Zoë Marie …
Zoë with Dad
Born this morning on January 27th, 2009 at approx 2am was Zoë Marie
7lbs 8.5oz – 20″
Grandchild #1
Luvin my Omnia
I’ve had my Omnia now for more than a month. Best phone so far. With it I can access just about everything, including managing and posting on this blog.
This post was made using it with the included Opera browser.
Left turn on a straight road
3:04am… Been awake for about 30 mins.. trying to get back to sleep.
I hear another jerk speeding down the street seeing what their vehicle can do as I’ve heard numerous times before… this time… I hear them hit the brakes, long screeching noises, bang and the whole house shudders..
Lisa wakes up and says something about the cats knocking something down… I tell her that cats don’t have headlights pointing into the back yard.
The guy hit the house… or more accurately, hit the block wall behind the house. Took out the gate and part of the block wall. Cute, will have to use a leash on the dog when they go out until it is fixed.
Some young jerk… no… this guy looks around my age… yep, 1951, he is older. The vehicle, a 2002 blue Corvette apparently taking it for a spin. Not his car, belongs to a friend. I’m sure his friend is going to be really happy.
I can hear him telling the cop that he was going about 45mph and swerved to miss a dog… right.. doubt there is a dog, really doubt the speed too… Really surprised but apparently no alcohol is involved.
Hard to figure how he hit like he did as it looks like he would have been coming the other direction.
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- Arrow shows direction of travel
More pics: http://picasaweb.google.com/tnet.services/LeftTurnOnAStraightRoad?authkey=Z3KltQnayZQ#
*Edit* Just noticed that the vehicle has an illegal license plate cover that blocks the license place from a flash. Wonder if they caught that.
WM6 Stop SMS Sent Message Notification
Loaded some SMS chat software that wanted to to test and when I removed it I now had an SMS Sent Message Notification each time I sent a new SMS message. Annoying…
Even though I already had unchecked the Request Delivery Notifications in:
Messaging -> Text Messages -> Tools -> Options -> Text Messages
It was still being sent.
So I turned it off with aRegistry Hack
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Inbox\Settings\SMSNoSentMsg = 1
It is a Decimal DWORD.
For me, the key didn’t exist, but as soon as I added it… presto, no more sent message notifications.
How to check your DNS server
While there are a number of websites that you can use to see if the nameserver you are using is vulerable to the Cache Poisoning Vulerability… most of them don’t provide you a way to test a name server that you are not personally using with those websites (ie a unix server at a remote location).
The following test will do that.
dig +short @ns1.yourdomain.com porttest.dns-oarc.net TXT
Replacing the ns1.yourdomain.com with your actual name server and executing, will produce output like:
z.y.x.w.v.u.t.s.r.q.p.o.n.m.l.k.j.i.h.g.f.e.d.c.b.a.pt.dns-oarc.net.
“192.168.1.3 is POOR: 26 queries in 20.0 seconds from 1 ports with std dev 0.00″
Where, Poor is an indication of an unpatched bind server.
A cleaner named server would look like:
porttest.y.x.w.v.u.t.s.r.q.p.o.n.m.l.k.j.i.h.g.f.e.d.c.b.a.pt.dns-oarc.net.
“24.249.176.163 is GREAT: 26 queries in 1.1 seconds from 26 ports with std dev 17751″
We are currently using ICS BIND 9.6.0-P1 for most of our name servers, which was released in Jan 2009.
Replacement for DNSstuff …
For years I have used the services provided by DNSstuff do checkups on various domains to see if they actually exist and if they are configured properly. This was actually a good way to determine if email stuck for a specific domain was because there are just a temporary issue or if it was because the domain was not really configured as a mail domain.
For years they were a simple site, free, with advertising on the page, but very usable. Several years ago, they went commercial, with a $36 a year subscription for basically accessing the same services that were free. I don’t mind paying for a useful tool even though I always thought it was weird that they continued to have advertising on their Paid subscriber pages…
Now, with my account coming up for renewal, I see they now want to charge 100%+ more than before for basically the same service. Now they say that they have dropped the on page advertising and as a result needed to increase their feeds.
I think they need to rethink their business model. I fail to see how their costs have risen to the point where they need to increase their rates by more than 100%. They state that they are doing further development, but really, the only thing I am really intersted in is the basic DNSreport which has changed little over the years and certainly for me does not warrant a 100% increase in fees….
So, after a little looking I found a replacement for the key tool that I use… http://www.intodns.com. IntoDNS provides a similar tool to the DNSStuff DNSReport, close enough for me but at what used to be the price DNSStuff used to charge… FREE.
I got a kick out of IntoDNS’s blog posting that talked about “fees” where they said…
IntoDNS will continue to remain free as long as we can afford to host it (and as a hosting & web development company I don’t see how we won’t afford that in the following hundred years
).
As for the other tools that DNSstuff provides, most of which I rarely use.. similar tools can be obtained via other services which are all currently free, like:
http://www.iptools.com/
http://whatsmyip.org/
I mind paying for good services, but I’d like to know that I’m getting something for my money… So, instead of feeding the DNSstuff unexplained run way costs, I will instead make arrangements to make donations to the other tools listed above instead.
I wish DNSstuff well in their endeavors, but if you have to negotiate with your existing clients to keep them, you must be doing something wrong.
Grampa ?? Who Me?
Well it seems that my Daughter is going to have her baby soon. Her and Bob are just about ready for the event… nursery, clothes, lots of diapers etc… as to when soon is, that would be around the first week of Feb.
“She” Zoë Marie, will be a first in both sides of the family becoming the first Grandkid and Great Grandkid. She will also be the one that places me into the Grampa category for the first time.
Zoë, pronounced as ZOH-ee, has greek origins and it’s meaning is “Life“. Marie is after her Grandmother, Cecilia Marie Lane who unfortunately left us last year and would have been Zoë’s great, great grandmother.
Hmmm grampa names… Grandfather, Grampa, GrandDad, Old Dude, Paw-Paw, Gramps … somehow none of those seem to fit… will have to work on that.
BTW, I estimated the weight at 9-1/2 lbs (went over real “big”)… though I didn’t give the highest weight which shifted the glare elsewhere. We will see…
Hey.. how about Grumpy… as in, “Lets see if Grumpy wants to hold Zoë now…” that kinda fits… might run with that.
The Vacation is over…
Well, today starts the first day after my nice holiday vacation which lasted from Dec 13th – Jan 4th.
Got to play with a lot of new stuff, newest release of Solaris 10 which has Root ZFS support, the Blog software, a number of web templates, a continuing search engine project from hell and some weather stuff.
All in all a nice time…
My wife will be glad now that I am out of the house during the weekdays.
Playing with Solaris 10/08
Leading up to the New Years I spent time setting up one of my spare servers with Solaris 10 Sparc 10/08.
I’ve been waiting for ZFS support for root disks for a long time… now it is here finally for the Sparc version of Solaris. It’s been in OpenSolaris for a couple months already.
For the new install, I used two 72GB hard drive in a Sun V210 server. My primary server also a V210 has the same size drives but is using SVM for the root disks under UFS… It also uses ZFS but it will be nice to have a complete ZFS based server.
The first question that I will need to figure out is dealing with Flar backups… I want to make sure that the root backups are kept small so they don’t take as much room. Not sure if this means I need to limit the ZFS root mount to do that or if it figures that out on its one… someting to play with.
I also plan on trying out the new release of WebTools which is the next version of what used to be called Cool Stack.
http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5357052&tstart=0
Will try to play with that tomorrow…
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