Not Dead Yet

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not-dead-yetDuring the 2013 Tour de Cure ride, my friend Marty was active on various social media sites … he frequently used the phrase “Not dead yet”.

As it happened, I recently finished a book that was recommended to me by a fellow type 2 diabetic.  It was “Not Dead Yet: My Race Against Disease: From Diagnosis to Dominance” by Phil Southerland.

When Phil was a child, he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.  His mother was told that he would either be dead or blind by the time he was 25. Despite this prediction, he went on to be a world class professional cycle racer and founded a professional cycle racing team: Team Type 1 (now Team Novo Nordisk).

I found the book to be very good and quite enlightening … on multiple levels.

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Tour de France

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I’m actually watching a sporting event on TV right now … well, slightly time shifted, as it’s recording on the the TiVo.

I’m watching (as you might have guessed) the Tour de France.

I’m honestly not following most the technical details, but it’s kind of interesting.

Unfortunately, the detached perspective of watching on TV makes it hard to judge the significance of various aspects … like speed, climbs, head winds, etc.

Still, kind of interesting.  I’ll keep watching for a while.

Text On Splash Screen

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You may have heard a variation of this at some point …

A lazy programmer is not necessarily a good programmer … but a good programmer is a lazy programmer.

I fully subscribe to that statement … good programmers are always looking for ways to make their jobs easier.  Either by automating some repetitive function or making some functionality easier to change in the future.

Recently I had to do some re-branding on one of my eclipse based applications.  One thing that I had to do was update the splash screen that was displayed in the Eclipse RCP to display different text.

We had the basic graphic and all we needed was to have our designer update the text that was displayed on the bottom.  I sent the graphic over and the new text and the designer sent it back to me.

The problem was, I got the text wrong.  I knew I was going to have to go back to the designer and ask her to redo the graphic.  Luckily she’s a very nice person and never had a problem with this.

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mailbait redux

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For anyone who runs a mailing list and has gotten pummeled recently with a rash of subscription attempts, they may be coming from mailbait.info.

A while ago I blogged on how to block mailbait, but it appears they have changed their host.

Their new host is ‘themailbait.bitbucket.org’.

I suggest you update your web server configuration to block any referrer that references the word ‘mailbait’ in the URL.

Here’s my new httpd.conf entry to block mailbait…

SetEnvIf Referer mailbait mailbait
Deny from env=mailbait

Metric Century!

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Well, I did it.  I rode a metric century (100 km / 62 miles) for the 2013 Chicago Tour de Cure!

That’s the longest distance I’ve ever ridden in a single ride.

I also raised $5,291 for the ADA. That made me a Champion on a Mission. A big thank you to everyone who sponsored me.

I’m super proud of myself for both achievements!

I was quite worried about the weather.  The forecast was for rain, but thankfully the meteorologists were as accurate as usual, and the weather was perfect.  Sunny, warm, but a bit cool at the start.  Perfect riding weather.

I rode with my friends Marty & Steve. Due to allergies, lack of sleep, and the remnants of a bad cough, Steve wasn’t able to finish.  Steve did do 45 miles which, under the circumstances, was pretty darn good. Marty and I finished the ride with few problems.

Below is a map and statistics of the ride from Strava…

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Responsive Web Design

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As part of my fundraising effort for the Tour de Cure, I registered the domain “ridewithdavid.com”. I wanted an easy to remember domain that I could use as a portal to the fundraising page that the ADA provided.

So I created a basic web page that would redirect the visitor to my fundraising page after a few seconds pause.

I designed the page with some graphical elements and got it to a point that I thought it looked good.

The problem was, while the page looked fine on a normal desktop or tablet browser, it looked horrible on a mobile phone browser.

Here’s a screen shot of the page that is displayed on a desktop or tablet browser … notice the two graphical elements on the sides?

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WordPress Under Attack

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If you run a wordpress blog, you really should  be aware that there is a global attack on wordpress blogs going on.

It’s coming from a bot net and is an attempt to find blogs that have their admin account enabled with easy to guess passwords.

I noticed the attack a couple of months ago when, while watching my web server log scrolling by, I noticed a significant number of attempts to use the wp-login.php script from random IP addresses.

A bit of research turned up information on the global attack.

Obviously I wanted to do something about it to protect my server.

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Tour de Cure 2013: GOAL!

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Champions-to-Stop-Diabetes-Logo-GOLD-jpgWell, I’ve achieved my goal for the 2013 Tour de Cure!

Last year I raised $3500 for diabetes research & education … this year I initially set my goal a little higher than that … $4000.  I quickly found out I have a group of very generous and supportive friends, family, & co-workers.  My goal was (rather quickly) raised to $5000.

Last Thursday, I achieved that goal.

Am I going to stop trying to raise money?  Of course not.  More is always better.

Being involved in the Tour de Cure is a wonderful outlet for me … it’s a very worthwhile cause, gets me on my bike on a regular basis, and has introduced me to a lot of really great people.

I’m also enjoying getting Team RED transformed into something a little more cohesive.  While we haven’t been able to get as many training rides organized (mainly due to weather), I’m pleased with what we’ve done so far.  I’m hoping to keep Team RED organized as a group through the year so we can continue pulling together as a real team next year.

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Mothers Day

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Mothers Day

I kind of forgot that Mothers day was just around the corner … but during a recent visit to the grocery store I saw the greeting card section and all the cards out on display.

I knew this was coming … and I’m not the first to experience it … but this is going to a particularly hard mothers day.

I imagine no mothers day in the future will be particularly easy.

Pretty soon we will be having a memorial to dedicate mom’s headstone.  Not especially looking forward to that either.

Truth be told … I’ve only visited the grave site once since the funeral.  I don’t need to.  My memories of my mom are sharp and clear.

She was my mom … she also my friend.

I will always miss her dearly.

Yahoo SMTP Deferrals Take 2

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Well, our good friends at Yahoo are at it again.

Once again they are deferring mail for no apparent reason.

Nothing has changed on my system and yet they haven’t accepted a message to deliver to one of their users in 3 days (maybe more).  And, of course, there’s no way to actually contact a human to find out what is going wrong.

I’m on Yahoo’s email feedback loop … so I’m notified when someone complains about a message.  Nothing has come in recently from the feedback loop.

I used to be on their bulk sender white-list.  There was never a mention of having to renew the white-list approval.

A note to all my friends … DO NOT USE YAHOO FOR EMAIL!  Especially for business email.  The folks at Yahoo do NOT know how to provide service.

Gmail doesn’t have this problem … nor does Hotmail (much as I love to hate Microsoft).

Oh, and FWIW, yahoo customer service tends to ignore questions that are too complex for their script reading drones to answer.