The Blog of Harald

Three weeks later there’s still a raccoon in my attic; She either doesn’t want to come out, or is too stupid to find the trap door on the “soffits”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soffit. At one point we thought she was gone, because there were no noises in the attic for days, but then suddenly there were again.

I’m going nuts listening to animal sounds above my head :-)

Update: she spent all night Sunday/Monday clawing at the (repaired, reinforced) soffits above my bed. No sleep makes for an extremely grumpy Harald.

Update 2: Apparently the trap door has been used, and there are footprints in the snow on the roof. So the noise we heard (all night) was probably our delinquent tenant trying to get back into the house. I certainly hope so…

My car barely made it to the school and back, but that’s not why I’m writing.

I wished I taken my camera with me today. As I was leaving the school I saw one of our big snowplows (not the truck kind, but the big construction grader style ones).

It was stuck in a large snow bank, slowly being pulled out by one of those industrial tow trucks….

bq. If you go to Winx Club, and read Bloom’s blog, it says that…

My six-year-old just used ‘blog’. In context.

bq. “Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity… We cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.”

– A.E. Newton

*That* explains my bookshelf…

Apparently I never documented how much I hate raccoons. Well, they’re back. A loud clatter in the attic at 2AM made me haul out ladders and flashlights, and sure enough, there was a critter up there. I’m not sure where she got in, since there’s no externally visible holes. Based on the noise, I think she’s not sure how she got in either; she was trying to claw / eat her way out through the siding or soffets or something….

I’ll pay the animal control people to deal with it. Again.

Today I’m feeling like throwing in the towel on this web server business: there’s just too much crap to deal with.

A friend’s server was broken into and defaced last week by a script kiddy. I’ve been double-checking my box over the last few days, and I’m astonished at the amount of crap flowing in from the Internet. As a security professional I knew it was bad, but I was fooling myself; I didn’t know it was _this_ bad!!!

I monitor the site regularly, mainly to ensure that we’re not abusing bandwidth that is generously donated, but also to make sure everything is working, and to watch for obviously suspicious activity. In the last week a major portion of the traffic to this server has been:

* referrer spam (which doesn’t do anything for the spammer, since I don’t display referrers anywhere; it only abuses my bandwidth). About 15% of my bandwidth for the last _month_ has been referrer spam; they seem to breed faster than I can block them out!
* people trying comment spam on weblogs with no comments (and no comment script!). This includes attempts to invoke old security holes in Movable Type.
* people probing for security defects in software that I don’t even have installed.
* people probing for security defects in software that I _do_ have installed (fortunately that was password protected, so they didn’t get in :).
* probes for network sockets (both for software with vulnerabilities, and for software installed by hackers). This box is heavily firewalled (in both directions; blocking outbound traffic has saved my bacon more than once!), but I still see the logs.
* password guessing attempts (mainly via SSH, which has been locked down to a small number of IP addresses for months now, since the last major SSH vulnerability).

The promise of Open Source software was that more eyes staring at code would lead to fewer defects. I’m seeing the opposite; it seems that the rate of vulnerability annoucements, and resulting patches, is _increasing_. Just last week I just upgraded three packages here as a direct result of security announcements (and, as mentioned above, caught someone probing for one of them…)

The Internet has become the cesspool predicted in several recent science fiction novels (notably Peter Watt’s Behemoth, which specifically mentions automated virus / hacking activity). After three days of looking two closely at my logs I feel like pulling the plug. If it were just me using the server, I probably would…

Before and after pictures, brought to you by yesterday’s snowstorm…

Cold enough for you?

(I snapped the picture this morning at dawn, generally the coldest part of the day…)

I’m used to getting blank stares when I answer the question “What are you doing this weekend”? It’s often somthing obscure and geeky.

The answer today is no different; I’m building a trebuchet. But the response is different! Instead of blank stares, I’m getting “Oh ya, my son built one of those for his science fair last year!”. or “Interesting; I was going to build one at the cottage last year”. or “I saw one of those on Junkyard Wars”. Or even “I read about those on the Internet”.

Cool; people have actually heard of trebuchets…

No, I’m not dead. I’ve been busy “doing research”:http://wiki.the-gang.ca/ProposedTrebuchetDesign. Fun!

With reference to “stop”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2004/12/31/stop/, I’m feeling a lot better now. After the chaos and stress of the week between Christmas and NYE, I got a day all to myself. I slept in, cleaned up the house (after the party), watched more Stargate, and generally recentered and regrounded.

Still not 100%, but at least functional again…

Space is showing all 22 episodes of “Stargate:SG1”:http://www.tvtome.com/StargateSG1/ “Season 6”:http://www.tvtome.com/StargateSG1/season6.html on Christmas night/Boxing Day.

With my “MythTV”:http://mythtv.org/ box, 22 hours is about 48Gb, which I should have free by then, since every other show will be in re-runs.

Of course, I’ll still have to find time to _watch_ them… :-)

_Update_: I made enough space by deleting old shows, and moving about eight hours of stuff to an old 20Gb harddrive. I’m exactly halfway through watching season six now. Season seven sure makes more sense when you’ve seen this stuff!

I could never have done this with the VCR, at least not without staying up all night to change tapes. Woo hoo!

the world, I want to get off!

Wow, I’m impressed. A search for ‘panvore’ in “google”:http://www.google.com/?q=panvore returned no hits! We’ve been joking about Brian (the human garberator) for years. Most of us are omnivores (we eat anything); Brian is a panvore, because he eats *everything*.

_Update_: two days later, and I’ve been indexed; the search now returns this page…

It began when I started driving to work; I lost 20-40 minutes per day of walking (not to mention an hour per day of reading :-).

It accelerated when my mother died; for a while there, I just didn’t care.

The result: I’ve mangaged to regain 35 of the 50 pounds I lost in 2002/2003. It’s time to get rid of them. I think I’ll get through the holidays first (although I’m going to try for _some_ restraint), and then get serious come January.

I was heading into the mall from the parking lot. A guy gets tired of waiting behind another car, and forcefully throws his car into the other lane and speeds towards us. Curmudgeon that I am, I yell at him to slow down. This guy stops his car (in the wrong lane!), _gets out of the car_, and yells back at me:

bq. Who are you to tell me what to do?

I gave him the obvious answer: I’m the guy with the two kids that you could have hit with your car!

He yells something else unprintable, but gets back into his car and speeds off.

Anyway, the real question is this: Where the hell does that attitude come from? He did something completely boneheaded, but other people aren’t allowed to call him on it unless they’re somehow an Authority? Sheesh!

Interesting read:

Why Nerds are Unpopular

bq. So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don’t really want to be popular.

I went to a school full of smart people, so I didn’t suffer this nearly as badly as some people I know, and people actually sought me out for help with their homework. Still, I can relate with the argument…

I’ve had no luck with “supermarket self-serve checkouts”:http://www.nelson.monkey.org/~nelson/weblog/life/supermarketCheckout.html either.

These days I’ll use them for quickly picking up snacks on the way to the Rolemaster session, but that’s about it…

We had the first blizzard of the season today. When I left the house the roads were clear. About 5 minutes later, it started snowing, but the snow was just blowing around making the road surface look pretty. 15 minutes after that, the snow was sticking and turning to ice, and everyone was sliding around trying not to hit things with their expensive SUVs :).

At that point, I turned around, thinking that the drive home would be even worse. It took me more than twice as long to get back home. Then I drove the kids to school, and the wife to the subway, before making it back home again.

* Time on the road: 2 hours.
* Times stuck: 1 (on a relatively small hill, too).
* Skids: 5 or 6, not counting powering around corners with the front-wheel drive :-)
* Times _almost_ rear-ended: 2 (in both cases, I had left myself enough room to move forward and avoid the guy behind me who couldn’t stop ).

The afternoon drive was much better; the salt trucks had been out, and the freezing rain didn’t materialize (at least, not here). People always complain about how the first snowfall of the season is the worst, because everyone has forgotten how to drive in snow. I think it’s worse than _that_. For most other snowfalls of the season, the roads are covered with salt left over from previous days, and the snow melts as it hits. Today, with no salt (and -4°C) the snow fell, then was crushed into ice by passing cars…

“Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com/ is cool; a Debian-based linux distribution that is more up-to-date than debian-stable (which is getting quite long in the tooth), but not as cutting edge as debian-unstable. I upgraded my hybrid stable / backports.org box earlier this week; the upgrade was completely painless, other than some confusion over which modules needed to be loaded at startup. Even my bizarre printer setup (I have a USB- based HP photosmart printer) survived the upgrade!

The new box is current enough to run Azureus without having to jump through hoops to upgrade the graphics libraries to the minumum required by SWT.

I was about to throw in the towel and go back to the RedHat (well, Fedora Core) distribution. I’m glad I didn’t have to :-)