by srhuston

It’s Worth A Shot

So, for no reason other than to say I did it, I’m going to try to post something in here every day.  I won’t say for how long, so that if it stops after two days I can say, “See, every day for two days.  Mission accomplished.”  Of course, that means I’ll need to think of something interesting to say.  And my interesting thoughts are usually spur of the moment (as well as tending to be “you had to be there” comments), so I’m not sure how inspired I will be.

At the very least, I’ve got something to start it off.  Within the last few minutes, Akismet canned the 200th spam on this site for me.  Hooray for despaminazation.  Go ahead, look it up.  I’ll give you a dollar if you find it.  And not in a marketroid‘s dictionary.

by srhuston

I *Think* That’s Irony

hello. it’s a nice day for your ideas…
very good post…
very best idea!…

These are just some of the spam comments that Akismet has caught for me.  Granted, WordPress would have caught them anyway, and I’d have deleted them.  But now they’re separated out, already detected as spam, and I don’t have to do anything about them (though I tend to delete them just for the satisfaction, instead of waiting the 15 days it would take before they disappear on their own).

The ironic bit?  They’re all attached (or would have been) to the post I made in October, about using ROT13 to screw with spammers in ICQ.  Now that gives me an additional chuckle :>

by srhuston

Phase I Completed

Well, it’s late, but about an hour ago I finished Phase I of the phone project.  All the old jacks are working just the same, though none of them need DSL filters now, and everything goes through the new termination blocks.  It’s complete overkill for the number of phone lines in the house (one) and the number of phones currently in the house (three), but this will allow for future expansion as well as keep everything neat, tidy and easy to manage.  Read on if you care, or just look at the pretty pictures.

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by srhuston

The Battle Begins

Thought I’d written something here about this already, but I guess not.  I ordered (and have received) all the stuff I need to start redoing the phone lines in the house.  There’s a lot of complete crap in places – lines that are run to jacks with telephone *cord* (like what you use to plug your phone into the wall) instead of proper cable, places where there’s three splices in a row on the same line for no reason.. it’s no wonder our phones are noisy, though some of that really is the fault of the lines coming in.  So I picked up a butt set for testing, a 66 block and two 110 blocks (one 110 will have the phone drops and incoming lines, the other will be a bridge, and the 66 will link the permanent house wiring with the telco lines and whole house DSL filter – overkill, but it’ll be clean when it’s done), whole house DSL filter, punchdown tool, and a probe amplifier for the later inevitable “oh crap which wire is this one” moments.  Plus a couple adapters for hooking up to test things.  All in all, quite a lot of equipment, and good quality.  Photos of the stuff, plus the beginning of the project (namely, the “before” shots) available in the gallery.

I’m hoping I can pick up the plywood this weekend and mount it to the wall, and I can start Phase I – installing the new equipment, having the NID and protector moved over, and reterminating all the existing wires to the new blocks.  Then Phase II will happen right after the data network lines are run throughout the house, since I’ll be using the same CAT5e cable for phones and data.  Extra benefit is that the telecom network as-is won’t go down, just the jacks will be phased out as new ones come into use.

by srhuston

One More Year

Well, our radio club’s elections were this evening (actually Wednesday evening, since I’m writing this in the wee hours of Thursday morning).  Stephanie was uncontested as treasurer, and Keith uncontested as secretary.  For president we had two Davids – N0YMV and W0SNJ, and vice president was Mark N2KIV and myself.  The results came in, and N0YMV is our new president as of January and I’m remaining as vice pres.  Should be fun and interesting – I’ve been in this position for two years now (man, it doesn’t feel like it was that long) and I’ve enjoyed it, though there’s been a few times I was ready to throw in the towel.  But that comes with any organization I think, no matter what the topic – get more than a couple people involved, and politics can take over and ruin the whole thing, if you let it.

So we’ll see what the new year brings.  There’s a lot of things we both would like to do, and some of them I think are on their way to happening already.  One other good thing is that David is a new mind to the board, so I’m hoping for some new ideas as well.  Either way, there’s now a chance for the entire executive board to be in the same vehicle at the same time, which has to violate some law somewhere I’m sure.

by srhuston

Christmas Party a Rousing Success

We had our annual Christmas Party last night, and it went wonderfully!  We had a lot of people show up, some who we didn’t expect to see but called during the day or evening and then headed up here.  Plenty of food (of course, because Stephanie usually makes too much food for something like this), and lots of fun was had by all.

A big Thank You to all who attended.  Hope to see you all again soon (some of you I know I will), and that you all have a joyous holiday season.

by srhuston

New WordPress Toys

Over the last few days, I’ve installed a few WordPress plugins, both here and at the radio club’s website. One is Akismet, which as thus far done a wonderful job of snagging spam comments posted here, and not even emailing me about them. They never made it to the pages anyway, because new accounts have to have one approved comment before they can post; but now I don’t have to even see the emails about them, which is nice.

The other plugin is called PHPEnkoder and is related to email. Normally, you’d see an email address like this: Email me! The problem with these links is that they can easily be harvested – a script can read the “mailto” part of the link, and know to expect an email address. There’s ways around that, like using Unicode characters to display the address in a browser but require something to decode them first, but those are easily foiled with a little bit of scripting and not computationally intensive. Instead, PHPEnkoder works by creating a self-referential JavaScript bit that must be executed on the browser in order to display the link. If you have JavaScript turned off, it just shows up with a tag to say “email hidden; must have javascript enabled”. But it keeps spammers away because not only do they not really use JavaScript in their harvesters (it’s CPU intensive), but also because the code itself takes time to execute. Not very long for a single person at a browser, in fact the page where I first wanted to set this up (shown here) only takes an extra second to load. But if a spammer had to load a full Java implementation into their program, and deal with all that CPU load over time.. it’s not worth it to them.

So it’s not perfect.. but it’s much better than it was before.

by srhuston

The Gang’s All Here

So I’ve been getting back into Second Life a bit – got a few things going on, and catching up with friends I hadn’t seen in awhile. And this evening when I logged on is the first time in awhile that more friends of mine were online than offline. Many of them were in the same general area, so I went to visit, and we all sat down and chatted for a bit. Was nice to catch up with people and see they’re all doing well :>

old_gang.jpg

Clockwise from the bottom is me, Theodora Duke, Ipenda Keynes, Felanis Soyer, Compulov Weeks, and Asaria Winnfield.

by srhuston

It Said What?

I’ve mentioned before that Leigh and I run IRC servers. You can connect to irc.srhuston.net (port 9999 over SSL) or wiretap.leighbert.net (same port) if you like. Well, I also have an Eggdrop bot that runs in there, and has an AI module compiled into it (which I ported a long time ago, and some others have taken the reigns for it thankfully). His name is KupaKawfe. ‘Cause everybody needs a KupaKawfe in the morning. And today, he said this:

<KupaKawfe> AstroComp: E) setup the nfs shares in netinfo and ignore the fact that the addresses have to mail things that annoy me regularly :p.

AstroComp is Leigh’s nickname in there.. now, I’m starting to wonder if that bot listening to our conversations is really a good idea…

by srhuston

Pine Barrens Express 2006

Well, yesterday was a lot of fun. David N0YMV and myself left my house around 11ish, and headed down to the NJ Pine Barrens for the Pine Barrens Express Road Rally. For those that don’t know, a road rally is where the drivers have a course defined for them (a series of instructions consisting of speed, distance and what turns to make at intersections or other road information instructions, but *no map*) and have to complete the course in a certain amount of time. They leave the start point about one minute apart, and they’re timed at various checkpoints along the way. There’s also a dinner break in the middle, since the event starts around 14:30 and didn’t finish until about 22:00. David and I went down to volunteer for communications during the event, and there’s quite a bit to do – plus, you become one of the members of the checkpoint crew, watching as these vehicles go by and grabbing their time and car number to write on the list. It’s usually a lot of fun, and this year was no exception.

Edit 20061119 @ 2024UTC: Uploaded the whopping two photos I took to the gallery – find them here.

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