If you suffer from that, don’t go here!
2004/12/16
Goodmorning New York!
Here we go:
![[Firefox NYT ad]](/wp-images/local/Firefox-NYT.jpg)
Right now the number of downloads on SpreadFirefox.com is just over 11 million. Wonder where that’ll be in a few days, as a result of the ad. 
Ah, finally managed to convince the pdf viewer to zoom in far enough, and found my own name now:
![[Firefox NYT ad]](/wp-images/local/Firefox-NYT-zoom.png)
Cool!
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2004/12/13
I’m so popular
So popular that they even send me the same pre-approved creditcard offers twice on the same day! Good job Citibank, your credibility just dropped a few notches.
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Don’t lie to me, m’kay?
For some time now I’ve been on a Dell Direct Deal mailing-list. I bought something from them at one point so no doubt I’ve neglected to unselect some checkbox years ago. Fine. They have an unsubscribe link in their emails. Great. It doesn’t work. Oops.
So, a few days ago I went through their website to kindly notify them about this. The webform was quite dedicated to problems with orders (they must have a lot of problems there, apparently) but there was also an Other Question not listed category, so I used that, and explained the problem.
Today I receive a reply, let me quote it to you:
Dear. Ms. Harte,
Thank you for contacting Dell Online Customer Care.
I have reviewed your request for assistance. I searched for your account
in our database and could not find it. In order to answer you query, I
need to see your order details. Once I have the order information, I
would be in better position to provide options.…
Erm.
- Ms? Don’t make assumptions when all you have is a name. You’ll make a fool of yourself 50% of the time.
- Order details? I’m talking about a mailing list here. I even gave you the email address, the least you could’ve done is check that — hey, surprise — that address on your company’s list.
Oh well, dell@<address> will just suddenly start generating Username unknown, I guess. Not my problem anymore, it’s been nice knowing you, Dell.
2004/12/12
Bacula
So far, so good.
There was a mild learning curve in getting started with Bacula and I had some fun with figuring out why it kept including certain files in incremental/differential backups (it turns out that they were dated in the future, I’m not going to fault Bacula for handling that the way it did), but it seems to work nicely otherwise.
Yesterday I started playing with the configuration file(s) a bit more and tested the use of compression (gzip) and file hashing (SHA-1). Seems to work fairly nicely. On the /home partition it results in about 30-35% compression, on things like /etc, /boot, /usr with fairly compressable text files and binaries or shared libraries, it’s more like 50-55%, so that kicks in quite a bit.
Today I started adding the other (Linux) machines to the mix. One is the firewall which, aside from a regular proxy and apt-proxy has very little local data. Of course everything in /var/cache can be ignored so that narrowed it down quite a bit. I don’t know where exactly the compressing and computing of hashes is done, with Bacula, but if that is done before it’s sent over the network, that would certainly explain the slowness, as the firewall machine is an old P233. 
The two workstations were a bit faster.
The biggest problem (but relatively quickly solved) was in finding a backport of Bacula’s remote end for Debian/stable, as the package itself is officially only available in Debian/unstable, I think (maybe testing, haven’t looked). Using apt-get.org two backports were found and that works fairly well.
A few more days of regular runs and a few more ‘random’ test-restores, and I’ll likely retire ye olde shell-script-with-rsync setup in favour of this. Yay!
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2004/12/10
Acronym Overload Alert!
I keep seeing headlines for newspaper articles about CERT, and each time I have to look twice because it just seems unlikely that they’re talking about the CERT that I know.
The one that I know is Computer Emergency Response Team, which deals with vulnerabilities in software (and hardware, I suppose). They’re well established in the internet world, you can find them here.
On the other hand the one I keep running into, for instance in this article, refers to Community Emergency Response Team and deals with vulnerabilities on an entirely different level.
*rubs eyes and goes back to work*
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You’re kidding, right?
This story posted on Fark.com is strange enough in itself:
A Burger King fired an employee after she refused to return a 10-foot-tall SpongeBob Squarepants balloon her boss gave her, which she then sold for $1,025 in an Internet auction.
But then I noticed these numbers:
Viney Richards, 36, … She said she had planned to give the balloon to her 2-year-old grandson, but it wouldn’t fit in his room.
Waitaminutehere. A 36 year old with a 2 year old grandson? Two generations in a row became a mother at age 17, or worse, one did much younger? Ugh. I’m turning 35 at the end of this month, and the kids running around in this house are enough fun, I’d rather not think about what it must be like to be a grandparent at 34. 
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2004/12/9
Today’s flakes
On an Alltel card:
Finanacial Services Department
On a letter from our trash service, dated 12-08-2004:
…, we will be raising our monthly rate from … to … effective JANUARY 1, 2004. …
Proofreading is still an art, apparently.
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2004/12/8
Weird?
The kids’ Christmas break will apparently be from Wednesday, December 22nd, to (and including) Monday, January 3rd. What kind of a weird schedule is that, what were they smoking? Do they expect the parents to just drop half-weeks of work for their convenience or something?
2004/12/7
Backwards
From this CNET aticle:
“It depends where the players are based. A session where four gamers are all based in the U.K. is likely to have pretty low latency. If one is based in America, one in Australia and one in Brazil, then there’s more chance of latency because of Internet lag,” said a BT spokesman.
No, you mean there’s more chance of lag because of latency, which given the physical distance between the places is pretty much unavoidable. Typical spokesman, he’s has heard about the technology while sharing a cup of coffee with a techie but doesn’t quite understand what he’s talking about. Alas.
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