kasia in a nutshell

Most commercial websites these days will serve you pop ups. It's a fact of life that is only fixable with a pop-up stopper (newer mozilla has it built in, as does opera and safari) and some good-old-fashioned ignoring of websites that stoop that low to make $0.10.

The one thing that scares me is that people are so used to this advertising technique they do not stop and question when a website that never served them pop-ups before suddenly spawns gater-ware. Now we're in territory of adware.. What's scummier than serving your users pop-ups? Serving them pop-ups that install "adware" (scumware?) on their PCs and spawn flashing advertisements on any website they visit. At dslr, we get accused of serving pop-ups on regular basis.. which we don't, never have and never will.. Now considering that probably about 1% of people who get them even bother asking, reporting or just plain-old bitching about it .. that probably translates into a healthy percentage of the general internet-surfing population with spyware and adware on their machines. Marvelous.

We're hunting down and prosecuting socially-inept high school kids who happened to have modified an existing virus.. but nobody cares that half the net-users out there are infected with malicious crap spawned by evil advertising companies. So.. it's okay to install software on someone's machine without their consent to make money.. but do it to say "Bill Gates sucks" and you get a jail term. Gotta love it. Capitalism at work.

Posted by kasia at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (1)

It's that time again.. my netflix queue has dwindled to mere five selections and I felt the burning need to add to it. This led to a realization (of course!).. every time I look through "new releases" or "recommendations" on netflix I tend to steer a second browser window into imdb.. to read about the movie there.

It's not just the ratings (although I do look at those, if a movie is a 4 I probably won't rent it (imdb 4, not netflix 4 in case you're confused)) the movie descriptions on imdb tend to be more detailed and accurate.. Netflix appears to have the "back of the video box" description style.. Not quite useful when deciding how to waste a few hours of my life with mindless entertainment.

I can't possibly be the only person doing this (I know I'm weird, but I'm not that unique) and it seems rather unlikely that netflix and imdb both are not aware of this.. so what's next.. Amazon buying out Netflix? Hey, you never know..

Posted by kasia at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've decided.. I just dont' like CVS.. I really don't. Sure, it's a great tool and I'm certain it works wonderful for something like say, open source projects -- unfortunately I'm finding out that in real life it's just a pain, pain, pain.

Real life? Well.. something like a development team where you really don't want the headaches of merging in code every time you make a change. Unfortunately, CVS isn't very kind to those who like exclusive checkouts (yes, I know.. C is for concurrent). Configurable but still a pain in the ass.

My main problem is that I am essentially addicted to refactoring code... I'm anal about formatting (well, really we all should be but that's another rant) and I simply cannot stand duplicated code and 1000 line-long methods. So I refactor.. a lot. You try and merge that in!

And no.. RCS is not an option for various factors, not the least of it being developers on windows machines (eek).

So now I have CVS that is built on top of RCS that I want to act as RCS and the one project I found that makes it do that has not been updated since 2001.. Subversion is also not an option, cool as it looks.

Rant over.

Posted by kasia at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (1)

Sandals in 50 degree weather -- not a good idea.

Posted by kasia at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Sitting at my desk drinking my morning coffee and watching the sheets of rain fall outside the window while I wait for a CVS update to finish. It's really quite fascinating - the water patterns formed by the wind.. of course the drive to work itself wasn't quite so pretty or interesting...

It's a feeling I have often.. watching something like this, wishing I had my camera on hand -- more often than one would imagine -- but the realization always comes quick: I don't think I can duplicate this in a photograph.. wasted effort? Perhaps. I wish I had whatever it takes to present what I see to others in a way that I see it. Invariably, there's something missing when I try.

A depressing thought on a fall morning.

Posted by kasia at 09:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Philip Greenspun apparently forgot that there is such a thing as an appropriate tool for the job.

Java an SUV? Perhaps.. but then php is a Mini - admittedly a very cool car that will get you to your destination, but do not attempt to haul a heavy boat behind it.

Posted by kasia at 06:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (19) | TrackBacks (1)

As Promised, here are some pictures of the powerbook.. Closed. Open. Another shot of an open one. It's really a beautiful machine, fast, easy to configure (actually, works right out of the box), display is very crisp and the lit keyboard is subtle.. not annoying as I was worried. My one issue so far has been wireless. I have a Linksys wireless router 802.11b.. which has served me just fine with my old Dell laptop. The powerbook is not so happy with it. The signal keeps fading out (as those who tried to chat with me on aim last night probably noticed).. One option was to purchase an Airport Extreme station - but that's a bit pricey ($199). I opted to purchase the Linksys 802.11g WAP. Hooked it up at the other end of the house.. and it works very well. Actually the signal is very strong and works not just throughout the house but also outside! Note to Best Buy employees, who told me it will not work with AE.. as I suspected, you don't know what you're talking about. $80 less than the AE station and works just as well. Beautiful. I wouldn't have the heart to do it (well and then there's the warranty) but this guy disassembled one.

Posted by kasia at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (1)

A glass of nice, white wine and a new powerbook to play with.

I'll post pictures tomorrow once I figure out how to get my card reader to work.

It's pretty :)

Posted by kasia at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

About a year ago, I bragged about a linux box I have reaching a full year of uptime..

Guess what this one is about?

Two years! (well, yes, of course, same box).

[kasia@geddy ~]$ uptime
11:16pm up 235 days, 18:05, 18 users, load average: 0.25, 0.16, 0.11

Now to put that in terms of the older kernel that rolls over at 497 days..

[kasia@geddy ~]$ fup
11:19pm up 2 years, 2 days, 20:35, 18 users, load average: 0.01, 0.09, 0.08

[deity] bless whoever invented the ups!

Posted by kasia at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Despite my oh, so obvious lack of blog'ing recently I have had quite the exciting week. Let's enumerate the exciting happenigs of the late.


I managed to slice off a bit of the tip of my left index finger. How? Cutting a sandwich in half with a kitchen knife. That's right, I've managed to survive for 30 years without injuring myself this way.. until now. Better late than never? Maybe not for this particular case. Typinf id fn eith missing fingrs!


I took yesterday off from work to visit a doctor about my now-infected-finger and (since I needed a break from keyboards and atmpts at tryping) went mountain biking at Lake Minnewaska in the Catskills (that's upstate New York). That was a blast.


My PC decided to crash and burn.


I'm getting my new 15" superdrive powebook tomorrow.


Had to do 1001010101010 ssh patches.


Have to patch sendmail


Verisign is a bunch of assholes.


I learned how to type without using a left index finger.


I'll have to unlearn it when it heals.

And how was your week? I promise to never use smilies in blog entries again!

Posted by kasia at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

mrtg is an extremely handy little graphing tool, contrary to its primary use (routers) I've been using it for graphing pretty much everything on my server and compiling a page of daily graphs to glance on now and then..

Sure, it may sound like a waste of time.. but the pretty little graphs saved my behind today..

Here's a graph image of my server's memory usage earlier today.. a perl script with a glaring bug in it caused this.. and would have probably caused a server crash if I hadn't noticed the increasing memory usage.

How hard is it to do this? Easier than making windows crash..

1. Download and install mrtg.

2. Create a small script to gather the 4 inputs mrtg is looking for.

3. Configure mrtg to call the above mentionied script and gather information and graph it.

That's about all..

If you promise not to laugh at my bad perl, you can take a look at my memory script here and the snipnet for mrtg configuration file here.

Posted by kasia at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (2)

These are great! Fun for the whole family. "I'm having one right now!"

Posted by kasia at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (2)

Only in the form of increased spam! I keep getting spam for "internet keywords".. in fact, several of them a day.. every day.. every week.. every months.. ugh..

Is it just me?

(Yes, I do use spamassassin, but I check my spam folder to make sure no real mail got caught).

Posted by kasia at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Dave Barry gives telemarketers a taste of their own medicine:

The American Teleservices Association isn't laughing at Dave Barry, not after the Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist for The Miami Herald listed the group's telephone number in his Aug. 31 column and sparked a flood of phone calls to the group's offices.[...]

Thousands of Barry's readers have done as they were told, forcing the association to stop answering its phones. Callers now hear a recording, which says that because of "overwhelming positive response to recent media events, we are unable to take your call at this time."

Posted by kasia at 08:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted in a forum about the 12-year old girl sued by the money-hungry RIAA cyborgs.

"Hey, if the little bitch wasn't stealing then she wouldn't be coughing up a couple grand to settle."

Something about hell, baskets, fried brain cells, conformity, not sure, but lots of words come to mind.

Posted by kasia at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Impressive:

I accidentally ran over my PowerBook with my dad's SUV today.

It's not very often that someone gets to say that. But perhaps what's even more surprising is the fact that I'm writing this on that very same PowerBook. Hold a 12" PowerBook G4 and you can just tell it's sturdy. It's thin, but not flimsy, and the aircraft-grade aluminum case makes it feel like a lump of metal, rather than a sophisticated high-tech gadget.

Posted by kasia at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Today, the original dslreports server was officially retired.

*sniff* I'll miss the little guy.

Posted by kasia at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Remember the good old days when you could make a search phrase on google point to a certain page? Who can forget when the phrase "go to hell" brought you the Microsoft site as the first hit. That was referred to as "google bombing".. simply linking to a specific site with a specific phrase making google ranking for that phrase increase for that site (but you all knew that).

Now there's a new version! Everyone loves their statistics.. of course.. me included.. but many forget, that allowing Google to index your statistics is totally useless for you and the person searching.. and guess what.

Now not only are the bad guys (tm) using your statistic pages to increase their google ranking.. some have discovered this is a good way to play pranks by using google..

Yep, it's just more google-bombing .. Simply hit a lot of blogs that allow Google to index their statistic pages with that phrase as a referer.. and suddenly a whole lot of people wonder why, what where..

It's simple to stop google from indexing your statistic pages.. in your root site directory, add a robots.txt file with something like this in it..

User-agent: *
Disallow: /stats/

Where /stats/ is the location of your statistic pages.

[Matt pointed out that search phrase to me.]

Posted by kasia at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (2)

It's so cute, cute, cute. Now if only I had a new powerbook to go with it.. (The 15GB model with docking station)

Posted by kasia at 08:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

It seems everywhere I turn lately, there are assholes trying to figure out a new way to annoy people by marketing to them... Using peoples resources without permission.

What is it this time? Spam in blog comments.. something that's been around for a while, but this is the first persistent idiot I found.. So for the first time, I've made use of MT's nice feature of banning an IP from posting comments.. which is so much cleaner than a service denial at apache level. Not to mention I don't have to edit my config files.

The dweeb who uses 61.181.5.147 (probably a hijacked PC or open proxy anyway) has been consistently posting comments with links to porn sites in my weblog.

Posted by kasia at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (2)

There's even an aim client for it.. and as is with all emacs add ons (especially the pre-compiled ones) it takes about 2 minutes to setup and actually works... That's provided you can remember your password (4 tries). In other news: I seem to be really bad at drawing little, black rectangles in gimp. Hmm. Who knew. The other black rectangle is Matt. He's shy.

Posted by kasia at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (2)

This is so slimy how can it possibly be legal? Yes, that's on my work linux box.. a little funny, really.

Posted by kasia at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (2)

A friend purchased a brand new laptop recently (last week, very recently).. she plugged it in.. and wham.. it's infected with msblaster and won't stay up for more than 60 seconds.

How is this possible?

Simple.. windows XP comes by default with the firewall disabled and configured for dhcp.

"She should have patched it"

Well, yes, except before she had the time to open the windows update website it was already infected (hard to believe, I know..).

"She should have enabled the firewall first".

Actually.. she didn't know the damn thing was already online.. and even though virus protection was enabled, it was not up to date.. .

Ah, see, a trend.

Windows XP - not up to date.
Virus protection - not up to date.

How can computer manufacturers sell machines that are so obviously out of date on important security patches (more than a month for the patch that would have prevented msblaster from infecting the system).

"In this world of viruses and attacks people should know better"

No, you shouldn't have to spend a day patching a brand new computer you just spent $3K on just so you can take it online. That's wrong.. when will the consumers put a stop to it?

Next time you buy a computer.. and it's more than a month out of date on security patches.. call them, complain, demand a refund. If you can't use your computer thanks to a virus infection -- that's a defective product.

Someone should be responsible, and it shoudln't be the consumer paying $$$ for a product they cannot use without some serious work involved. If a car manufacturer sold a knowingly defective car.. they would be sued out of their pants.. so why is it that people put up with this crap when it comes to computers?

Posted by kasia at 09:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)