innismir.net

Since my e-mail addresses have been around in one form or another for 10+ years (There is a scary thought), I get my fair share of spoofed mail bounces. Normally it’s a annoyance, but occasionally I get some white elephant in my INBOX:

From: uucp <uucp@inetgate.telecom.gomel.by>
Message-Id: <200811150241.mAF2fnrj009642@inetgate.telecom.gomel.by>
To: (ME)
Subject: UUCP job killed

Message from UUCP on gml Sat Nov 15 04:41:49 2008

UUCP job

zip.CK9GSD2AAFVV

for system

zip

requested by

daemon

has been killed.

======

Reason: Your mail message has been expired after 672 hours.

====

The job was queued at 2008-11-17 14:43:48.

It was

rmail oot@zip.belpak.gomel.by

UUCP? Really? I haven’t seen that in use since the mid-90s, when I first started with the crazy “Internet” thing. But I guess in Belarus it’s still in use. Wow….

This originally was going to be part of my last post, but it was long enough to be broken off into it’s own article. I know that KA3DRR has asked me a couple of times what my antenna setup was like. My antenna setup is very meager, when I first made my antenna I had a good idea what I needed:

I had a few requirements:

1. It had to be cheap
2. It had to be easy to set up and break down
3. It had to be simple
4. It had to not require a tuner

Since then, times have changed a bit: I have a tuner now, and I wanted to operate more bands. However, the cheap, simple, and easy to set up and break down requirements stayed the same. My mounting situation has more or less stayed the same. I use a tree that is outside my office to hang my antenna up and then when I’m done I take it off. It’s not the best situation and the “half wavelength above the ground” rule is definitely flaunted:

Click For Larger

You can see my radio room from the outside in shot. Also visible is my 2M on-the-ground-plane. This is permanently left outside and is connected to my IC-27H.

Again, click for Larger

With the original 20M elements and the 10M elements I added a few months ago, I think it looks like a giant spider when it’s hung in the tree. Thankfully it breaks down in about 5 minutes of work and is a rolls up into a nice manageable size. I use Velcro cable ties on the end to keep the elements wrapped up and neat.

Guess what? Click For Larger

I love my antenna, as it’s the first “homebrew” project I ever did. It also works quite well, I’ve worked as far as the Ukraine on it with 100W. Sure, it’s a pain to shuffle out at night and take it down and I can’t wait until I get a house in which I can simply have an antenna that I can leave up all the time, but in my current situation, it gets the job done.

There has been a lot of drama over the ZOMG CW OPZ ROOL AND NO CODEZ DROOL Video. It started when Jeff, KE9V posted a message on Twitter linking to a weblog post at the Parma, OH Amateur Radio Club weblog. The post contained a video about the death of Morse code, and how anyone who didn’t pass a Morse code test is dumbing down the hobby.

I, like any other red-blooded netizen, posted comments on the post and the YouTube page saying in no uncertain terms on how I thought his thoughts bore a striking resemblence to a large pile of edible offal from the stomachs of various domestic animals (”a load of tripe”). I don’t think Morse is the cat’s meow, but I do know it (despite being one of the dumb no-code hams) The bile flowed from my fingertips and my circle of Hams on twitter was abuzz at the video, most of the talk being negative.

Then it was gone…

Steve, K9ZW tweeted that he couldn’t get to the video via the weblog post. Sure enough, the video had been removed. I forwarded him the YouTube link, which he replied he also couldn’t get too. Looks like someone had second thoughts. Finally, the title and all the comments were deleted from the post and all further comments needed to be moderated. All that was left was a non-functional little nubbin of a post that previously had about six people’s comments. I assumed that it was over and that the creator of the video retreated. I would have preferred some kind of discussion or an apology, but it’s his call.

Flash forward to Friday morning, where I see that the video has been reposted. I was glad I can now link to it to talk about it some more, but it did ruffle my feathers that the creator, rjkd732, essentially tossed all the previous discussion down the memory hole. About ten people commented on the various postings and he has seen fit to flush it all down the tubes. I posted my comments regarding this and reposted my original comment regarding offal. This time, he did reply saying that he took down the video because (para-phrasing here) I was being rude and calling other people names.

He then took it down again…

Then this little gem showed up in my Youtube INBOX:

those who passed code ARE BETTER! stick that in your pipe, whiner.

Hahahaha!

Oh wait… You’re serious…

Let me laugh even louder….

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

OK. So I’m not a saint. What?

The Internet is a great place for meeting people that say things that make your blood boil and pray for the ability to punch people via TCP/IP. I seem to have a silly habit of tilting at windmills and trying to engage them and talk. What annoys me is when people do the electronic equivalent of “taking their marbles and going home” by deleting threads and comments. Although he’s well within his rights to do these things, it sets off a giant flashing red light that says he’s not interested in hearing an alternate viewpoint.

OK, I’ve switched over to WordPress. If you are seeing this in your RSS feed, I guess my redirect works. If there are any SNAFUs, please let me know.

As much as I love Pants I’ve been wanting a bit more bells and whistles in my weblog. So, I’m moving to WordPress. Hopefully, this should be as seemless as possible. RSS readers! (all 15 of you) You *may* need to update your RSS to point to http://www.innismir.net/feed - I tried to set up a redirect, but I don’t know if that will be successful…

Jeff Atwood has, once again, hit one out of the park. I always wonder how he always seems to come up with these great posts, seemingly pulling them out of thin air, while my weblog just seems to post satellite audio.

So, I’ve been messing around with the layout here and have further went down the rabbit hole of Web 2.0. I borrowed Ryan Grove’s super cool Flickr loading code and also added Technorati blog reactions which are like trackbacks,
>but without all the suck that goes along with them.

Maybe at some point I’ll add some content…

Apparently, in order for me to claim my weblog on Technorati, I need to smear their link feces on my weblog in a visible manner.

You fail, Technorati, but here it is anyway:

Technorati Profile

Nepenthes is a wonderful tool that is great for collection of various malware nastiness. It’s extremely useful and has provided me a fair share of amusement when I review the logs seeing all the various trash the Internet’s tubes try to dump onto my computer. I love Nepenthes.

Unfortunately for me, Nepenthes also completely sucks.

Nepenthes does some amazing things in the areas of collecting malware, examining payloads, and automatic analysis. However, from a user perspective, it’s a fetid pile of yak’s droppings and an abomination in the sight of God. The software seems to be in a perpetual state of debugging, which, by itself is OK, but it seems to constantly want you to run it from the console. This makes it difficult if you ever want to run it unattended, which in most cases you will want to do considering you’re essentially trawling for malware. Also, the logging facilities also seem to reflect this, as extracting meaningful messages from the log file is pretty close to reading tea leaves.

The thing that really drives me batty is trying to get Nepenthes and Honeyd to work together. The author seems to know that people want to do this and tries to explain what has happened, but provides a next-to-useless explanation and ends it with an update of “The Honeyd guy managed to do this, but I don’t know how.”

I know that almost all open source software is on some level classified as a hobby, but wouldn’t you at least try to make inquiries as to how to make it work, and or adjust the codebases to make this kind of setup easier? Instead, you have people like me who are using duct tape and bailing wire solutions to “fix” the problem, and are unable to recommend the software for use in production environments because of specifically that.

Which is sad, because I love Nepenthes.

Yeah… No matter what I do, I always seem to like the idea of having a weblog, but I never seem to keep it updated. With me finding out that Wonko has released his blog engine that I’ve been wanting for a while, I decided to once again take a crack at writing something.

I’m sure I’ll take it down and put up a static page again within a few months…