Dec 04 2012
OK, I admit it … I kind of like Siri on my iPhone.
Some of the features are darn right useful … being able to tell the phone to remind me about something based on location, get the current weather, send a text message by voice, etc.
Recently I found a case that Siri seems to know how toparse … but can’t answer. Which I find very odd.
Nov 20 2012
Here’s a tip for internet domain owners:
Make sure the contact information for your domain has more than one email address. And make sure at least one of those email addresses is not in the domain itself.
If your email starts malfunctioning, you want people to be able to tell you about the problem … and if the only email addresses you list are in the actual domain, they won’t be able to contact you.
The contact information is publicly accessible via the ‘whois’ databases.
Domain registrars that offer whois privacy capabilities should let you list more than one email address when they redirect the email address that they list in the whois lookups.
For privacy sake, I like using a PO Box for the mailing address on all my domains.
Nov 15 2012
Fair warning: This post is pretty darn technical and is of little interest to people who don’t muck around with Linux and/or mail servers.
Recently I had a problem with someone on a midrange.com mailing list where they sent obvious spam.
The problem was, they were a subscriber to the list and had posted before … so the normal counter measures for that didn’t work (the first post for all subscribers are held until approved, to prevent people from subscribing, posting spam, and unsubscribing).
The puzzling thing about this was … the ‘from address’ on the message was not in the subscriber list.
Turns out that Mailman will accept message based on the FROM address of the message or the SENDER address (also known as the envelope-from). The sender addressed is set by the sending mail server and is not normally in the body of the message.
After a bit of digging around, I figured out a way to add this information to the message headers so I can more easily diagnose the problem in the future.
Oct 25 2012
Recently I’ve been getting a lot of mail from the feedback loops I subscribe to indicating that someone has gotten a subscription confirmation message and they considered it spam.
After digging into my logs I noticed a few things …
This ‘mailbait.info’ service is supposed to allow you to fill your mailbox … why anyone would want to do this is beyond me … and it has absolutely ZERO protections against submitting someone else’s email address. As such, it just ends up generating spam. And a lot of the twits that are using this ‘service’ are hiding behind TOR nodes, which protects their IP address.
Oct 01 2012
This is another one of my Pet Peeves … people who walk (or run) on multi-use trails who don’t pay attention.
This is common sense … when you’re walking or running on a multi-use trail, you have to pay attention to what’s going on around you.
There are bikers (such as me), other runners, sometimes horses, etc, all around you … and, if you’re not paying attention, you can get hurt.
Sep 30 2012
Sep 29 2012
Let’s get something cleared up here … I’m not annoyed at Motorola for not providing Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) for the Atrix 4G.
Not at all.
Companies need to make decisions about what hardware they are going to support and what hardware they aren’t going to support.
I participate in those kinds of decisions quite frequently at work.
What annoys me about what Motorola did is the fact that they lead consumers on for quite a long time … indicating that ICS was going to be provided on the Atrix 4G.
Sep 25 2012
Sep 03 2012
As some of you may be aware, I don’t put a whole lot of stock in the “SMART” feature of hard drives.
Rarely have I had the SMART capabilities of a hard drive actually tell me that the drive was going to fail.
Recently I had an encounter with SMART errors in a totally different way.
Basically, my ReadyNAS NV+ storage server was telling me that “Disk 1″ was having problems and might fail soon … but all my tests indicated that the drives were fine.
After a lot of hassle, and going back and forth with Netgear support, I finally figured out the problem.
It started a few weeks ago with an email the ReadyNAS sent
Reallocated sector count has increased in the last day. Disk 1: Previous count: 671 Current count: 677 Growing SMART errors indicate a disk that may fail soon. If the errors continue to increase, you should be prepared to replace the disk.
The odd thing was, the SMART information on the drives, that was available via the ReadyNAS web interface, did not indicate any of the 4 drives currently installed had any reallocated sectors.
Jun 10 2012
The ride is over and I did my 35 miles.
I had a good time, got lots of exercise, met some interesting people … and got involved in a cause that both directly and indirectly effects me.
I raised $3380 … which made me an “Ultimate Champion for Diabetes”. I got a fancy shmancy gold medal and, theoretically, a champions riding jersey (although that didn’t arrive on time, so I wore a red riders jersey). The medal was kind of silly, but I would have liked to have been able to wear the jersey.
Riding helped me in many ways … there’s the obvious cardio benefit, which helps keep my diabetes under control, but it also helped me deal with the stress of my mom’s illness and passing. About three weeks before the ride, my co-worker Marty and I were planning on doing a 35 mile ride (following the Tour de cure route), when my mom was moved into the hospice unit at St. James Hospital. He asked if I wanted to cancel our ride, but I told him that I needed to ride.
I’d like to thank everyone who sponsored me on the ride … your support is greatly appreciated.
IMHO – midrange.com
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