I'm back!

I'm back in Missouri. Really jetlagged. I'll write more when I can think straight! I had a wonderful time, though.
Mood: tired
Music: None

Astrology is wierd.

I'm a skeptic of Astrology in general, since I prefer to believe that I
make my own destiny. On the other hand, it's surprising how often there
is a strong correlation between astrological analyses and
personalities. A large part of that is the fortune teller effect
- you say things in such a way that they will sound true; on the other
hand, I sometimes wonder if there actually is something there. Take
this silly LJ quiz thingy:

Your Birthdate: September 21

Being born on the 21st day of the month (3 energy) is likely to add a good bit of vitality to your life. The energy of 3 allows you bounce back rapidly from setbacks, physical or mental. There is a restlessness in your nature, but you seem to be able to portray an easygoing, "couldn't care less" attitude. You have a natural ability to express yourself in public, and you always make a very good impression. Good with words, you excel in writing, speaking, and possibly singing. You are energetic and always a good conversationalist. You have a keen imagination, but you tend to scatter your energies and become involved with too may superficial matters. Your mind is practical and rational despite this tendency to jump about. You are affectionate and loving, but very sensitive. You are subject to rapid ups and downs.

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?

Mood: weird
Music: None

Not awake!

I was up kinda late last night, researching streaming webcam interfacing for a work project. It's surprising how much software there is out there to host a webcam/stream it to remote users (usually via a Java applet) - and it's surprising how much of it seems to be really poorly written! I won't name names (although I have emailed the guilty), but I found everything from "give your FTP users rights to execute this .EXE" (with on indication as to what the .exe does, or it's required security profile) to "this assembly requires full trust to the entire drive to run" (even though it uses one folder, it fails it's security assertion if it doesn't have read/write to the whole drive. I finally settled on Webcam32, because it's cheap, cheerful, and seems pretty easy to use. The funny thing is, I may not even be writing this particular work project, I believe that it will be William's while I'm gone (hence the need for me to get the research together, I guess - that's my job!).

Today, I'm a little lethargic but otherwise not feeling too bad at all. I'm definitely in the pre-vacation motiviation drain zone, though. I'd love to find excuses to have some fun today! It's probably okay if I do - I can't do any major software releases this close to a vacation, or I'm guarantying time on the phone trying to fix/rollback the patch while I'm in England. Even with unit tests and a basic regression test suite, it's hard to release something with zero defects!

I wonder what I'll do today. :-)

Mood: relaxed
Music: The silence of my office!

Worm.Sober.P

For a worm that requires work to install, a crapload of people seem to have managed to contract Worm.Sober.P! So far, my clients seem to be avoiding it okay - but our mailserver has been blocking them at an impressive rate. We peaked at 1,000/minute yesterday. This prompted me to make some changes to our infrastructure:

• Viruses are unzipped/scanned on a ramdrive rather than physical drive. This reduces drive wear, and is a lot faster (as long as there is RAM left!). FreeBSD has a nifty facility to have a RAM drive that becomes a physical drive if RAM is short, so worst case it degrades to it's previous performance level.


• I changed some concurrency settings to avoid running out of swap.


• I firewalled off one host that was hitting us with 1.5mb/s of worm traffic. Too expensive to talk to! (I hate paying for bandwidth use)

So far, today is about as heavily loaded - but our systems have reverted to FreeBSD's traditional "that all you got? Hit me harder!" mode!

Mood: accomplished
Music: Drives whirring

Not feeling very socialist today

I hate to say it, but I'm really sick of being hassled by homeless guys. I generally feel a little guilty when I don't give change to the homeless (I tend to think that they are better off finding help at one of Columbia's many facilities for the homeless, rather than taking cash I give them for alcohol), but I'm really running out of patience today. It's not even a class thing - I have nothing against the homeless, or anything like that. I'm just sick of being hassled in not-nice ways! Between this morning and yesterday, I've been hassled three times outside my workplace! All three incidents have included the same gentleman, referred to here as X. The first time, X and an African-American guy from Mississipi cornered me (making it really difficult to just keep walking; they moved every time I moved) and tried to get "$3 to cover gas to Mississipi" - $3 might get you to the edge of town! Anyway, after I said no, claiming to have no money (not entirely untrue, I didn't have much on me) the MI guy pulls a knife out and... tries to sell it to me. Needless to say, a guy pulling a knife didn't do much for my nerves, and my first thought wasn't "oh, nice knife, I'd love to buy it." It was more along the lines of "can I run away? Not sure. I hope he's slow enough that I can dodge and perform a break-lock...." The second time, X appeared in our parking lot and started rambling about wanting smokes/money, and how he was going to die without a cigarette. I didn't give him one. He didn't die. I'm beginning to think that's a shame! Anyway, this morning I'm smoking with Dan, and X wonders over saying "is that a cellphone?" Considering he was with MI Knife Man yesterday, my first thought was "try and get my cellphone, and I'll show you just how fast an English guy can get into the office and call for help!"

Sometimes, people really bother me.

Mood: aggravated
Music: None

Interesting

For the first time in months, my system has a virus (actually 107 instances thereof). The infection vector? Firefox+Java! I'm running uptodate versions of both, as far as I can tell - but some sites popup a "virus found in ..." error pointing at the JNI cache reliably, and despite AVG's best efforts, the file makes it onto my system.

The moral of this story: Firefox may be secure, but it isn't that secure.

Mood: cheerful
Music: None