a blog…

Blue Security - AntiSpam

Recently I stumbled over this company: Blue Security

They basically keep track of the spam you forward to them and file complaints on your behalf. I have had it running for 2-3 days now, but I haven’t yet noticed any reduction in the spam that I receive (about 100/day on my personal account).

Here is a quote from their site: “The Do Not Intrude Registry is enforced by the Blue Community and uses Blue Security’s Active Deterrence, a patent-pending technology that disrupts the business of merchants, advertisers and spammers who choose to ignore the Do Not Intrude Registry.”

I am going to continue using it for a while and see if it helps… if so I will post about it again… Meanwhile I think it is a cool idea and that it has some potential for positive results.

Birthday present from NASA

On the day of my 25th birthday, presumably as a present to me, NASA decided to launch the Discovery Shuttle. While I am very happy for such a wonderful present, I read something in their report that didn’t make much sense: “Shuttle engineers investigating the anomaly believe that electromagnetic interference from existing or new hardware, such as additional cameras or heaters attached to the bipod fitting that connects Discovery to its external tank, and a small grounding issue with sensor wiring may be the culprit.” From space.com.

So what is it, a grounding problem or EM interference? I looked at some of the diagrams (http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/122488main_ECO_sensors.jpg) and it looks like it is shielded pretty well inside the tank… so how is EM messing with it? And why is it only messing with one of four sensors? Much more likely is the grounding problem, but I can’t find much details about it…

Good luck to NASA!

Magic Tar

People ask me all the time what the hell is ‘magic tar’ and why should anyone use it. I learned about this from a sys-admin at the University of Colorodo, Boulder - Andrew Scrivner - and have always been thankful for it.

Here is a sample of the command:

Magic Tar:
tar cf - . | (cd /where; tar xf -)

Here is the same command modified to run over SSH:

Magic Tar over SSH:
tar cf - . | ssh user@host "cd /where; tar cf -"

Use it or suffer from losing permissions, links, owner/group, etc…

So, this is some sort of a blog…

Been a little while that I wanted to have a blog, but never knew if I would post anything useful there…

Today - I don’t have an answer to this question, but at least now I have a blog and I have posted something…

http://moon.google.com - is pretty sweet… too bad it is only a tiny portion of the moon and isn’t at a good resolution… I want to see the flag that they left there… What we don’t have telescopes powerful enough to see it? How about photos that we taken by the Eagle as it was taking off? There has got to be something…