(Ft. Worth, TX, USA)

aubreyturner.org

Computing

Friday, May 01, 2009

Lifting A Curse

I’ve had a computer sitting around in the closet for nearly two years now.  I originally bought it as a fairly inexpensive barebones kit that I was going to build out to give to my Mother for her birthday.  But after I built it I decided that it wasn’t quite what I wanted and so I shelved it and I ended up giving her a new HP for Christmas later that year.  So into the closet it went, only being pulled out long enough for me to scavenge the video card and memory for some other systems that needed them. 

About six months ago I decided to revive it.  It was pretty lagging edge, but still useful for a basic computer for someone who just writes a few documents and checks email/surfs the web.  I had found a video card that I’d forgotten that I had while searching for something else in my office, so all I needed was memory, which I found for $20 or so on eBay.  As I was putting it together I noticed that the tab at the bottom of the metal bracket on the video card wouldn’t seat correctly in the hole, so I took a screwdriver (do you see where this is going?) to try to “guide” it into position.  Unfortunately, the screwdriver slipped, and when it did it hit one of the tiny surface mount resistors on the motherboard, completely annihilating it and ruining the motherboard in the process. 

Now I was at a decision point:  abandon the system or replace the motherboard?  I almost abandoned it when I started pricing replacement motherboards.  The system was so far behind the curve that no one was making new ones for this socket configuration anymore, and all of the online retailers were asking ridiculous prices for such old technology.  But eBay came to the rescue with a lightly used motherboard of similar configuration. 

So… I replaced the motherboard but realized that I didn’t have the proper ATX plate insert for all of the motherboard connectors.  I went ahead without one, but it was nagging at me that it could cause problems.  But, it didn’t appear to have any adverse impact as the system booted right up the first time and loaded the OS without any problems.  Or so I thought.  Once I shut it down it wouldn’t come back on until I’d unplugged the power supply for a few minutes.  If I didn’t all that would happen is that the front panel power light would come on but nothing else would happen (no fans, no HD spinup, etc; like it was in hibernate mode).  I tested the power supply with my ATX PS tester, and it showed all green lights for all of the supply lines on the MB connector as well as all of the molex connectors.

I thought maybe I had some weird grounding issue, so I went back to eBay and managed to find what seemed to be the one remaining ATX insert for this motherboard on planet Earth (only $6.00!).    Once I had it in hand I proceeded to remove the motherboard (which is always a royal pain), install the new plate, and check all grounding points to make sure they were in contact.  So I plugged it in, booted it up, and then shut it down.  Then I pressed the power button again.  No joy.  Same problem. 

At this point I’m convinced that this system is cursed and I decided to cannibalize it for parts.  But when I started my latest build I had two older-style ATX power supplies (including the Enermax) that I could not use in newer systems.  As a last-ditch effort to revive the system I swapped the original power supply for the Enermax.  And the system now works perfectly!  So the problem had been the power supply all along, despite the fact that my power supply tester showed no problems.  Either the PS was marginal for the new motherboard or it had gone bad while it was in storage. 

I guess the lesson learned is that if you suspect a power supply is bad to try another one even if the original tests OK (provided you have another PS on hand, of course). 

Now I have no idea what I’m going to do with this system; it was just sheer cussedness on my part that made me want to get it running again.  If someone is in desperate need of a new PC I’d be willing to give it away (it’d have to be someone local since the shipping would be prohibitive).  If memory serves, it’s an Athlon XP 2200+ with 1GB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive, a 16X DVD-RW drive, and it’s running openSUSE (11.0 I think).  No tech support or exorcist included. 

Ubuntu Boogaloo

I’ve long been a user of the openSUSE Linux distribution (I actually started when it was just SUSE, before Novell bought them and created the openSUSE community).  So I had already downloaded the DVD ISO for openSUSE 11.1 when I started my recent system build.  But the day before the build I saw that Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 had been released and that it was generating a lot of good reviews.  Ubuntu is based on Debian, and a couple of years ago I had used Debian on a backup system and found that I liked their package tools, so I decided to give Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 a try.  I figured that the worst that could happen is that I wouldn’t like it and that I would be able to wipe it and install openSUSE.

However, I don’t think that is going to be necessary.  I found it to be one of the smoothest installations I’ve been through in years.  It found and installed drivers for every component in the system and when it finished the final reboot the system was immediately usable.  That’s a far cry from any Linux distribution I’ve used before and better even than Windows, where I often have to install anywhere from 2 to 10 drivers after installation.  The system even included a utility to automatically install the proprietary ATI/AMD video drivers, which was a nice touch.

There is only one fly in the ointment so far.  While the system was usable, it did not correctly manage my dual displays so I ended up seeing the same image on both (stereo!).  This appears to be an issue with the ATI Catalyst 9.4 drivers.  To further complicate matters, Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 contains a pre-release version of the 9.4 drivers.  After I figured this out and applied the latest released Catalyst 9.4 drivers it seems I’m tantalizingly close but can’t quite get there.  The ATI configuration utility tells me that I have to create a second desktop to enable Xinerama, yet the desktop configuration page won’t let me create a second desktop.  It says to “drag and drop” the “objects” yet nothing will drag and drop. 

I’m continuing to investigate this one, but in the background when I have free time, which has been limited of late.

But I don’t blame the above on Ubuntu, since they don’t control the proprietary driver.  Overall I’d say that Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 has been quite polished and easy to work with.  I think it’s the first desktop Linux that I’d be comfortable giving to my Mother to use (once I’d set up everything, of course). 

Packrat System Build

I tend to accumulate computer parts over time as I upgrade older systems or replace them.  I also keep an eye out for good sales on parts that I can either keep on hand as spares for current systems or use for new builds/upgrades.  So when the upgrade bug struck recently I already had a number of parts on hand, including a 500GB SATA drive, DVD-RW drive, a couple of ATX power supplies (including a really high-end Enermax 450W unit), and a really nice Cooler Master Centurion case.  I started looking around at motherboard and CPU combos.  What I wanted was a motherboard capable of supporting dual monitors and a multi-core AMD CPU.  I was also intending to run Linux, so as I came across motherboards I checked for compatibility of video, LAN, and audio drivers.

I eventually settled on the following setup from Newegg.com:

• BIOSTAR A760G M2+ motherboard
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200 Brisbane CPU (AM2)
• Kingston HyperX 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit

Not exactly bleeding edge, but I got all three of the above for $150, which is pretty good for a new system build.  While waiting for the parts to arrive I pulled the Enermax PS from another case where it had been sitting.  That was when I noticed that it had the older 20-pin ATX motherboard connector, rather than the 24-pin connector that the motherboard required.  Now some motherboards will run without the extra four pins (you just plug the 20-pin connector into the first 20 pins of the 24-pin connector on the motherboard).  However, the manual for this motherboard did not mention this as an option so I ended up having to shell out another $50 for an Antec Basiq 500W power supply.  A bit annoying, and now my budget build was starting to fell somewhat un-budget. 

But this was the only hiccup, as the system went together really smoothly once I had all the parts together.  I think it only took about an hour total to get it assembled.  Since my phone was handy I snapped a few photos for posterity (which also prompted my previous whining about user interface annoyances). 

Cooler Master Centurion with Antec PS installed, awaiting installation of components:

Motherboard and CPU:

Optical and Hard Drives:

All components installed:

There’s something satisfying about taking a bunch of boxes and parts and converting them into a pile of trash and a working computer.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Cry For Help…

Someone hit my site over the weekend using the following search phrase:
   i have emails which repeatedly continue arriving in my inbox the same “ones over” and over and over again why

Aside from the weird use of quotes, can’t you just feel the desperation in that search?  I think it’s the pathos of the “over and over again why” part that puts it over the top (kind of reminds me of “When will the hurting stop?” [*]).

Anyhow, to answer the question, either you have been targeted by a particularly annoying spammer, or there is a problem with your email program.  I have seen this problem at times with Thunderbird using POP3 when you leave the email on the server and your system is experiencing intermittent network problems as well as insufficient memory.  This was with an old laptop that had insufficient memory and was getting bogged down by a nightly virus scan.  Adding more memory fixed the nightly network problems and I haven’t seen the issue since.

Monday, December 15, 2008

Comment Spammers Suck

We all have our particular windmills at which we must tilt.  The blogger at the Keitai Goddess is engaged in a war to stop comment spam.  What’s interesting is that one of the spammers actually responded to her.  The respondent’s sense of entitlement to use of our blogs for marketing purposes is breathtaking:

Leaving comments on your blog linking back to our site is a fair trade as long as the comment is relevant and a decent length.  Many SEOs say content is king when it comes to ranking in Google and Yahoo, but this is not true.  Links are king and links from good websites are king.  Content comes in at a close second.  We give you content that makes YOUR site rank higher for different keywords and you give us a link back to our site that helps our site rank higher.  I don’t see how this is not a fair trade.  We’re not “parasites” like the people who comment on blogs and leave (sometimes literally) over 100 links in the comment and completely ruin that page’s pagerank.  I’ve seen people put links on blogs that run anywhere from 1 to 200.  We leave a relevant reply, take 1 link, and leave.  The ones who put more than 1 link in their reply are the parasites, not us.

I really have to wonder what this spammer thinks “relevant” comments are.  I’ve seen crap like “great article,” or even some that try to summarize the gist of my posting, but they’ve all been very transparent as text used for filler just to get their link past the spam filters.

Anyhow, the “conversation” got a bit heated, and the spammer really lost her cool in her followup message, to the point of acting like a creepy stalker by searching out Keitai Goddess’s comments on other blogs and claiming that those were somehow unethical or hypocritical because those comments included a link back to her site.

Really, the tiniest bit of common sense would have revealed to the spammer the difference between a real comment and one done solely for SEO purposes.  The rule that I use for determining if a link/comment is spam is that if the comment is truly relevant and adds something new, then I examine the link to see if it is back to the person’s personal site or to a commercial site.  If it’s to a commercial site, and I don’t recognize the online “persona” as belonging to someone I personally know who is associated with that enterprise, then it’s spam.  Period.  End of discussion, no debate allowed. 

In other words, commercial entities are NOT ALLOWED to post comments on my blog.  My comments are intended to be by and for people.  The only time I might entertain a comment associated with a commercial entity is if I’ve commented about that entity’s products or services.  However, the person doing the response must do so under a real name and they must identify themselves as being associated with the company.  Anything else would border on dishonesty or sock-puppetry.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

What’s The Point Of It Anymore?

I’ve noticed lately that spammers are hitting my contact form about twice a week.  What’s weird about it is that it just says something like “Buy <drug name>” or “Cheap <enhancement drug>”.  The notes don’t give any information about who is selling it or where to get it. 

And the comment spam I’m seeing is just about as useless.  Spam filtering techniques have gotten to the point where just about the only things that will get through are genuine human messages and complete garbage.  I’ve seen a few where it appeared people typed them up and just used the URL field to try to advertise their sites.  Others were filled with what appeared to be random gibberish with copious links to sites with URLs that looked like they were created by hitting a bunch of keys on a keyboard all at once.  What kind of sucker would click one of those links?

So if most of the spam lately doesn’t provide any good ways of getting the spammers into a search engine because it’s gibberish, or they can’t even list their site because of the filters, you really have to wonder why the spammers even bother anymore.  Is it sheer cussedness?  Are they up to something that they think will pay off in the long run?  Or are they just being annoying buggers for the heck of it?

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Political SPAM

Bitter is complaining about a candidate for Virginia Attorney General who is spamming her and who won’t respond to requests for removal.

In a similar vein, I’m pretty annoyed by the spam I’m getting from Chief Justice Wallace B. Jefferson of the Texas Supreme Court for his re-election campaign.  The reason I’m annoyed is that I never gave anyone permission to send me emails about Jefferson’s campaign.  Worse than all that, the email address is one created specifically for use with the Fred Thompson presidential campaign.  I’m not sure who to be more annoyed with: Fred Thompson’s website for selling my email or Jefferson’s campaign for using a list without doing any opt-in confirmation. 

The emails are being sent on behalf of Jefferson’s campaign by StreamSend and they include link tracking URLs and email tracking image bugs.  The whole thing has a stink about it.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Two Down… Many More To Go…

I was glad to see the announcement that two pump-and-dump penny stock scammers were arrested recently. 

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s Special Investigations Unit charged two Texas residents with devising an illegal high-tech scheme to defraud investors out of more than $4.6 million. Both suspects, who were indicted July 3 by a Harris County grand jury, are the subjects of an ongoing investigation by several states and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In addition to the state’s charges, the suspects face securities fraud charges, which were filed today by the SEC.

Darrel Uselton, 40, of Katy, and his uncle, Jack Uselton, 69, of Houston, face organized criminal activity and money laundering charges. According to state and federal investigators, the Useltons reaped millions in illegal profits by promoting shares from at least 13 penny stock companies. The suspects then secretly sold those stocks into an artificially active market they created with manipulative trading schemes, spam e-mail campaigns, direct mailers, and Internet-based promotional activities.

I don’t know if these two were involved in any of the scams that affected me, but as the recipient of the blowback from bot-net blasted spam emails, I think it’s about time that some of these bastards were taken down.  It’s just unfortunate that we can’t bring back the stocks and the pillory.

Getting Out of AOHell

While I’m on the topic of brain-dead ISP’s, it appears that AOL’s cancellation tactics have finally gotten it into hot water.  They are now agreeing to mend their ways:

Under the agreement, which was filed by Texas and 48 other states, AOL must provide its customers a simple online cancellation method (http://cancel.aol.com). The attorneys general took legal action after AOL customers complained about difficulty and confusion when they attempted to cancel their AOL paid services. In the future, AOL must record and verify telephone calls between AOL customer service representatives and customers calling to cancel their accounts. AOL must also resolve outstanding customer complaints and provide refunds to consumers who complained since Jan. 2005 of unauthorized service charges or improper billing.

I suppose it remains to be seen if this actually pans out.  But then AOL is getting out of the ISP business anyway, so perhaps they anticipate lots of cancellations and would have done this anyway.

Spam Blowback Continues

Despite removing all catch-alls, thereby killing the Joe Jobbers in their tracks, I still seem to be banned from sending email to certain people.  Most notably people with AOL email addresses.

I had someone contact me yesterday via my Contact Form to ask some questions about the Marlin Camp Carbine, but my reply got bounced.  AOL informed me that it was not accepting email from my address.

Now this is stupid on the part of AOL, since I never sent spam to their users.  But they still put my domain into their blacklist of spammers, apparently because of the previous Joe Job crap. 

Anyhow… if you try to contact me and you’re using AOL (or Earthlink) and you don’t hear back from me, you might want to investigate getting a less brain-dead email provider.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Notebook-ka-Boom!

The laptop battery fire and explosion recall has expanded again, this time with Lenovo recalling 208,000 9-cell lithium-ion batteries that shipped with certain of the 60 and 61 series laptops.  It turns out that my new Thinkpad, a T60p, has one of these explosive devices attached to it.

I submitted a request through their online form for a new battery, but I find it a bit irritating that the confirmation page says that it will take “4 to 6 weeks” to receive a replacement.  In the meantime, for safety, I’m supposed to remove the battery and only use it with the AC adapter.  Hmm… that kind of defeats the purpose of having a notebook computer, doesn’t it?

It occurs to me that there needs to be some kind of handy short catch-phrase for all the recent notebook battery problems. Glocks have _kB!_ (for kaBOOM!), which is immediately recognizable.

How about noteBOOM!, to be referred to as nB!.  Hmm…  that seems to be a little too derivative.  Any ideas?

Monday, February 26, 2007

Kill All Spammers

I hated to cave in and do away with my catch-all address, but I finally had to do it.  I saw a definite pattern where I’d get four or five apparently hand-crafted emails, followed within a few hours by a tidal wave of bounces.  It appears to me that the spammer were probing my domain to make sure the catch-all was still in place so that their bounces wouldn’t be rejected.  Then, upon confirming the catch-all, they’d engage the bots for a major spam run, with me catching all their crap.  If I’d taken the catch-all off of the domain, their initial probes would have been summarily rejected by the SMTP server. 

Because I’ve been using the domain for the past seven years for making up email addresses at will, I had lots of possibly valid addresses that I had to deal with.  I wrote a short Perl script that groveled through all my old Inboxes (back to 2000) to extract all addresses with an aubreyturner.com address in the “To:” and/or “for” headers (in some cases, especially with lists, my address wouldn’t have been in the “To:” field), discarding duplicates.  When I was done there were 1732 unique email addresses.  I spent a couple of mind-numbing hours going through that list deleting garbage entries from spammer Joe Job backscatter.  That left me with 604 addresses that I had to enter into the Dreamhost email control panel.  Fortunately, they have a “bulk edit” feature for each domain.  But it almost caused the panel to cough up a furball when I uploaded the list.

Now I’ve gone back and deleted another 30 or so that looked legit, but which I’d forgotten had been compromised by spammers.

If anyone out there has tried to email me and the message bounced, it’s probably because I missed an address in the alias file.  I’ve verified that the Contact Form target address works, so you can get in touch that way.

Anyone for killing spammers and using their guts to hang them from light poles?  Or am I the only one so annoyed?

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Thoughts On Dreamhost Service

Dreamhost has taken a lot of hits recently due to instability and downtime.  I think some of the complaints were overblown.  After all, if you’re betting your business on a website, a $9.99/month shared hosting plan isn’t very smart.

However, Dreamhost has slipped in several areas since I first joined them in 2000.  Given my recent experiences with them and their support staff, here are a few recommendations I have on ways Dreamhost could improve.

1.  Bring back targeted email/panel announcements.

This was one of the better things they used to do.  Whenever a server you were using was going to have any work done they’d send you an announcement telling you what servers were affected, what was being done, when the server would be down, and for how long.  They’ve since moved all of their announcements to their status page, which is a crappy way of doing things.

I don’t expect Dreamhost never to have any downtime, especially at the rates we’re paying.  But they could certainly do a better job of communicating with users.  As an example, they moved my server in early December and the only way I found out about it was after the fact when I saw their status entry.  I should not have to keep track of their blog to determine when one of my systems is being affected.  I should get a directly targeted email.  It cuts down on the clutter I have to manage.  Yes, I know they have RSS feeds, but that still means I have to poll the stupid thing to get information and that I have to wade through all the announcements that are meaningless to me to determine if something is relevant.

This would have also helped me with the ImageMagick issue that I discovered after the upgrade (i.e. I would have known the exact date of the change).

2.  Inform users when their particular systems are down or are rebooted

This is somewhat related to the first item, but that was proactive, while this is reactive.

It’s understood that sometimes things break and a system goes down or has to be rebooted (even if all of your stuff is still working).  As soon as any trouble ticket for a particular system is seen and the problem is verified (not fixed, just verified), then all users of that system should be notified that a problem has been identified and is being worked.  When the problem is fixed, another announcement should be made.  Being properly informed would likely prevent additional trouble tickets from other users of the system if they know the problem is being worked.

I think this would go a long way towards getting ahead of the customer satisfaction issues.  Something like 90% of the griping (my unscientific impression of it, anyway) in the comments is from people who are complaining that their sites are down, yet they aren’t affected by the system that was mentioned on the status page.  But since they don’t trust the ticket system and don’t have any positive information about the problem they flood the comments with complaints about their own sites.  If the system was known to work properly and people knew they’d be notified, there’d be a lot less griping. 

3.  Allow users to update their own trouble tickets

If there’s a way to do this, I haven’t found it.  But in several instances now I’ve need to update the ticket with new information (i.e. in one case I found the problem myself and just needed them to do something; in another the problem went away “on its own”).  My only recourse was to either open a new ticket and reference the first or wait for the tech to reply. 

The last case, where the problem went away on its own, appeared to me to have been a problem with the database server.  And from what I could see, someone rebooted it.  Everything was working fine within 30 minutes of me opening the ticket.  First, if I’d been properly informed (per my suggestions #1 and #2 above), I’d have understood what was going on (and obviously someone was working on it, since the DB system was rebooted), and would not have opened a ticket.  Or, if I hadn’t seen the announcement in time, I could have closed the ticket myself, thereby saving everyone time.  Instead I had to wait 14 hours for a Dreamhost tech to get around to telling me that the site was working fine now.  Duh! 

4.  Provide a site monitoring service

When I first started with them they used to have a system status page where you could see the uptime information for your Apache, MySQL, and SMTP/POP3 services.  Of course, checking uptime in Apache isn’t necessarily an accurate reflection of a site’s availability, since there are other factors, such as application load, network and database availability, etc that can allow Apache to stay up even if the site doesn’t “work.”  Since the status page didn’t give accurate uptime impressions, they decommissioned it.

It’d be nice if they had a site/application monitoring service that allowed you to specify your own webpage and the frequency of monitoring.  That way it could monitor a real example of your application (i.e. the page you specify would access the database and run the application code) and not just the HTTPD status.  The service would then notify you if the site didn’t respond or gave an error. 

Since this involves additional resources to handle, I could see this being a fee-based add-on.  Perhaps it could even include a feature to open a problem ticket automatically if certain events are triggered (this would likely require an extra fee, as well as some work on your part to identify the various failure modes). 

Anyhow, this is just a “nice to have” thing, not necessarily something that’d be required.

At the root of all of these is a simple idea:  Keep your customers informed.  If people have relevant, timely, and accurate information about their systems, there should be a lot less griping (or at least less confusion).

Upgrade Breakage

Last summer I implemented watermarking for all hotlinked images.  But while checking referrer logs today I came across some images that weren’t getting watermarked.  This puzzled me at first, as all the logs clearly showed that the file was being properly redirected and they were picking up the watermarked version.  Examining the cache showed that everything since late December wasn’t getting the watermark added (the cache image was the same as the original).

Looking at the watermarking script and the fact that it used the composite command from ImageMagick reminded me that Dreamhost had just upgraded ImageMagick.  They’d long been running on a very downlevel version and upgraded at the end of December to v6.2.4 (which is still a bit odd, given that the current release is 6.3.1).  Thinking that perhaps something in the command line had changed from v5 to v6, I tried manually running the command.  Even with debugging and verbose options on, it showed no errors and the invocation matched the example in the documentation.  It just wasn’t adding the image overlay.

So I took a further look at the documentation and they had an example of using commands to dynamically generate the text (with associated background changes to help differentiate it).  I created a small script that used parameters for the filename and replaced the composite command in the watermarking script with my script.

#!/bin/bash
convert -size 250x35 xc:none -gravity center \
    -stroke black -strokewidth 2 -annotate 0 ‘Hotlinked from aubreyturner.org!’ \
    -channel RGBA -blur 0x3 \
    -stroke none -fill white   -annotate 0 ‘Hotlinked from aubreyturner.org!’ \
    +size $1 +swap \
    -gravity south -geometry +0-2 -composite $2

I still don’t know what broke in composite with the upgrade, but at least this works and looks better than my original.

Hotlinkers will get the image with the text added at the bottom in the center, like this:

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Slow Roll

I just upgraded to Expression Engine 1.5.2.  Yes, I know I’m 20 days behind the curve.   

The upgrade seemed smooth on the server end, so let me know if you experience any unusual symptoms (from your browser; I don’t want to know about that itchy pentagram shaped rash ).