hjalfi

Some bastard's attacked my machine again. As a result my mail server's been down for about 50 hours, resulting in lots of bounced email and considerable hassle, which is just what I need right now.

The details: someone claiming to be from 209.161.238.175 started making connections to my machine's SMTP port on June 26, 1512:10. Ten times a second. Spey, my home-made spam blocker, cooperatively started passing on these requests to exim. 13 seconds later exim started refusing requests, and spey shut down (a known bug).

I'm wondering what the best thing to do here is.

Firstly, of course, I need to fix that bug. That'll stop spey from falling over whenever the downstream SMTP server isn't responding.

Secondly, I should probably harden spey against this sort of attack again in the future. One idea is to implement a flood protection mechanism, so that if too many connections come from a particular address, just stop listening to that address; but that's complicated and fiddly.

A simpler solution would probably be to delay connection to the downstream mail server until we know that it's a real connection. That means that this kind of flooding will use minimal resources; spey is carefully designed so that each incoming connection is cheap. It would be easy to implement, too.

I do find myself wondering why I got attacked. Random drive-by shooting? Accidental, due to someone's misconfigured computer? Retaliation because I've written an anti-spam tool? (Don't laugh. It happens. Spammers can be very vindictive.) The originating machine is currently not responding, which means it's probably someone's home machine that's currently turned off. Tracing back, it appears to be in Ontorio, Canada somewhere. I think I'll send an email to the guy's ISP. I wonder if it was the same one as last time?

Meh. I had better things to do this evening than rewrite my mail server.

Hurrah! SpaceShipOne made an apparently perfect flight to just under 100km and, more importantly, back again. A very happy looking test pilot, Mike Melvill, used the word 'mindblowing' in the nicely non-NASA impromptu press conference immediately after touchdown... there'll be a more organised press conference in about 90 minutes.

Can't wait for the photos.

Blow-by-blow timeline on Spaceflight Now.

In case anybody who cares is unaware, on Monday Scaled Composites, a privately-funded aerospace company based in the US, is going to try to put a man into space.

Assuming everything goes well --- and given their track record, it probably well --- it will be the first time ever that a purely civilian aircraft has gone higher than 100km.

The vehicle --- the really weird and absolutely gorgeous SpaceShipOne --- isn't going to make it into orbit, so this is just a suborbital hop, but it'll still be a truly historic moment. It's already achieved one world first: in an earlier test flight, it became the first entirely privately-funded aircraft to go faster the speed of sound. (Concorde, and it's Russian clone, were heavily subsidised by their respective governments.)

SpaceShipOne, and its launch vehicle White Knight, were designed by Burt Rutan and funded by Paul Allen. Burt Rutan is one of the best aircraft designers out there; practically everything he's done has come in on-time, under budget, working perfectly, and looking like it came from Mars. He's done things like building Richard Branson's balloon gondolas, and the prototype X38 space station lifeboat, and the Voyager round-the-world plane (nine days, no refueling, and flown by his brother), and the Boomerang, which is just wrong. Paul Allen was one of Microsoft's founders, cashed in when it made it big, and now seems to be trying to live down that reputation by spending his money on really, really cool stuff.

Scaled Composites is notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to revealing their future plans; they much prefer to announce what they're going to do when they're sure they're going to do it. But SpaceShipOne is almost certainly the precursor to a true orbital vehicle. When that happens, the world will be a different place.

There are lots more pictures available.

Okay, I've completely rewritten whyTalk's front end; it now uses even more CSS, is faster to load, works on Internet Explorer, and looks better. I can have a Firefox window open and an IE window open and pass messages back and forth. IE is a little laggy on startup --- the first three or four messages come in in a bunch --- but after that's it's impressively responsive.

Of course, I don't suspect for a moment that it'll actually work...

Please play with it and tell me if it breaks.

(PS. IE's CSS support sucks. Badly. It seems to make a point of interpreting anything that it can interpret differently to Firefox, differently. A whole bunch of useful styles --- such as right: --- just don't seem to do anything. You should see the cryptic stuff I have to get through to get that layout.)

(Of course, it doesn't help that the CSS standard was defined by the W3C and is therefore wordy, bloated, cryptic and inadequate. Can I say, 'I want this element to be the same height as this element, whatever that is'? Can I say 'I want this element to be 100% of the width of its parent, minus two pixels'? Can I say 'I want this element to be just big enough to hold its contents, but no more'? The hell I can...)

Okay, okay, it's an abject failure. Don't ask me why --- it all works fine from my end.

Layout is, as I expected, complete garbage on IE; IE's CSS support is pathetic. What I don't understand is why it doesn't seem to be able to talk to the whyTalk server.

*shrug*

I'll try and fix it and get back to you...

I really don't know how long this will stay up, but my latest project, a web-page based chat system, is on-line. Please play with it and let me know what you think, or even if you find it useful.

It is almost certainly going to look very bad on Internet Explorer; IE is notoriously bad at conforming to web standards. I need to sit down with a copy and try and work out what's going on. However, it should at least be usable.

It's currently an extreme work in progress; there's lots of things that can be improved.

BTW, you can emote by prefixing anything you say with a : character. e.g.: ":waves." --> "Hjalfi waves."

Have fun. *crosses fingers*

...a totally excellent on-line comic strip was fours years old. Kudos, Howard.

If you've never heard of it, and any of the following things interest you, check it out:

• Giant spaceships.
• Giant spaceships attacking other giant spaceships.
• Giant spaceships exploding.
• Assorted other things exploding.
• Characters.
• Character development.
• Characters dying.
• Characters who look like crap.
• Big guns.
• Big guns carried by big people.
• Big guns being fired by big people.
• Big guns being fired by big people at other big people (who deserve it, honestly).
• Good writing.
• Good and very funny writing.
• Huge conspiracies to take control of the known universe.
• Attempts to overthrow said huge conspiracies.
• (See section on spaceships and explosions.)
• Elephants.

Schlock Mercenary tells the story of the (mis)adventures of a group of mercenaries in the far future, as they follow their endless quest for revenue. It's seen through the eyes of their newest and first non-human recruit, the aforementioned Schlock, who is... different.

It's fun. Read it. And if you don't, you might meet someone in a dark alley who has an ominous hummmmmm...

I think someone's just tried to DoS me. From 0449 to at least 0502 last night, someone was connecting to my mail server about once a second, waiting for my SMTP server to respond, and then hanging up... I suppose it could have been an inept attempt to port scan my machine (www.cowlark.com, should you feel so inclined), but it seems rather strange.

(I didn't even notice that the mail server wasn't running until this evening... I had wondered why I hadn't seemed to have been getting any mail.)

I say at least 0502 because that was the point at which my mail server fell over. I don't know why, which is annoying, because I wrote it, and if I can't find out why it fell over I can't fix it.

Also annoyingly, I'd just fixed a bug in it, and in the process broke the log reporting, so I don't even know who was making these connections. I've fixed the logging; I hope they do it again...

A sad event occurred for me today. I finally finished all the episodes of Reboot.

The short post I was going to make actually turned into quite a long essay on the programme, so it's hidden here. There are spoilers, but they're safely marked. ( Read more... )

I'm now in Wondai.

Getting here involved two very long days of travel. I got on the Sunlander at 0830 the day before yesterday, and got off it at 1500 yesterday. The train trip itself was great; peaceful, comfortable, far too cold due to the Australian overenthusiasm for air conditioning, but very civilised. Met some interesting people, did a lot of reading (got all the way through The Two Towers and Return of the King...), and watched some really quite amazing scenery. Alas, the number of bored lonely females on the train was a number pretty much indistinguishable from zero, but we can't have everything.

Then, of course, there was the bus trip from Caboolture to Wondai, which was extremely dull, but enough of that.

I've finally gotten to meet my uncle Martin. He's very hairy and disreputable and great fun. This is the first time I've seen my mother and her two younger siblings together... but if I gave you any more details I'd have to kill you. Let me just say that they all have an enthusiasm for 60s folk music and leave it at that.

(I really wish I'd brought along some of my music. callylevy, I don't suppose you could email me a copy of Now and Here? Alas, it's pretty much the only thing I know that's suitable... and I'd still have to teach Martin to play it...)

I get to spend a few days here, and then there's another huge roadtrip north back to Proserpine.

Yep, I'm still in the party city. It turns out that the Skyrail doesn't take luggage --- they mumbled something about terrorists --- but they only told me this after I booked. Hey ho. By the time the roads were unblocked, it was too late to get up onto the tablelands and spend any meaningful time there; my uncle had to be in Cairns today anyway. So we spent last night in a motel.

But today I finally managed to do something that was not just fun, it was awesome: I went scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef. Spent a total of about forty minutes underwater, going down to abour 16 or 17 metres, plus about an hour of snorkelling. The weather was a little choppy in the morning, but by lunchtime it was perfect. Flat as a millpond. (Yesterday it had been flat as a millrace.)

Oh, yes, what did I see? All the usual stuff, really. Fish. Coral. Some dolphins, but only at a distance. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary for the Great Barrier Reef. *smug look*

I took down a disposable underwater camera; I managed to take 25 photos. I need to get 'em developed and see how they come out. (I suspect they'll be blue and murky and quite boring. Those spectacular photos of the reef you see in the glossy magazines are taken with special equipment.)

And after getting back, I spent the evening relaxing by the motel pool with my uncle, two of his sons, his son's girlfriend, and one of his potential grandchildren... eating prawns, of course.

Tomorrow we get up far too early and I get dumped onto the Sunlander, the long-distance train that runs up and down the east coast. It'll take about thirty hours to get to my stop, and my other uncle doesn't have net access, so my next update won't be for a while.

(PS. Those thongs gave me sufficiently bad blisters that I couldn't actually put any shoes on today. So I had to spend the entire day in my bare feet. Poor me. Although I will admit that tarmac that's been in the sun for eight hours can get quite hot...)

After yesterday's forecast of gloom and depression, the evening actually turned out pretty well. I found a quiet cafe for dinner, and when I got back parked myself in the kitchen and, after mustering up my nerve, managed to open a conversation with a couple of girls there; we got on pretty well and ended up playing increasingly inebriated card games all evening (they were getting inebriated on alcohol, myself on jet lag) before going to bed at midnight. The three Swiss people sharing my dorm --- two boys and a girl, who according to body language seemed to be a bit annoyed she had to sleep in a seperate bunk to one of the boys --- came back in at around 0200.

They turned out to be Brits and had spent five months going round Australia. Emily, 28, was from Birmingham and Jennie, 26, from Bristol; and, most interestingly, they weren't having a good time in Cairns eitheer. It seems to Cairns is a really great place to be is you're 18 to 20, and none of us were. They'd tried some of the local bars on Friday night, and hated them. (Loud and drunken.) So far they'd spent a week in Cairns and Queensland, the weather was dreadful due to the cyclone, they didn't like the people --- curt and unfriendly, they said --- and were very glad they'd managed to book a last-minute flight out to Sydney this morning.

Now that I'm less depressed, I wouldn't say that the backpackers' is unfriendly, really. I'd think self-absorbed fits the bill better. You've got to work really hard to get through to anyone.

Anyway, the weather is far, far better; the sun is out, for the first time in over a week, I gather; the Skyrail is open; and the bus picks me up in half an hour. The Skyrail is a cable car up over the range to the tablelands. It goes over the rainforest amid some, allegedly, spectacular scenery. I'm looking forward to it. Unfortunately I don't have the ability to add photographs here, so I'm just going to have to go back and back-edit all the entries when I get back.

My new thongs are giving me blisters. Don't ask.

It's now nearly six in the evening. Cairns is full of interesting nightlife, none of which appeals without company. All the people in the backpackers are in tight little groups and while I'm sure they're friendly enough I haven't found any openings to actually talk to them.

So, all in all, I'm actually pretty much bored out of my mind, and it's made worse by the fact that I'm being bored during my very expensive holiday.

Luckily, I should be out of here tomorrow. I'm booked on the Skyrail, a cable car through the rainforest up the side of the Atherton Tablelands. Because it's a cablecar it's pretty much immune to mudslides. My uncle will meet me at the top.

Given that the last time I slept in a proper bed was... let me see... 24+12+8 = over fifty hours ago, I think I'm going to give up my fruitless quest to socialise and just find a quiet corner where I can read until it's a reasonable time for bed. And then I plan to sleep.

(I have done one holiday-ey thing so far. The backpackers doubles as a tourist information office; I asked them this afternoon what I could do. The woman behind the desk looked blank and said, "Well, most things are closed because of the cyclone, but... let's see... there's bungee jumping. Or target shooting." So I went target shooting. The guy who ran it insisted on taking photos, so I have some overly macho pictures of me clutching assorted pieces of military hardware next to some very dead paper targets... which I have as a souvenir.)

Hey, whaddaya know. Australia has 'net access.

Well, after spending over a day of my life in the air, I have finally arrived at Cairns. Unfortunately, so has a cyclone; Cairns is about as wet as Britain is, except quite a lot warmer, and roads all over the place are closed. As a result, my uncle Mike isn't able to get down off the Atherton Tablelands to pick me up. Which means I'm stuck in this backpackers (trans.: youth hostel) in Cairns overnight. With luck we'll be back on plan tomorrow.

Of course, this means I get to miss out on Mike's excellent steak (made from his own bullocks).

It also means that I get to sleep in a four-person dormitory with three total strangers, who speak German.

Sigh. I suppose I'd better go out and try to talk to people and find something to do this evening. Unfortunately, all the other backpackers are (a) rather younger than I am, (b) in large groups who aren't really interested in talking to random strangers, and (c) offensively good-looking... what is it about Australia?

Long time since my last message, which seemed to be written right in the middle of the battery crisis. You'll be pleased to know I know have all my kit (except for one set of PP3 batteries; must contact ARD to find out what happened to them).

Lots of stressful stuff recently, including my company laying off 40% of its staff. I'm staying, although a lot of my friends have gone. Their general impression is that they got the best of the deal, which is not necessarily encouraging.

In better news: I'm off to Australia tomorrow! I fly out from Heathrow at 2145, gods permitting. I get back on the 3rd of April. I would not have picked this particular time for a long holiday, but since it was booked quite a while ago, I'm damn glad it's here. I really need to get away from everything, and Australia's about as far as you can get.

Planned things to do: sit in a plane. Eat steak from my uncle's very own (dead) bullock. Swim in the Pacific at the Great Barrier Reef. Take cable car trips over the rainforest. Go on a long-haul train trip down the Queensland coast relaxing and talking to people. Meet relatives I've never seen before. Generally chill.

Damn, I can hardly wait.

Called Citylink. The courier would be back at the depot at 1500, they said. I could come and pick the parcel up there.

Called again at 1600. Is the courier there? No, he's running late. He'll be in about 1730. When do they close? 1800.

Arrived at 1745, after a half-hour cycle across Reading. Is the courier there? No, he's running late. He'll be in about 1830. When do they close? Hang on, I know this one... oh bugger. Can I wait? Where's your yellow card, he says. What yellow card, says I. The one the courier left at your house.

What's the yellow card for? Well, it's got the consignment number on it. We've got two thousand parcels here, can't do anything without a consignment number. Crap. Well, I'll pick it up tomorrow.

Go out, unlock my bike. Thought occurs to me. Go back in.

How can I stop my parcel being delivered tomorrow? If it goes out with the courier again at 0800 it'll be the same circus all over again. What's your name? I tell him. Click, click. This you, he says. I lean forward and look at the screen. Yup, that's me, and there's my consignment number in prominent letters. I remain silent, as I actually want to get my parcel. He notates the entry. My parcel will stay in the depot tomorrow. I shall drive round before work.

On the way out I pass a van coming back in. It's probably got my parcel in it.

Half hour cycle across Reading and I'm home. I knock on my neighbour's door. The builder's ten-year old son answers. Unusually, he's not smoking.

The builder waves for me to enter; he's a nice old Asian chap, with a largely indecipherable accent. He's getting quite concerned about my parcel, as it's been nearly a week and I still haven't got it (despite calling twice a day). He says that the owner claims to have left it somewhere in the house, but he can't find it. He dispatches what might be his daughter, a be-pierced teenager who is also, unusually, not smoking, to a nearby pub to call the owner. He'll let me know if anything happens.

Tune in later for the next exciting installment! Will Hjalfi get his computer equipment back from Citylink? Will he rescue his batteries from the villanous grasp of the EVIL NEIGHBOURTRON? Or will he be doomed to have to walk over to the television to change channels until the end of time?????

Twitch. Twitch.

I am so sodding sick of couriers.

I was supposed to have another parcel delivered today. I told them to deliver at work, because that's where I'll be. I was watching the parcel tracking website; I saw it had arrived at the depot --- left the depot --- failed delivery. Huh?

A few phone calls later revealed that the mail order company, disregarding my request to deliver to an alternative address, had given the courier my home address. And had neglected to inform me of this. Idiots.

What's even more annoying is that the Citylink courier is actually going to pass by my work address later today. I'll probably see it out my window. I can't get them to drop it off, oh no, that would be far too easy. I'm going to have to wait for it to arrive at the depot on the other side of Reading and go and pick it up.

Citylink actually appear to have a clue, however. They didn't leave it with the neighbour.

Still haven't got my batteries back, though. Apparently the owner has dropped the parcel off, but when I went round this morning, the builder couldn't find it...

Yow.

Zero Point Physics, Vacuum Energy, Scalar Physics

It's not as bizarre as the Time Cube, but I'm afraid that Richard Hoagland is totally beat.

Here are some choice quotations:

It is continuously announced that the FULL psychological attack on this planet will begin with a ploy (an "extra-dimensional biological entity" coupled with) using scalar technology soon after the Japanese economy crashes very badly; this presumably in the next year, and possibly much sooner. The revelation is made by a former USA diplomat in a book and on radio shows. This move is to be made BEFORE the arrival of the true Christos approximately only 265 days from January 1, 2003. (You must consult a Rabbi or pious Jew, to determine Succoth, a holiday close to the "Jewish" New Year, and following "The Feast of the Tabernacles" The bibles seem opaque because they speak in terms of "natural law" which is the same as scalar physics.) Succoth is September 20, 2003.

And that's only the third paragraph!

SEE THIS INFORMATION ON THE EXTREMELY HIGH DEGREE OF PREPARATION OF THE CHIPS TO BE IMPLANTED IN ALL HUMANS IN NORTH AMERICA These are part of the cashless society and are the "Mark [MARC} of the Beast." It is hoped that this measure can be taken before 2003, but it will be inevitable after that year, after what the military calls a "mass evacuation" of hundreds of millions who will "vanish" or "ascend" or "rapture" or complete the next evolutionary leap for this species.

(Links removed.) Hmm.

At the time of Christ, Vietnamese women promoted their two still most revered women, the Trung Sisters, to Goddess status for instigating and generaling the defeat of the Chinese, who had been there for 800 years. This poster in Vietnam shows the elevation of the men to demi-god status, or to "Titans". Vietnam is virtually a perfect society, matrilinear and pervasively female! The women control the society by withholding sex. The commie rat bastards controlling the country now are trying to reverse their elimination of prostitution, since the women, who copulated wildly with Gis, by grabbing them and dragging them off - something GIs don't brag about, otherwise have their legs shut outside of marriage.

Right.

I know I shouldn't laugh at someone so obviously disfunctional, but this guy manages to combine the New World Order, flying saucers, the Rapture, high-end theoretical physics, anti- (or possibly pro-, it's a little hard to tell) -semitism, the Men In Black, crop circles, magic, ancient history, and basically every other conspiracy theory ever dreamed up into one seamless, coherent, incoherent whole. I'll tell you one thing, if ever I need an idea for a SF plot, this is a good place to start.

Oh, good grief:

Some number of generally Anglo Saxon nations, led by Prince Philip ... the leading candidate to be the voice behind the Antichrist, are in cahoots in manipulating this entire ignorant species. (The "antichrist" THING has been around since 1976 and visits the White House two or three times a week!)

(Italics original.) Well, that does explain a few things.

Some of the links are intriguing, too. Alas, the orgone-powered automobile link points a dead Geocities page. But there are links to numerous perpetual-motion machine sites, ZPE pages, antigravity studies, the Philosopher's Stone, transmutation, fractals, cold fusion, time travel... unbeknowing, the guy seems to have written an entire encylopaedia of weird.

Hmm.

There will never be another presidential election.

If you see Christ come with angels and the resurrected, YOU WERE LEFT BEHIND. The time to watch for is the first star on the evening of the previous day. But you must be ready to be nobody and everybody at the same time.

And it's all in text in all different sizes! And colours, too, but I'll spare you that.

Wow. Hours of fun.

About a week ago I ordered a bunch of batteries from ARD Electronics. They sell a incredibly wide range of them, very reasonably priced, and I always get my batteries from them. (I can get a box of 40 AA cells for about the same price as 5 Duracells in a supermarket. Plus, ARD's batteries are fresher.)

So far, so good. ARD shipped my order promptly, or at least, most of it. This was Thursday, I believe.

On Saturday I got a card through the door saying that the courier, DHL, had arrived, discovered I was out (probably in bed, actually) and delivered it next door.

Huh?

Why is a courier that's a branch of Securicor, for goodness sake, handing my stuff to some total stranger?

It doesn't help that my neighbour isn't actually living there at the moment. He's having work done, and the sole occupants are the builders. Who, of course, are only there during work hours, when I'm at work.

So I've just spent the last week knocking on his door at every opportunity trying to get my blasted box of batteries. So far I've worked out that the builders helpfully delivered my box to the owner, who took it home. Now I'm trying to get him to bring it back so I can pick it up.

Sigh. I want my batteries.

And, in yet another sign that the fates are toying with me, today I got another card through the door from DHL. I had another parcel. Mirabile dictu, they didn't leave it with the neighbour, or indeed give it to a passing stray dog; they took it back to their depot. So I went and visited them this morning before work --- a half hour trip --- and picked up a 40x30x20 cardboard box.

It turned out to contain a large number of inflated plastic bags and, tucked in a corner, one tiny box of 10 C cells. ARD had had them on back order and couldn't send them with the rest of the stuff.

Sigh.

This is totally unrelated to my new icon.

Furnulum pani nolo. "I don't want a toaster." Generally, things (like this quiz) tend to tick you off. You have contemplated doing grievous bodily harm to door-to-door salesmen.

Which Weird Latin Phrase Are You?
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