mcbeen.com

I found a rather fun site today. It is a online etymology dictionary. So if you are anything like me, and sometimes wonder why certain words are used certain ways… This is THE place. Ever wonder why exposed film is called footage? Now you know.

I have had this video clip for some time now. It was given to me by a local electrician. Supposedly it is real. Supposedly it came from a site in the Central Valley of California. Real or not it’s pretty neat.

Judging by the way these guys back away, I think it is real.

Jenn and I now have WP 1.2 installed. Lots of good new features for us to play with. Plus, we couldn’t just let Joe have all the fun. The Coppermine stuff is really starting to work well now. It’s pretty much what I have been wanting. One of the reasons I stopped posting photos to my website was I was sick of maintaining the html library by hand. WHAT A PAIN! Now it’s cake… And my blog is directly linked to it.
Sorry about the new theme Jenn. I couldn’t resist. Let me know what default theme you would like and I can set it for you.

I’ve gone ahead and updated my blog to 1.2 of wordpress, and linked to a new online photo manger, Coppermine, running on my server. I’ve got about four other blogs running on my server right now, and I plan to integrate all of them into coppermine. A small sample of what this means can be seen off to the left. Random photos from the gallery are shown. There are tons of different things that can be done here. the least of which is something like this:

6|2||||

This image is being served directly from the Coppermine system. I’m hoping that I can find a way to add in a post to blog button to the gallery so this can be a two way posting system. I may just have to write my own fuction. Based upon what I have learned about both systems, this should not be hard.

BTW, Wow Wee, the makers of the Robosapien sent me a new remote! goodie! Nice to have our little buddy mobile again!

This thing is fun. My kids have yet to stop playing with it. Other than a rather annoying problem with the remote, this thing is made really well. I’m quite shocked. I doubt you could find a better made toy/robot for $100.00.
It is suprisingly heavy for a plastic toy, and it is very solid. no give in the plastics. It works great on carpet too.
The only problem I have had is the remote. It seems to “crash”. You have to pop the batteries out and put then back in every once in a while. I thought they were going dead, but new ones have the same problem. The problem seems to be completely random. Oh well. Maybe I’ll see if I can get a replacement.

Wow. Looks like this week will be fun. SBC is one strike for three days, and we have three lines down. Looks like our phone system that SBC was supposed to install will be put on hold as well. They could be out as long as three months!

At least there is some good news. Our Mailfrontier stopped another few hundred viruses that got through Symantec over the weekend, and on top of that, I got vidication from our “virus protection” out sourcing company.
I have been working with them for over a month now to try and tighten our virus filters. Many strains were getting through, and I felt it was just a matter of time before our luck ran out and our network got leveled. But I kept getting responses like this which was addressed to our department:

…The strong majority of Ben’s emails are actually benign, even though the desktop software recognizes them as a virus. Here’s what is happening:

I should note that it is possible to disable the attachment scanning and rely only on the AV software, which may make for more thorough cleansing, at the cost of lesser protection. Let us know if you want to try this route.

The true situation is this…

SAV strips Attachment
SAV scans message – Sees no problem
SAV sends message on
Mailfrontier Scans message – Finds exploit scripts
Mailfrontier Blocks message with virus/vulnerablility and redirects it to an external “holding pen” on one of my personal email servers. Now THAT is a dangerous mailbox. I don’t even like to LOOK at it.

Imagine my joy today when the SMTP gateway of our security vendor showed up in my inbox complaining about viruses I had sent to them! Turns out when accessing the “benign” scripts in my inbox, THEY GOT HACKED!!!! The virus harvested their inboxes for email addresses, and then started sending!
I think they learned their lesson. I asked them if they would like to use my consulting service to get a handle on their virus vulnerablilites. 🙂

Lucky for me, I have an on-the-ball lady working in receiving. She knew I was expecting a parts shipment from Dell. She also knew that our CAO was not. Guess who dell shipped the package to. I’m going to have to start taking pictures. I’m not sure how much more of this you all will believe with out a little physical proof!
So, she brought me the box to verify if it was what I was looking for. Sure enough, it was the memory… But wait… Here we go. 4 refurbished memory modules. Unfriggin believable. They want me to put USED, FAILED memory in my server. But I’m sure this meets Dells stringent QA testing, waiting I seem to remember a quote in a previous email that makes me nervous…

2005-05-19
>Ben
> send the log. Because if there is less the 10 errors within a given
>time thats normal and well within specs. thats why it is ECC . Thank
>you for using Dell’s online support for Workstations/Servers.

On top of that, the modules are not paired. This is DDR RAM. Shit. I’m screwed. And of course they want these all back within 10 calendar days as well. I have no way to know if any of these sticks will work, and not enough time to thoroughly test. I have a feeling I’m going to be calling CDW to buy new ram.

Not all is frustration and gloom here at work. Overall, things run quite well. So, in order to counter act the one-two punch that is Dell and Symantec, there must be some pretty good stuff over here! What could it be? It’s Mailfrontier ASG/EG. the ASG/EG stands for Antispam Gateway/Enterprise Gateway. These guys are cool. They have been around for about two years now, but the ASG product is just a tad over a year old. It is great. Truly great stuff.
The software was primarily designed to block SPAM, but it now also blocks viruses and does Policy based filtering as well. And it does its job admirably.
When we decided to look into running the ASG software, we were getting about SPAM 10000 messages a month, with 7000 real. We thought we had trouble then. So far we are looking to break 80000 messages this month for spam alone. It is breath taking to watch the stats climb.
Our users are happy, and they get beautifully rendered spam reports personalized every morning sitting in their inboxes. They are easy to read, and concise. The users get personalized white and black listings as well.
The policy stuff is pretty new, so there is room for improvement, but the virus handler is deft. Yesterday, Mailfrontier/McAffee stopped 276 viruses from getting into our network. Not a big deal? Well keep in mind that Mailfrontier sits INSIDE our Symantec antivirus firewall. That’s 276 infections it saved me from cleaning up today. That makes me very happy.
To fill out one of Mailfrontier’s HUGE gaps in functionality, I built an SQL/Crystal reporting engine that automatically imports the logs from the previous day and gives me stats any way I can imagine.
This is what software should be. I want software to make my life easier.

Got a response back yesterday and as expected it was amazing. Well… I might as well through the entire mail sequence.

2004-05-19
>Ben
>send the log. Because if there is less the 10 errors within a given
>time thats normal and well within specs. thats why it is ECC . Thank
>you for using Dell’s online support for Workstations/Servers.

Now, I was a little taken aback by this. ECC memory is there to PREVENT CRASHES of applications and data corruption caused by memory errors. It IS NOT there to give Dell an excuse not to replace my RAM. It’s as bad as Sony! So, I took the exported log file that the Dell open manmanage system generated, and attached it to the reply. I get this later in the day.

2004-05-19
> the logfile sent is unreadable. all i see if a bunch of number and
>letter strings. Try and resend it using TXT format .. that should
>work..david

Now, keep in mind that I sent them their log file directly exported from open manage. they export a ZIP file, not a txt file. when you attach a zip file, it gets MIME encoded as base-64 so the smtp gateways can handle the binary transfer. He got it, and couldn’t figure out what it was. I’m getting tech support on a SERVER from a guy who doesn’t understand EMAIL! I know the attachment was ok because I extracted it on my side and opened it from his replay :-).
So. He wanted a plain text version of the log. This is a problem. When I unzipped the log, it is html. lots-o-html. Why would the export html if they want txt? Go figure… oh yea… this is Dell! Frustrated, I just cut and pasted the entire rendered page into a text email. My email program through out the tables and formatting, and I ended up with a rather jumbled mess of log entries. I didn’t feel like repaginating, so I just hit send. I got this yesterday.

2004-05-20
>Ben,
>Swapping the ram seems to have make the issue follow the stick of
>ram since the error are consistent with 1 stick at a time . I
>will go ahead and ship out 4sticks and make sure we cover
>all bases. They will be there friday morning and the ref. number is
>xxxxxxxxx

4 Sticks…. that’s wierd. I only have 2 in the machine. Hmmm… I hope they are the right size. Oh well. If they aren’t, we’ll try again. You have to be patient with these guys. It is currently 1:11 pm, and the sticks are not here yet. Looks like we will continue play on Monday.