Author: Jan Dembowski (page 94 of 96)

February 12, 2006

Fully domesticated snow professional

With the snow forecast (we got 12 to 14 inches of snow) I unpacked the snow thrower Saturday morning. It’s a 6.5 horsepower gas powered contraption.

Saturday we started getting snow. Sunday morning and afternoon I got to use the snow thrower. Originally I did not want to get one as I thought we did not really get that much snow.

After doing the entire driveway I am glad that we got one. It was very time consuming but it worked. I guess that means I am a fully domesticated home owner.

This is the second snow thrower that we’ve gotten. The first one was an 11.5 HP monster that did not even fit into my Dad’s mini-van. There was an issue with missing parts and eventually we got the monster returned. Looking at the documentation the old one was good for my driveway, the 3 neighbours driveways, and the street.

The one that we got afterwards worked really well but the day was not complete until we heard from my cousin Peter who called to say

“Hey it’s too bad you returned the old one. That’s a lot of snow out there.”

Should have taken before and after pictures.

February 4, 2006

StarForce sillyness (they suck wind loudly)

Recently the maker of the StarForce apparently threatened to sue an author on Boing Boing for talking about his bad experience with their copy protection driver scam. This made me laugh since I removed a game partly because it installed StarForce drivers.

For Christmas my brother Alek got me the Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood video game. Normally this would be a good match since I enjoy playing first person shooters. The game looked okay but they got many little things wrong. The cinematic cut scenes were awful. I was frequently somewhere far from where the people talking in the scene were. And my character was frozen in place while a conversation was going on. I found the game play to be a little stifled.

But what really turned me off was the copy protection system. After I installed and tried to run the game, I got a message stating that I had to reboot in order to activate the driver. Driver? I had installed a game not a piece of hardware. Why did they need a driver?

The driver was part of the StarForce copy protection scam. From the web site for “StarForce Drivers Removal” the text says

Some versions of StarForce Copy Protection will install dedicated drivers on your PC. Those drivers are necessary for the StarForce specific CD/DVD checking procedure, only. They do not include any hidden functionality. The drivers are active only at execution of the protected application. StarForce constantly improves their drivers to keep them compatible with the latest versions of Windows operating systems.

See http://www.onlinesecurity-on.com/protect.phtml?c=55 for more information. Google is your friend.

The underlining in the text is mine, but that statement is just nonsense. The real reason they install the drivers is to interfere with your system should you have the CD in the drive when you try to use a CD-ROM burner. So even if you are not running the game the drivers run and interfere with your system as the game publisher feels appropriate.

I installed a game. Looking at the back of the box I see that they do sorta warn the user with some disclaimer. Now I normally dislike that I need to keep the CD in the drive when I play the game but I do it. Call of Duty 2 and F.E.A.R. are like that. But AFAIK no drivers are installed and those two games are great.

Starforce

Windows XP Pro (any version of Windows really) is an unstable environment. And at no time did I see any problems with my system that I could point to the StarForce drivers and say “Them! They hurt my box!” But installing drivers needlessly is just plain stupid. If Ubisoft wants to check the CD by running code when I actually play their game, well I think that’s rude but okay. But to have their drivers installed and running when I am not even playing their game? Nuts.

I removed the game and the drivers and in the future will check the game before I buy. I will look at the back of the game for this warning and not buy it. Game publishers who use this protection scam seriously do not get it. Game piracy may be a problem but people who pirate games get around all the protection. Installing drivers just hurts the end user. This is a game, not launch-the-missiles-now software.

January 29, 2006

Happy Chinese New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year! This is the Year of the Dog and we celebrated by visiting Lily’s family in Queens. The kids love abusing their cousins so it was all good.

In reality we just enjoyed the time off. This is the first time in a long time that Lily has really had a day off; this is a very busy time of year for her at work.

I think this coming week we may want to take the kids out to eat but today Flushing and Chinatown ought to be a mad house if you are driving and looking for a place to park. Weekends 11am – 2pm are normally just bad but today with everyone out and about it really would push me over the edge just looking for parking.

January 19, 2006

A Not by Kurt Vonnegut speech

Anyone remember the Kurt Vonnegut Commencement speech that never happened? Wear sunscreen? The text was great, and sounded very cool. It’s just Kurt Vonnegut did not pen it nor deliver it.

I was browsing some blogs, and found a reference to this. Guy Kawasaki wrote a speech and apparently gave it a few times. It is a fun read.

January 14, 2006

Google Pack

Friday I installed Ubuntu on my laptop.

The operation was a success but the laptop died. Something in what I did made the NTFS partition an “unmountable_boot_volume” so I could run Ubuntu perfectly but could not get my Windows XP working.

. . .

Bundle_sm Okay I re-installed everything from scratch. This time I added Google Pack. The appeal to me is that it has most of the software I want in one place. The installation was pretty smooth and I had planned to put all those programs on my laptop anyway.

The Norton 2005 A/V that came with it was odd. I had to run live update and reboot something like 5 times and kept running live update. It definitely has a recycled feel to it. In 6 months my subscription will be up, I’ll see what will be available after that.

January 5, 2006

Optimum Online Boost

I have had Optimum Online Boost for a few days. It’s not bad and here is what they offer (from the website):

Faster speed, up to 30 Mbps down and up to Mbps up.
Total of 15 e-mail addresses, 1GB each.
Different setup’s for creating web sites.
Domain registration.
Web hosting.
15 custom e-mail addresses (some.joe@yourdomain.com).
The ability to host your own web server or e-mail server.

The last one grabbed me and you can un-block ports 25 and 80 (SMTP and HTTP). The rest is probably not bad; I just don’t really have much use for items 2 through 6 myself. If I were doing the home business thing that might work for me.

The speed is great but at some point we hit “ludicrous speed”. The servers I am downloading from aren’t that well connected so no “light speed is to slow” for me.

There is a catch: the IP address is dynamically assigned. Static IP addresses are not yet offered. For hosting a server this is not really a problem since they offer different dynamic DNS clients for Linux and for Windows.

For sending e-mail from your domain, this might be an issue. My current address is 24.46.186.255. If you check my address in Multi-RBL you can see that that IP address is on a ban list of both njabl.org and sorbs.net, so anyone I send mail to who subscribes will not accept mail from a server in my basement.

I used to use SORBS, now I use Spamhaus, they seem to have a more accurate hit rate for me. The dynamic address is not a show stopper since I use another server I maintain to deliver my e-mail.

Still having a static IP address would be more attractive. I have spoken with the tech support at Optimum Online about this, they don’t offer it but are contemplating doing so in the future.

January 2, 2006

Basement server installed

SUSE not Fedora

My Internet gateway at home is a old Dell XPS 450. It’s a PII running at 450Mhz, has a 30GB IDE drive, and 256MB RAM. No cd-rom drive, I removed it when it broke a few years ago. When I need to install an operating system, I temporarily attach a DVD drive.

I was previously running Fedora Core 3 on it. Fedora is okay, but it is on an aggressive development schedule. For example Fedora Core 2 was released May 18, 2004, patches are currently supported by the Fedora Legacy Project. That’s how the model works, the main project works on releases and patches for a small amount of time. Then the Legacy project takes over the patches. It’s all well documented and explained.

My problem is the amount of time for main project support is too short. I don’t want to keep installing a new Linux distribution, but I do want timely patches. The legacy project is pretty good, but they definitely have resource issues. The current Fedora Core gets patched quickly as you expect. But in order to stay current you should have the latest release.

The SUSE ftp server has patches for the 9.0 release, which came out October 2003. That is the kind of support I am looking for. I downloaded the SUSE Linux OSS 10.0 CD images, ran a script to create a DVD image. I burnt the DVD, attached a drive to my old box and installed away.

Postfix, Spamassassin, anti-virus, Oh My

Now that ports 25 and 80 are no longer blocked, I wanted to use the basement box as a backup mail server.

I want the server to

receive mail for dembowski.net and epyon-1.com
use TLS encryption if possible
check the sender’s IP address against Spamhaus
greylist the traffic
virus scan the mail
rate the content for spam

Bookofpostfix I installed the SUSE package for Postfix and configured it to only accept mail for my domains, open mail relays are BAD. I referred to The Book of Postfix for guidance; Postfix is now a breeze. The only thing I deviated from was to generate a self signed certificate as so

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:1024 -days 3650 -nodes -x509 -keyout dixie.dembowski.net.pem -out dixie.dembowski.net.pem

This created a self signed key and certificate with an expiration of 10 years. That is the pem file that I refer to in my postfix main.cf file.

Greylisting is the number one most effective thing I have added to kill spam. It works like this: a mail server connects to my server and tries to deliver mail. The servers IP address, the sender’s e-mail address, and the recipient’s address goes into a database. Instead of accepting the mail, my server sends back a 450 code, which basically says “Not now I’m busy. Try back in 5 minutes”. A RFC compliant mail server will attempt to re-send later, and all further attempts (after 300 seconds) from the IP address, sender e-mail, recipient e-mail combination will be accepted.

Spammers typically do not try to re-send, and the sender’s e-mail is often random so they never get in at all. See http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/postgrey/ for more info, this is a very effective means to control unwanted mail.

I downloaded a postgrey RPM from http://www.lfarkas.org/linux/packages/el3/i386/SRPMS/postgrey-1.23-0.src.rpm and modified the postgrey.sysv file to match SUSE. Rebuilt package and installed.

I added the SUSE packages for Spamassassin, ClamAV, and Amavisd-new for content filtering.

A few tests and all was done. I modified my MX records for my domains, and have been receiving mail on my new box. This server does not attempt to deilver e-mail except to the destination servers for my two domains.

December 29, 2005

Optimum Online Boost (Verizon vs Cablevision is good)

I may be able to host my server in my basement after all.

When I lived at the old house, I had Time Warner Cable for surfing the web, and Acedsl. The DSL line was for hosting my domain in my house, I was given a /29 address block to use.

DSL was okay, but due to distance limitations I was getting 768 kbps up and down. With TWC I was getting ~1 to 2 Mbps down, don’t know how fast up stream.

Last year when my family moved to Long Island I found that there was no DSL available here, and Cablevision was only offering dynamic addresses and blocked ports 80 and 25. Running a mail/web server was not doable.

Now for an additional $10/month (if you are a voice subscriber already) Optimum Online offers unblocking ports 25 and 80 and provides a DDNS client. Also they uncap the speed so down stream is now up to 30 Mbps, upstream is up to 2 Mbps.

That’s pretty respectable. See http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ for a good speed test. I selected the Washington, DC server. Here is a graphic of the results I just got.

10641 kbps down, 1733 kbps up. Just plain sick. If I can work it out, I may setup a server in my basement.

December 28, 2005

What a phone call

This one irked me too much and I have to share.

Lily and I are on vacation this week so we’re sleeping late and getting the kids fed and bathed after 8am. Vacation: it’s all good. Around 8:45am today I heard my cell phone ring. I was busy wrestling with my son, so I let it go to voice mail.

15 minutes later I checked the voice mail. It was marked "Urgent". Here’s what I heard.

"Yeah this message is for Jack Someone, my name is the John Doe and it is extremely important that I speak to you as soon as possible regarding your case that I’m handling.

My firm has been retained to have a -fuzzy sounds like- criminal issue for the sheriff to repossess your Name-Brand Car and before any other charges that are pending against you are filed or any subpoenas for depositions issued to family, friends, relatives, or business associates that may be familiar with the current status of this collateral, I’d like to give you the chance to avoid this.

My contact number is 1-800-555-5555 extension 665 and I’ll hold service pending immediate contact. Also it’s purported that John Dembowski may be driving this vehicle."

Names and details changed, in case you don’t realize it.

Gee, that sounded just like a collection agent. I worked with Jack Someone in the past, I have no idea why they were calling me or how my cell phone number came in their possession. I even knew the last part was just to get a rise out of me and call back, even if they did get my first name wrong. The prudent thing would be to just deleted the message; if someone had something real to say to me they’d used registered mail.

Even knowing that, I called.

John: Hello? Me: Is this John Doe?

John: Yes it is.

Me: You just called me, regarding Jack Someone.

John: Yes, yes I did.

Me: I don’t know where you got that information but I am not driving Jack’s car, and I don’t know what this is about.

John: Well, that is what he is putting out there. Have you had any contact with him?

Me: I worked with Jack two years ago at ACME Sprockets.

John: I want you to listen very carefully, I am going to ask-

Me: I want you to listen to me very carefully, I am hanging up now.

And I hung up. He called my cell phone less than a minute later.

John: I want to ask-

Me: John if you call me back again I am going to report you to the authorities.

And promptly hung up again.

I misplaced Jack’s number so I instead called a mutual friend. He conferenced in Jack and we chatted. Jack is a good guy and he was very apologetic. He asked if I could send him the details, so I sent him an e-mail as above and included a MP3 of the message I got.

I wonder what the success rate on using tactics like that are? For some people just sounding authoritative works. If they can get you to lie (what little I said was truthful and accurate), they can work that. They want to get you to do their work for them and if that means annoying some people to get to someone, they do it.

The positive result for them is getting the person dodging them to contact them. So on that score, John Doe did his job well. Jack contacted the original company that sent the job to John Doe.

Next time I will just delete the damn message.

I am sure that there are ethical, effective, collection professionals somewhere. I am equally sure that under the right conditions (say, on an episode of MythBusters) pigs really can fly.

December 26, 2005

Merry Christmas Everyone!

December 24th

Saturday night we put the kids in bed at 7pm. We told them they had to go to sleep or Santa might not come to our house.

Naturally as soon as we got them to sleep, Alek and my parents went to the basement and began to wrap presents. I brought from the basement the presents Lily and I had gotten and Lily started wrapping.

Wrapping is too complicated for me, I’m told.

By 11pm we had all the gifts wrapped and placed under the tree.

December 25th

Christmas day was perfect. The kids woke up around 6am and woke me and Lily up. Hearing your kids say “Look, Santa came! Look at all the presents!” when they are 2 and 4 years old is great. The kids tore into their gifts and really had fun. We had the sense to separate their set of gifts from everyone else’s, or they’d have ripped open all the presents. It was great fun and we all exchanged really good gifts.

Every year the whole family heads over to Ed’s house and we all hang out and have a meal with his in-laws. Ed’s family is great, lots of fun, and really good to be with. We had dinner and exchanged gifts. A good time was had by all. The kids love going over to Ed’s place and fooling around with his niece.

Ed shared with us two funny videos from the Internet, Worst Job (warning: NSFW, not to be viewed by small children) and Anti-boredom. We are ~~a bunch of geeks with broadband Internet connections~~ your typical American family.