Rick's World

Yep, I'm back after a long period of not blogging. Why? I don't know. Just never got around to it. Other stuff to do. Anyway, yesterday was Christmas, so here's my summary of the day.

The day started at about 8am with my furry alarm clocks (Tiger & Jewel) waking me up. I got up, had breakfast etc. I was out the door around 9am or so. I arrived at the parents house around 930am. After greeting everyone and bringing in my pile of gifts, we proceeded to take some family pictures. For the next 20 minutes or so, it was a game of rearranging the family to every possible combination of two people, three people, and even a few of all four of us (taken using the timer function of the cameras. After everyone had their own family picture, we proceeded to the gifts.

As usual, its the war between the parents insisting the kids open their gifts first and the kids insisting the parents open their gifts first. Of course the kids won and we had the parents open their gifts first. Mom got a CD of games for the computer and a copy of Planet Earth from me. For dad, I got a copy of Windows XP Professional (We don't need no steenking Vista!). Yes, that's right. After all these years, my parents are finally 'legit' with Windows! My brother gave my dad a new jacket to wear, and a large new Ikea cutting board that he liked. He gave my mom a new light fixture for her ceiling fan and a gift certificate to JoAnn Fabrics (Mom's a quilter!). From both of the 'kids' we give dad a wireless keyboard and mouse for the computer. Mom also got a new ring to wear from Dad and Mom gave Dad a nice new Sealy Posturpedic computer chair. Man that's a comfy chair! I want one! :)

Once the parents were done unwrapping their gifts, the 'kids' got to open their gifts. I got a nice battery powered screwdriver, an Ikea Poang chair and footstool. I also got a copy of Animusic 1 and Animusic 2, but one of the DVDs was loose in the case and got badly scratched. The DVD was unplayable and so I had to mail it back to Amazon.com today for exchange. It'll likely be a few weeks before I get the replacements. What a bummer! Those are some really neat movies. My brother received several seasons of TV shows on DVD, another copy of Windows XP Professional, a remote control helicopter, and a Nintendo Wii. Yes, that's right. My bro managed to receive one of the most sought after gadgets of the year. I gotta thank my friend Dave for finding that Wii for me. I spent weeks looking but was unable to locate one.

By now, it was past noon and the presents were finally all opened. I went off to help the parents change the CD Key on their copy of Windows XP to use their new legit CD Key. I was able to get this changed and their computer completely updated. However, once I set the new CD Key, AVG Antivirus suddenly started complaining that it's serial number was invalid! This is weird, because I was using the free version of their antivirus and it never asked for a serial number. It just generated one. Apparently, it must generate that serial number based on the Windows XP CD key. I had to uninstall and reinstall AVG Antivirus to get that to work again. Grr. I also had a ton of trouble with their network printer. It refused to print from Windows, though it oddly printed perfectly from my brother's Mac Mini. I was never able to figure out how to fix that yesterday. My father and brother did manage to fix it today though by reinstalling the printer drivers.

Later, around 6pm we ate dinner. Dinner consisted of a Honey Baked Ham, mashed potatoes (made by me!), veggies and rolls. A very good dinner. I left later in the evening and took all my new stuff home. I was really tired. I went home and went straight to bed.

I also found out that a cousin of mine discovered my blog and hopefully is a regular reader now. Hi Miki!

As for that photo up at the top, that's the Ekle family. I'm the guy on the left. My brother, Bob is standing to my right, followed by my dad and my mom.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas!

For the last several years I've had an ongoing problem with my garage door opener. Several years ago, the garage door opener that came with my house stopped working right, so I got a new one. My dad came over to help me install it (I'm not exactly Mr. Handyman). We proceeded to replace the motor only and left everything else alone. There was no need to change anything else, because the motor was the only thing that was bad.

For the last several years I've had a problem where the garage door opener refuses to close properly. It would close part way, stop, and then reverse itself and open up all the way again. At the end, the light would blink repeatedly, as if there was some kind of error. For a long time, I just forced it to go down by holding the button until it closed all the way. This really annoyed me, though because I could never close the garage door unless I was inside the garage. It makes it kind of useless.

This past weekend, I asked Dad to come by so we could swap out the old electric eyes that were left over from the previous garage door opener, with the new ones that came with it. I figured that the old electric eye wasn't working right. This would cause the eye to think something was blocking it, so it would refuse to close the door.

Dad came over and after some experimentation with the old and new electric eyes, we finally figured out what the problem was. There was nothing wrong with the old electric eye. The problem was we had connected it wrong to the motor! This was no doubt screwing up the signal causing it to not work right. It took some trial and error and reading the installation instructions (which weren't very clear), before we figured out the wiring was wrong. Finally, after fixing the wiring, the old eye worked perfectly with the newer motor. It's worked flawlessly ever since.

The moral of the story - Read the instructions! Don't assume you know how it works! :)

This past weekend, I went to the Miami International Auto Show. Below is a picture taken of me sitting in the car I wanna buy!

Yesterday, I took a trip down to my local Circuit City to buy a copy of 'Transformers' on DVD. As I picked up the box in the store, I heard some noise coming from it. It sounded like the DVD was sliding around inside the sealed box. I didn't pay much attention to it. I just bought it and brought it home.

Last night, I sit down in my nice comfy recliner, cranked up my thumping surround sound system and fired up the movie. About 20 minutes or so into the movie, it just suddenly pauses and jumps ahead a good 15 seconds in the movie! This is usually a sign that the DVD player is having trouble reading the DVD. I knew instantly that I had bought a bad DVD. I took the DVD out, turned it over, and sure enough there were several large scratches on the bottom of the DVD. Darnit, just when the movie was getting good, I had to stop, pack it up and head back to Circuit City to exchange it for another one. I brought the DVD in, and went back to grab another copy to exchange it for. I picked up several copies, only to hear that same noise of the DVD sliding around inside the box on each. Finally I found a 'silent' box, so I exchanged it and brought it home. I checked the DVD and it was perfect. No scratches and the movie played flawlessly.

The moral of the story is, when buying DVDs in the store, shake the box a little. If you hear a DVD moving around inside the box, don't buy it! Buy another copy that doesn't make any noise when you shake it. It turns out that the DVD I originally bought was not properly seated in the holder inside the box. This caused the DVD to get bounced around inside the box and get scratched up. From now on, when I buy a DVD, I'm going to do the 'shake test' before paying for it.

I wrote previously about how excited I was by the concept of the Amazon MP3 store. I loved the fact that they were selling high quality DRM-free MP3 files. Well, my excitement has decreased quite a bit. A couple days ago, I bought several songs from them and I have to say that the sound quality of these songs I purchased was very disappointing. I'd say that this was just bad luck in the track I downloaded, but I downloaded several and they all didn't sound very good. Granted, I haven't downloaded a lot of tracks from iTunes Plus (the DRM-free store on iTunes), but those sounded much better than these did. Maybe I'm spoiled by AAC. I don't know.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Ok, our friend the comment spammer has picked up the pace. Today he hit me with 217 comment spams, all in the course of an hour and a half. The comment spam all came from the IP:

62.33.12.24

Let's do a little bit of investigating of this.

We have several pieces of information to work with.

1. The IP address used to post the comment spam: 62.33.12.24
2. The DNS name of that IP address: dialup-24.pskov.ru
3. The User Agent used to send these comment spams (found in my server logs): "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

These three pieces of information tell us a lot about our spammer.

First the IP address begins with '62.33.x.x'. This IP range is assigned to the country of Russia. Looking farther tells us that '62.33.12.x' is owned by domain 'pskov.ru'. The DNS name confirms this. This is actually the third IP address in the 62.33.12.x IP range that I've received spam from.

econd, we see the DNS name. The first part 'dialup-24' tells us that our spammer is connecting to the Internet through a dialup connection. In other words, our spammer is spamming the world using a 56K modem! In the DNS name, we also see 'pskov.ru', which is the domain he is connecting from. This is no doubt the name of his dialup Internet provider. This again is confirmed by looking up the information on the IP.

Third, we see the User Agent. The User Agent is the program that he used to send the comment spam. From the User Agent recording in my server logs, we see that this guy is sending the comment spams using Internet Explorer 6.0 (IE6.0) on Windows XP (Windows NT 5.1). This is unusual. Most 'professional' spammers use scripts to send the spams automatically in large batches. This User Agent tells us that our spammer is entering his spams manually, one by one! This guy wasted an hour and a half manually spamming my web site using Internet Explorer!

Based on the fact that this is the third IP that I've received from the same Internet provider in Russia, and that our spammer is dialing into the Internet leads me to believe that all three of these IP addresses are the same spammer. Since he's on dialup, that means that his ISP likely provides him an IP address using DHCP. This means that he could get a different IP every time he dials into the Internet. I had banned the last two IP addresses individually. Since it seems to be a pattern with this guy, I decided to ban the entire '62.33.12.x' IP range (his entire ISP, or at least a good chunk of it).

Banning Addresses

If you are running Apache as your web server, you ban IP addresses by adding some lines to a file named '.htaccess' (note the period as the first chracter). This file contains various commands to Apache on how to run your web site. Here is the code you would put in to ban this IP range:

Note how there are only 3 numbers listed on that 'deny from' line? That means ban all IPs that start with those 3 numbers. This will ban 62.33.12.0 through 62.33.12.255. If you want to ban individual IP addresses, just add another 'deny from' line with the IP address you want. You can have as many 'deny from' lines as you want. Make sure you put all these 'deny from' lines between th e'order allow,deny' line and the 'allow from all'.

One less spammer harrassing me.

*sigh* These comment spammers are amateurs.

Note to comment spammers - if you use the same IP address to send all your comment spams you make it very easy to delete the spams and ban your IP. Today's winner is the IP address:

62.33.12.29

This guy sent 29 comment spams, all from this IP. The comment spam is deleted and his sorry ass is banned from my site.

Nice try moron.

Last night, I updated my blog to the new 2.0 version of my blogging software. I gotta say, that so far this new version is a very nice improvement.

Now I just need to figure out how to write custom skins so I can write an iPhone skin. :)

The other day, I was in the bookstore with a friend of mine. He mentioned that David Weber was a good science fiction author. A few days later, I was looking through the bargain books section at Barnes & Noble and I found a David Weber book - Ashes of Victory. I bought it and put it in my pile of books to read. Then, yesterday I was in the bookstore again and found another David Weber book - War of Honor, also in the bargain books section.

Both of these books are part of the Honor Harrington series of books. Since both books were far into the series, I debated buying that second book. I'd never read the series so I thought that starting near the end of the series might be a bad idea. The thing that sold that second book for me, though wasn't the book, but what was inside the book. Inside this bargain book, was a CDROM containing the entire Honor Harrington series of books - in HTML, Microsoft Word, RTF and a couple other formats! And all these files were not protected by any form of DRM! I buy one book and I get ALL the books! How cool is that!

When you put the CD into your CDROM drive and view the HTML page on it, there is a link to the Baen Free Library. This is a web site that lets you read the entire books that Baen Books (the publisher of these David Weber Books) publish. The Library site opens with an introduction by the company as to why they are offering all these books for free, without any DRM. Below is a quote from the page as to his opinion of DRM and online piracy:

1. Online piracy — while it is definitely illegal and immoral — is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.

2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market — especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people — is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.

Amen brother! This is a rare sight - a book publisher that GETS the Internet and the concept of DRM being bad. Plus, this was written in the year 2000! Seven years ago, this company 'got a clue' and there are many companies, such as *ahem* NBC Universal and Universal Music that still do NOT.

I have to say that after discovering this, I'm going to be buying a lot more Baen published books. I show my support with my money, and these folks certainly deserve it.

Ok, this one just started showing up today. It appears to be very similar to the previous spam scam I wrote about - a compromised computer starts sending spam with links that supposedly go to one thing, but actually point to something else. See the actual email below:

Subject: LOL, that is too cool.....
From: xxx.yyy@zzz.com

If your mom sees this she this video of you she is gonna freak. here is where I found it... http:// www. youtube. com/watch?v=dPoP6G44wg9

In the above email, that Youtube link is a hyperlink, but it does NOT go to Youtube. It acutally goes to http:// 70.244.195.157/. I did a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address that it REALLY links to and it is not Youtube, but a DSL customer on AT&T's network. In other words, it's a home user. Had this REALLY been Youtube, it would have linked to youtube.com. The fact that this is linking to some DSL customer of AT&T means that we have YET another computer that has been secretly infected by spyware. When I retreived the HTML for this page with wget, I see that this one is serving out a file called video.exe. It also contained a Youtube logo on the page! This one certainly looks like a better done scam than the previous one, but again, easily disproved.

Once again, we see another example of Windows machines that have been taken over by spyware/malware without their owner's knowledge.