My new server seems to be acting up a little bit. For some reason one small area of my blog isn’t accessible any more as when you try to access it apache dies. I’ve been searching google for a day and a half now with now luck. The error could be due possibly to a misbehaving plugin not quite sure yet. As of right now I don’t have access to actually work on the server, I’ve got a couple things I want to try though.
My Linux Laptop
I’ve had a old laptop (if you can call it that: it’s weight ~ 15lbs) just sitting around for quite some time. The battery (Not a Sony battery or Dell laptop) died and it now has to be tethered to the wall, since I’m too lazy to look for a replacement battery on eBay. I’ve played around with Kubuntu on a virtual machine for a few months so I got it in my head to install it on my laptop.
The adventure began about a week ago. I burnt the latest ISO I had of Kubuntu (6.1) popped it into the drive, after pulling what few files I did have on there off, played around in Live mode before installing to make sure that most of major stuff worked (keyboard, trackpad). I neglected during that entire time to open Firefox to determine if I had a wireless connection. After I finished installing only then did I discover that I had no connection. After fiddling for about 30 minutes, I hopped on the Ubuntu forums and soon discovered the problem lie with my PCMCIA Belkin 54G card. After reading a few posts it seems that the problem lie with the fact that no suitable Linux driver can be made for the card and that you must use a NDIS wrapper to fool Linux into using the windows driver. It was late and I really didn’t care to pursue the problem any more. I feel now that I can not contain my curiosity and must try to fix this problem. Just a little quirk of mine I hate to see things unfinished.
It’s been a long time coming…
I’ve been hit by the first of many to come spamming runs. I was greeted by 4 spam comments this afternoon, quite vulgar and graphic, that had been caught by Askimet spam filter (thanks to WordPress for including this spam protection). I knew it wouldn’t be long before my new blog would be hit with this scum. It actually took longer than I expected probably due to the fact that I not only changed the backend blog software but I’m using a new domain and link structure.
Myspace fighting back
Even if my distaste for Myspace is so great that I’ve blocked all access to it at my house I have to admit they doing something good. Zdnet has the rest of the details here. Basically after a phishing scheme that compromised thousands of accounts, a clown that goes by the name ‘Spam King’ used those accounts to post spam to Myspace bulletins. So Myspace is now suing the ‘Kings’ pants off. This comes after Microsoft already sued the same guy for $7 million dollars for the same thing. This makes me think if he can afford a lawsuit like that and still go about business, no wonder some many people are sending spam because it’s so profitable.
It just wouldn’t be so profitable if everyone and their grandma set up a hotmail or yahoo account and then slung their address all over the internet. Then they think that this is a wonderful offer for Ma13 3nhanc3m3nt$ and that some prince in Nigeria would actually contact them for help, so lets send them our money. I guess that some blame has to be given to Mail admins who don’t have the resources to filter out all the crap that come through their servers. But with spammers taking over thousands of PC’s and using those to spam, which effectively makes most RBL just a waste of bandwidth. But I guess it’s just something that everyone will have to deal with whether we like it or not.
Now if you would excuse me I need to put my Soapbox away, don’t want anyone tripping over it you know.
New work computer
I just got to order a new pc for myself at work. Although it was a Dell (state contract with Dell for K-12 education) it has a Pentium Core 2 3.0Ghz with a gig of ram and a nice 19 inch lcd. All for under a thousand dollars too. I’ve been wanting to try out one of the Core 2 since I built my gaming machine to see if all the hype about AMD getting beat by the Pentium chip was true. Anything will be better than what I have now, a Celeron 1.7 with 512 mb ram. It will be almost quadrapole the processing power.
