowerDNS... PowerDNS I hope will bring me the best of all worlds. I can zone transfer which is a very important thing, I can run the primary against a DB which makes administration so much easier, and at this point, the system is stable, secure and fast. The architecture will basically look like this: Once the cutover is completed the next step will be moving this onto a BGP anycast for true GSLB (geographic server load balancing) and redundancy.

CNN.com - James Doohan, 'Star Trek's' Scotty, dead� - Jul 20, 2005

Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. (1330 GMT) at his Redmond, Washington, home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, he said.

See: Bush says won't prejudge CIA case, Rove's role - Yahoo! News

"I have instructed every member of my staff to fully cooperate in this investigation. I also will not prejudge the investigation based on media reports," Bush told reporters in response to a question.

These quote unquote media reports are the reporter standing outside of the grand jury and stating for the news crews that Karl Rove was the source. This isn't a speculative statement. It doesn't get more concrete than this. A good followup and timeline: Karl Rove is fucked

See: Idaho Boy Dies in Apparent Choking Game - Yahoo! News

Dalton Eby may be the second Idaho child killed in recent months while playing a choking game, trying to cut off the oxygen supply to the brain to achieve a type of "high."

While words can not describe how badly I feel for his parents. There are usually reasons things like this happen.

Thanks to Jeremy for pointing this out. See: Getting my Thunderbird Search on with Yahoo! Desktop Search (by Jeremy Zawodny) Yahoo Desktop Search (aka YDS) now supports the Thunderbird client. For people like me who heavily use both Outlook and Thunderbird this is an incredibly imporant feature. And this was one of three things that prompted me to switch from YDS to the Google Desktop Search. The other two being:

1. Support for Trillian. I use Trillian as my instant messenger program. Why? Because I have multiple accounts on every service (don't ask).
2. Speed. The last version of YDS that I used just felt slow. It was slow to index, it was slow to search. GDS is much, much faster than that last version of YDS that I used. Slow searching is annoying, that's the whole reason I installed the thing in the first place

What YDS does have is a great interface. Jeremy said it best:

"This made me realize that one of the glaring holes in GDS for me is the assumption that I always want to search my "desktop". The reality is that 95% of the time I simply want to search my email. YDS gets that."

I use search to index my email, Yahoo does a great job at that.

Saying that a dangerous amount of diesel fuel is stored in a 25-story building in TriBeCa, elected officials and residents called on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg yesterday to rescind a variance that permits its storage. The fuel, they warned, could lead to a major fire if there were a terrorist attack or other disaster. The city's Department of Buildings granted a variance to the owners of the tower at 60 Hudson Street late last month, allowing the owners to store 80,000 gallons of diesel fuel, much of it below - but some actually in - the building.

What the article does say at some point is the reason their are fuel tanks in the building is so the network and voice equipment will function if their is a blackout or problem with the "street power". This is standard practice for all telecom facilities, and an absolute requirement for tenants. What would be interesting to see happen... is if the neighborhood successfully removes the fuel storage, and then there is a problem with electricity for the building, what would the neighborhood response be when their Internet and Voice connectivity is erradicated for the duration of the outage? People probably wouldn't be too happy. See: Building's Extra Fuel Tanks Raise Concerns in TriBeCa - New York Times

I am certain that I am not the only person that has struggled with a programming language selection. Perl, PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, etc.., etc.., etc... The problem isn't finding a good language (they are all good), the problem is finding the right one for you. I have struggled with this for quite some time now (as have many) and have often looked for advise from others (two really good presentations are included at the end of this post). For me I ended up using Perl for most of my SysAdmin type tasks. Anything running from a command line that required more complexity than a simple pipe to grep. And for my web development I ended up with PHP+Smarty (for templates - which is an awesome app btw). While this combination has given me the best of both worlds in many cases, in more than one way it has been less than optimal. Why? Because I don't code every day. This means whatever language I was working in last is what is freshest in my mind. So every time I need to go back and forth there is a learning curve that I have to deal with. I've become _good_ in two languages, but not great in either. I've been annoyed by this, and struggled with this issue for some time, which has lead me to a decision: Only program one language... Perl Why Perl? For me it's a pratical decision. I use more Perl on a day to day basis than I do PHP. It has more applications in line with what I need. Besides, Perl is cool. Now all I need to do is figure out how to write a CGI script that works. Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo! One Year of PHP at Yahoo!

If you are reading this post then chances are you have received an error message that looks like this

There was a SMTP communication problem with the recipient's email server. Please contact your system administrator.

from an email user that tried to email a message to your organization. More specifically, the sender was trying to send an attachment, and you are probably witnessing an intermittent error. In my experience this is caused by one of two things. Either you have a firewall that is doing application level content inspection (Cisco Pix, Checkpoint, Watchdog, etc...), or if you look through your smtp logs you will see errors to the effect of command too long, or invalid command. First things first, disable the smtp proxy on your firewall. Why? Because most firewalls are very basic and don't understand/can't process the EHLO verbs correctly. This is a constant problem with the Cisco Pix, other firewalls are hit and miss.

See: Astrologer Sues NASA Over Comet Mission - Yahoo! News

NASA's mission that sent a space probe smashing into a comet raised more than cosmic dust %u2014 it also brought a lawsuit from a Russian astrologer. Bai is seeking damages totaling $300 million -- the approximate equivalent of the mission's cost -- for her "moral sufferings"

Why is this even being considered by the courts? I should sue somebody for consuming my oxygen supply and damaging my well being and way of life.