Monthly Archives: May 2002

I found Solbeam.com a few minutes ago. It seems to be a site about the travels of the author. There’s an excellent page on packing which’ll come in handy. I know Martina is going to be very interested in this!

Dave picked up on the disturbances in Dublin I reported a few days ago. I’m glad to see a popular weblog run with the story and provide links to more information about it.

Courtesy of Daves Picks comes CSS browser support: basic concepts which I must delve into later.

It’s hard to find information on digital equipment such as Sharp WD250 camcorder. A lot of it seems to be sponsored adverts/information without user comment. Now’s my chance to dilute their message. I bought a Sharp WD250 camcorder last February. It’s a nice camera, has 26X optical zoom, uses mini DV tapes, DV-out.. Problem was, the picture quality and sound got distorted a lot! At times the picture looked like it had blocks of scrambled images across it, something I’ve only seen in mpeg videos, then the sound would go silent and crackle intermittently. I brought it back to the shop and I expect to get it back on Thursday or Friday hopefully. I’ll post more news later.

If you’re using Linux and need to find the spelling for a word, just type “look [start of word]” and it’ll print a list of alternatives. It’s actually for displaying “lines beginning with a given string” but by default it uses the dictionary file! Guess who wasn’t sure how to spell “intermittently”?

Using Hdparm I found out that my harddrive only supports up to 8sectors/interrupt (-m8, no -m16 or 32).. I knew this computer was cheap 😐 There might be something in the BIOS to change that but my uptime just hit 100 days so I want to keep that! I did enable 32 bit access (-c1), dma was already enabled (-d1) and the change to 32 bit access almost doubled the score I got from buffered reads (1.7MB/s to 3.0MB/s – I’m running X, Galeon and Kmail too..)
The computer is noticably more responsive! More info available on Google.

It was Mother’s Day in the USA, Australia and somewhere else (according to my Far Side calender), User Friendly had a nice cartoon that struck a chord with me. *sigh*

Whoever is doing that rumplestiltskin attack is persistant and annoying:

May 12 04:29:37 mail sendmail[895]: g4C3TWA00895: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection
May 12 04:55:13 mail sendmail[1055]: g4C3t8A01055: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection
May 12 05:20:56 mail sendmail[1220]: g4C4KpA01220: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection
May 12 05:46:35 mail sendmail[1391]: g4C4kUA01391: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection
May 12 06:12:16 mail sendmail[1557]: g4C5CBA01557: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection
May 12 06:38:04 mail sendmail[1746]: g4C5bxA01746: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection
May 12 07:03:56 mail sendmail[1870]: g4C63pA01870: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection
May 12 07:29:50 mail sendmail[2042]: g4C6TjA02042: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection
May 12 07:55:30 mail sendmail[2163]: g4C6tPA02163: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection
May 12 08:21:10 mail sendmail[2365]: g4C7L5A02365: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection
May 12 08:46:52 mail sendmail[2486]: g4C7klA02486: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection
May 12 09:12:49 mail sendmail[2695]: g4C8CfA02695: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection
May 12 09:38:34 mail sendmail[2840]: g4C8cTA02840: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection
May 12 10:04:29 mail sendmail[2965]: g4C94OA02965: tcpwrappers (rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se, 194.198.208.46) rejection


I hope Claire Marie is still reading (hope the exams went well!), although I like to see diversity, I have to agree that Galeon is Slowly Killing Off Reasons to Use Anything Else. All the features, Gecko rendering engine, and the Linux browser market looks a LOT healthier than it did just a few years ago.

Our mail server at work is still getting attacked by a rumplestiltskin attack and after looking at the whois information it’s the same guy as last time so I think a polite email to abuse and postmaster@systemaccess.se and @comtech-data.se may pay dividends.
Meanwhile, I found a good article on stopping spam with open source software. I must roll some of those Sendmail m4 directives into Install-Sendmail soon.

From the maillog:

May 5 04:10:43 mail sendmail[8030]: g453Agr08030: ... User unknown
May 5 04:10:44 mail sendmail[8030]: g453Agr08030: from=, size=0, class=0, nrcpts=0, proto=SMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=rlkal1a046.comtech-data.se [194.198.208.46] (may be forged)


Nostalgia time! I just found a remix of a tune I used in my first ever C64 demo, Bits ‘n Bobs in the final part of the demo! (first screenshot of the page linked above.)
It’s called “Jt in Space”, I used it without permission, (Sorry and thanks to Jeroen Tel!) and can be downloaded from the Xample.com website.

The two Irish mobile phone companies I’ve been a customer of know where I’ve been for the last 6 years! If this wasn’t so shocking I’d actually like to see that data and maybe answer that perennial question, “what was I doing this time last year?”