Derwoods Experimental Blog

So, the other morning, I got into our trusty Saturn, and started to back out of the driveway.. As I put the shifter into reverse, I felt something give way and suddenly the shifter was loose. I couldn’t get the car out of reverse, so I stopped and turned off the ignition.

After some cursing, and some time with a screwdriver, I found this broken piece underneath the shifter.

It is a plastic/rubber bushing that connects the shifter to the shifter cables. After some google work, I found that this happens a fair amount on the Saturn SL series with manual transmissions. However, if you go to Saturn to buy a replacement part, they won’t just sell you the bushing, you must buy the cables, and the bushing comes with the cables.. But, that costs about $250.. Nice scam.

A little more digging allowed me to find that NAPA sells just the bushing by itself. But, the 5 cent piece of plastic is still $20. The NAPA part number is BK 6201411. Any NAPA store should be able to look it up and order it.. Luckily, the one nearest me had one in stock.

You can also find it on Ebay, and other parts stores for $20-30. After I got mine, it took a whopping 5 minutes to get things functional again.

Some of you may or may not have noticed.. All the blogs on Naebunny.net are now running WordPress.

After nearly 5 years of using MovableType, we’ve made a much needed switch.

Why all of a sudden?  The answer to that is simple.. MovableType 4.1.

When SixApart released 4.1, it had serious performance issues with the SQL code.  I sent a problem report to them containing a text log of the SQL necessary to add one comment to one entry.  It was several thousand lines of SQL.   And, while my SQL box is reasonably fast, it took a couple of minutes to add a single comment to a single entry.  I even tried adding more memory caching to the mix, but I only saw a small improvement with that.

I had been hoping they’d get to that pretty soon, as other users of 4.1 were complaining about the slowness, but we got tired of waiting.  The move to WordPress was easy, painless and quick.  Plus, saving entries and comments now only takes a fraction of a second as opposed to multiple minutes.  Even on Kathy’s blog, which has over 2200 entries and over 10000 comments.  The overall load on the SQL box has gone down considerably since leaving MT behind.  Now, the biggest user is our SpamAssassin bayes token DB, which has 2.6 million rows, so I’d expect it to be the biggest user.

So, hope you all enjoy the newer faster blogs here at naebunny.net

The Tor script has now been updated to only pull IP addresses of exit nodes.
I had to read the TOR directory server documentation at this place to figure out how to read the spew that comes from directory servers..
From there, it was just a matter of figuring out how to associate the IP with the exit node flag so that I could then give a final listing of exit nodes only.

I also did a little script cleanup. There are 2 lines that will need to be changed so you can specify working and destination directories for the script.
I’ve had it running on my system now via crontab for a few hours and it seems fine.

The link to the script is here: torlist2.pl

I have left the previous script in place in case someone wants all IPs in the tor network.

I just checked the other day and it looks as if the TOR system has switched its directory servers around. So, I’ve adapted my script to pull IPs from more than one directory server, merge the list and remove duplicates..

Read the rest of this entry »

But, I can never really think of anything to put in here anyway.

However, I was able to come up with something tonight. There is a project called TOR that has been around for a couple of years. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)

Its basically a way to surf the net anonymously. And, each time you use TOR, you appear to come from a different IP address. TOR was initially created to give people true privacy on the internet. But, like anything that was created with good intentions, it has been subverted for evil. A great deal of spam comes through TOR these days, and it’s also used for harvesting email addresses from websites.

Since I already have my own DNS servers, all I need is a way to get a list of current TOR IP addresses, and then merge them into my own blacklist. I’ve been thinking about doing it for the past few days, but sat down tonight and worked it out.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, what a year.. Glad its over
As some of you may or may not know, I keep a very close watch on the servers here in the Naebunny datacenter. I also keep stats on web and mail traffic as well. The program I use is called AWstats. Its free, and is quite good at showing you where people are coming from.

AWstats normally shows stats by month, but it can also calculate everything and give you grand totals for an entire year..
So.. with that in mind.. Here’s some interesting info (Well, interesting to me anyway).

Total number of vists: 363467
Total number of pages viewed: 1213393
Total number of hits: 3421046
Total bandwidth used: 68.95 Gigabytes

Lowest traffic time is 5am
Highest traffic time is 4pm

93% of our visits were from Windows users
4.1% from Mac
0.9% from Linux

72.2% of you use Internet Explorer (Brave, arent we?)
14.7% use FireFox
2.3% use Mozilla
2.1% use Safari
1.4% use Netscape

60% of you view our site at 1024 x 768
22.6% at 800 x 600
7.4% at 1280 x 1024

Of the search engines that directed people to our site, Google gave us the most traffic. Followed by Yahoo, MSN, and AOL in order of hits received.

Humble DevilDog sent us the most page referrals:
http://ajsneurons.blogspot.com/ : 3462
http://sitysk.mu.nu : 1594
http://www.heterophobic.org/journal/ : 911

The top search phrases were:
St. James Davis
Jennifer Wilbanks
Jessica Junsford
Forsakeourtroops
Anna Ayala

96% of you have browsers that support Java
98% have Flash installed
93% have Windows Media installed
70% have Quicktime installed
58% have Real installed

Now for the important part.. Heh..
This year, we blocked 821,815 blog spam attempts.. Thats right… 821 thousand.. And, I only wrote my script up in March.. Not too bad..
I’m pretty happy with those stats.. Especially the blocked blog spam..

Also, all of the stats listed are external visitors. Anyone that visits our site from inside our home is not counted by AWstats.

By the way, I took a look at Kate’s blog stats in the database, and she has just over 1400 articles and 6000 comments.. Thanks to everyone for participating, and making her blog a lot of fun.

Hope everyone has a Happy New Year..

Derwood -

OK.. Yeah, Derwood has been to the doctor and is feeling better…
However, its time for a rant…

First off, I’d like to say that UPS officially sucks balls. I can hear the “no shit sherlock” responses out there already..

So, I order some Christmas presents for Missy and Kate last week.. The company I order them from gets them out the door the very same day and shipped them UPS 2 day air.. Thus ensuring that they would be here with plenty of time to spare..

The package was due for delivery Monday. Monday morning, I check the tracking info on the UPS website and it shows the package as “Out for delivery”. I get up in the afternoon to find that the tracking info now states the package was missorted and routed incorrectly. Then, I also see that it was put on a truck to Sharonville, OH which is about 50 miles south of us.

So, I call the 800 line and deal with their stupid voice recognition system. Then, after finally getting a real live person, they tell me that it is sceduled to be delivered on Tuesday (today) even though its 50 miles away from the Dayton or West Carrolton distribution centers. So, I wait..

This afternoon, they update again, saying the package was missorted and routed incorrectly. So, again, I call into their worthless phone system. After finally getting another drone, I request a supervisor who does try to contact the local office but has no luck. While I’m on hold, the status updates to show that its being re-routed back to Dayton, and it is now scheduled to be delivered tomorrow. So much for 2 day air…

I knew when I ordered this, I should go with DHL.. Now I know better.. UPS will never ever ever get any of my money ever again.. Even if it means I have to have the item shipped US Postal service..

And yes, I realize that there is still time before Christmas.. Thats not the point.. The point is that I paid for 2 day air so that I would have time to deal with any other problems should they arise..

Now, UPS, the wastes of skin that they are have fucked up that plan. So, if something is wrong with the contents of the package, I now have no time to fix things so that all will be proper for Christmas. Fucking dirtbags…

–Update 1–
Earlier, I had emailed ThinkGeek about the situation to see if there was anything they could do to help. I just received a response from their Customer Service people. The response is as follows:

Hi Darin,

Jennifer Frazier
ThinkGeek Customer Service

Now, THATS what I call Customer Service.. Its not even their fault, and they’re apologizing and offering to send a replacement via next day (probably by DHL or FedEx this time). UPS could take a few lessons from Jennifer and the gang at ThinkGeek.

–Update 2–
OK.. This is getting ridiculous.. The package is once again back in Sharonville, OH.. So, yet another call to UPS Customer Service drones reveals that the package is on a truck headed for the West Carrollton, OH office. Normally when have a package sent by these losers, this is the center that things come through. I have given them instructions to call me no matter what time of day when it arrives at the West Carrollton office. Let’s see if they can handle that one.. Dolts..

–Update 3
Got a call from a supervisor at the West Carrollton office this morning letting me know that the package was in fact on a truck and to be delivered to me today.
When I got up, the package was in fact here.. So, 4 days for a 2 day air package.. So, what can “Brown” do for you? Screw things up royally would be the answer for that…

Before he winds up in the hospital or something. He sounds horrible, I swear I think he’s got walking pneumonia (or the next best thing) and he won’t listen to me.

If other people nag him, maybe he’ll give in and do it.

Thank you. ~Kate

Just a thought here….
What if all the conservative uncertainty about her is just a show? So far, the democrats seem to like her just because the conservatives don’t…
So, are they *really* unhappy with Dubya’s choice??? I guess we’ll know when its vote time. Personally, I’m betting that the conservatives all vote along party lines while the democrats vote for her because they think this is making the right unhappy.

That would make for a really smooth confirmation, wouldn’t it?

I’m probably nuts, but it just smells fishy to me…