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The Eye Doctor

Did I mention that my Primary Care Physician thought that I needed an eye exam?  Well, he did.  That and a colonoscopy.  Yeah, that’s from a different dude and a different story.

So I sit in the chair and a Technician starts the testing with a vision test.  There’s a nice eye chart on the wall and I start in.  I read a couple of rows and so the Tech skips a row and we go straight to the hard stuff.  I struggle with the first couple of characters then I nail a couple and then I get completely stuck on the last one.  Hmmm, ahh, ohhh, ummmm.  You get the idea.  Well, the Tech apparently gets tired of waiting and for some reason is reluctant to call the test due to darkness so it says “it’s a number.”  Wow.  We test the other eye and in the process never get to the same line instead stopping on the previously skipped line.

Later, when the Doc and I are discussing the results the subject of my 20-20 vision comes up as demonstrated by the fact that I don’t wear glasses.  Does it count that my readers are hanging in plain sight from my shirt collar? Apparently not.  Did I mention that not only do I not have 20-20 vision but that I haven’t had 20-20 vision in four of five years?  I’m still trying to decide just how much credence I should place in my eye exam.

2011 10 11 pete Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Cracked!

Gad Zooks!  We’re going old school with “cracked” instead of “hacked” but the bottom line is that the wiki got defaced.  Looking back I now see four clues that I should have heeded.  Not all are related but they are all clues.

May 31: I start with our DLS provider to get the reverse DNS settings straightened out for some of the mail servers.  One of our sister machines here is the mail server for our local LUG and those guys don’t seem to miss much.  This takes two weeks to complete and likely doesn’t have anything to do with any of these issues.

June 9: mail from bugtraq starts timing out. Well, they recently changed mail servers and I’ve got rDNS issues so I’m not sure where this falls.  I’m concerned that one of my milters is peeved about the names moving.

June 10: Logwatch reports a seg fault in one of the daemons.

June 12: Logwatch reports an attempt to use a known hack on the apache daemon.

June 18: STARTTLS posts a strange error.

June 20: I notice that the wiki is defaced.

So I’ve upgraded mediawiki, changed the creds, and restored from backup so it looks good.  I’m not paranoid but I am cautious so I’ve alerted my users, set some traps, and am waiting patiently in the bushes to see what crops up.

June 22 update: It appears that this may have just been a small misunderstanding, specifically the kind of misunderstanding that comes from not reading all of the docs.  I _may_ have allowed anonymous posting (default) and just confused defacing with bot editing.  Oops.

2011 06 22 pete Slackware
thome Comments (0) Permalink

N900 from Nokia

I’m sporting a new phone.  Since Palm doesn’t seem to have a big future I figured that this might be a good time to jump ship and step into the 21st century.  I’ve had a Palm Pilot, a Visor, a Treo 90 (still no phone), and finally a Treo 600, complete with a phone bolted on but that’s it for me.  There appears to be no good way to get my contacts off of this thing and in this day and age, that’s a problem even for me.

Of course I can get the basic contacts off but no one seems to know what to do with the proprietary stuff like the four customizable fields or the contact categories.  Naturally that’s where I kept birthdays, spouses, kids, and anniversaries.  That’s 625 manual edits that I need to make.  Anyway, that’s why I decided to abandon ship and move to something else, hence the N900.  Okay, that and my Wife saying “when are you going to get a new phone?” and Kyle at Linux Journal singing the praises.

2010 07 13 admin Toys Comments (0) Permalink