Digital Choke Daynotes

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It's Sunday afternoon, and I am sitting out on the small porch of my second floor apartment, overlooking a very quiet swimming pool. The sky is blue, the trees are green, and I can hear the hoot of an owl that is nearby, along with the hum of various air conditioners. The temperature is about 82 degrees, I think, and there is a slight breeze blowing, just enough to make the tree branches move. It is quite peaceful. I suspect that there will be some more action at the pool later on, but right now there are only two people out there. One is reading a book in the shade while her daughter swims quietly in the pool, and the other is laying quietly on a lounge chair, soaking up the UV rays in an attempt to darken her skin.

Yesterday was busy enough that I didn't get around to the nightly post. I went over to the old house to show the new owner where things were. He has only been there since Wednesday night, and already has made a lot of progress in his remodeling. He has a large motor home parted in the driveway, with an awning and a grill outside. He has his two brothers staying there to help him with the remodeling. They were just finishing up gutting the kitchen down to the wall studs; all the counters and cabinets and appliances are gone. He widened the hallway to the bedrooms by two feet, removing the carpet which he will replace with stone tile. He plans on moving out the wall of the kitchen and dining room by four feed, which doesn't require major reconstruction of the roofing since part of the roof there covers the back patio.

He is going to tear out the wood deck that is on two sides of the house in the back yard, and then put in new concrete and a pool. The front entry will become un-recessed, and one of the bedrooms will be extended by about 5 feet to make that part of the house at the same level. He had already filled up one of those construction dumpsters.

So we took the tour of the property. I explained how the water well works, and how the pump relay sometimes gets fried bugs which causes the water pressure to drop to zero. I showed him where the underground sprinkler pipes were, and how the water gets from the irrigation ditch up above the house to the yard sprinklers. And we walked over to the pond to see where the water comes into the pond, where it goes out, and the overflow area for when the pond gets really high due to extended rain.

When I moved out, I had left all the extra paint that had been used inside and outside the house. He didn't want them, because his wife was planning on repainting everything anyhow, so I put all the paint into the back of the truck. I took them over to the dump, where they collect that and other hazardous waste. There is usually a small charge for that, but yesterday must have been 'free paint day', so all it cost me was my time and a bit of gas.

Then I picked up my wife at the hairdressers, and we made the rounds of a few furniture stores (that was fun...) and then into Costco for a few things. Back home, where the grandkids came by (with their mom and dad) a little later. We were babysitting while they went out on a dinner date. We got the kids into swimming suits, and headed for the pool. We only got as far as the one-foot wading pool, where both of them had a great time splashing in the pool.

Then a bit of dinner, and it was time for the King's basketball game. In which our glorious team didn't play as well as they could have (and had been), with the result that they are done for the season. But it wasn't a total loss; we had some Baskin-Robbins ice cream for dessert.

This morning we slept it a bit, had a leisurely breakfast with the Sunday paper, and then got ready for Church. And now we are back home, relaxing with books (my wife and daughter) or computers (that would be me). We're going over to my oldest daughters' house to barbeque some steaks in a bit.

In the meantime, I'm going to work on the "felonious computer" paper. It needs a bit of fine-tuning, and should be ready the early part of this week. This week is our last week in the apartment, which means doing a bit of packing up, and then the big move on Saturday. A three-day weekend coming up to give us some extra time to get settled in the new place. And probably some more furniture shopping.

The anti-spam server got another 2GB of memory over the weekend. It was behaving itself today. The memory utilization percentage went way down, under 10%. I'll let it 'cook' a bit over the next couple of days to see if it continues to behave. The new rule to kill shopping/marketing spam looks pretty successful. It caught about 4000 messages over three days without catching good stuff. And I tweaked a couple of rules to get rid of some 'increase your size' type messages that had been getting through the filter. I also took a look at the statistics. We're still processing about 50K messages a day, and about 25% of that is being caught as spam. Of all those message we process, about 70% seems to be incoming. Those numbers aren't exact, but you can see the volume of spam that we need to catch. I suspect that we could get the total 'spam caught' percentage up to maybe 40%.

Those numbers tell you the size of the spam problem, which is probably information you already know. I'm not sure what the solution is. I think that a redesign of the Internet mail system is going to be a big factor in reducing spam. That's going to take a lot of effort, and lots of time. Reducing the number of 'open relays' (mail servers that allow anyone to use them) should help. But I'd bet that many of those open mail relays are on user's computers, so we really need the help of the operating system vendors to fix that part.

The 'other project' is still around. It's getting closer to where the project is going public, but not yet. But it still takes up a bit of my time, and a lot of time of one of the other members of the security team.

Other than that, it wasn't an exciting day. I did some port scans of the network, and it looks like it will show better results than last time. The number of open ports that shouldn't be on servers and workstations has gone down, although I haven't done the final analysis because of the other things that cropped up today. I also worked on some more 'acceptable use' guidelines, updating a couple of them and their Intranet pages so that they both match. I'll need to work on more of that tomorrow.

On the home front, I set up the phone service and DSL for the new house. We paid off the car and truck, so we can reduce the insurance on the truck (since we don't drive it that often). We decided to leave the full insurance on the car, because it is fairly new, and we use it daily.

After work, my wife and I went to Lowe's and Home Depot, looking for outdoor furniture and a gas dryer. Although we already have a fairly new electric dryer, we think that a gas dryer will be a bit more efficient and cheaper to run. And I have a niece that could use the electric dryer, so it will go to a deserving home. We found a GE dryer at Lowe's, and arranged to have it delivered on Saturday. No decision on the outdoor furniture, though, although that doesn't have to be done right away. I also looked at barbeques, but no decision there either.

Tomorrow I am driving my oldest daughter to the dentist to remove her wisdom teeth. They will knock her out to do it, so I need to be the chauffeur (a common task of mine). I'll be back at work before about 11am, I think. And I suspect there is more furniture shopping in my immediate future.

My morning was taken up with being a father and a nurse. My oldest daughter got her wisdom teeth removed today, and I was available to help her get to and from the dentist office. Her husband stayed home with the two children, as he is unable to drive at this time (that's another story). So I was able to help out. The surgery went well, and I was able to get a few things at the grocery store she needed. It was quite a bit of running around, and I didn't get into work until after lunchtime.

Once there, I discovered that the filtering rules allowed the "Paylh" virus to make it through one layer of our anti-virus defense. I sent this to Jerry Pournelle, who was kind enough to post it on his Security pages on his Daynotes site.

I'd pay attention to that lesson. I'm blocking all email from that source, and keeping track of how many of those messages are received.

The rest of the work day was spent updating the physical access guidelines. And I was given another assignment to update some of the other guidelines that are related to the 'secret project', and the "felony in your computer" paper is also related to that. A full plate for tomorrow.

After work, my prediction came true. More furniture shopping. Very exciting. But I was able to get home in time to watch the finale of "24". Everything worked out in the end; but then there was the the 'kicker' at the end. Now we'll have to wait for next season. I enjoyed the whole show, you might want to catch it on reruns, if available. I suspect that Fox will run it, as well as the FX channel.

And I put my computer to work during "24". My laptop's anti-virus files are now current. Are yours?

This morning, I looked at the message statistics on the anti-spam server. The Palyh virus (also called "SoBig.B"), which is the email that purports to be from support<at>microsoft.com, had made an appearance at our email front door. I only got four copies of it today. Again, that's usually an indication of a virus message that is pretty widespread.

Other than that, the anti-spam server seems to be working much better with more memory. But the overall problem of unsolicited email is more than can be fixed by laws. There are various proposals at the US State and Federal level that want to ban email in vairous ways. Legislation is not going to fix a world-wide problem. This problem will require a combination of fixes. The basic design of the entire email delivery process needs to be re-worked. Internet providers, especially the big ones, need to block mail that has spoofed addresses or sources. The operating system builders (mainly Windows, because of it's market share, but other OS's need to participate) need to be much more secure. And users need a better way to make sure that their systems reject unwanted mail and viruses/worms. It's not going to be an easy fight, and it will take some time.

Most of the day was spent updating and refining some acceptable use guidelines (and unacceptable use). They are to be posted on our Intranet pages, and will be sent out to all users. Although we have a general policy, these guidelines are split into smaller pieces to make it easier for people to "read and heed".

We left a bit early today to go up to the new house for a final walk-through. The house will close by Friday morning. I made a few measurements so we can order some furniture for the family room. Right now, there is no furniture available for the whole downstairs. We also stopped by another furniture store to look at some office stuff. There were some possibilities there, but we need to do the kitchen table and family room furniture first.

Then we went over to my oldest daughter's house. She's recovering from her wisdom teeth removal, and was a bit tired today. So we treated her to dinner at a restaraunt. Back at the house, I gave the kids a bath (that's a very wet experience for the kids in the bath, and me sitting next to the bath ... there is much spashing involved when kids take baths). While I did the bath thing, my Pam and Stacy (wife, youngest daughter) helped clean up the house. We all spent about 25 minutes, but was able to help out quite a bit.

We got home a bit after 9:00pm. A bit of web surfing, an attempt at excellent prose (your're reading it, in case you wondered), and an hour of "Whose Line" (US version). It's a goofy show, but I like it.

Again, my prognosticating powers are validated. After work, Pam and I did go furniture shopping. (Pretty easy prediction, though.) We went to an oak furniture store and found a nice solid oak kitchen table with six chairs. It has a center leaf in it, and a gear-type assembly on the top of the expansion slats so that it opens and shuts nicely. The gear assembly is on both parts of the expansion slots; there was a cheaper table there that only had the gear thing on one side. Based on that, and a couple of other details, I think it is a good guality table.

So, we hauled out the checkbook and put a deposit on it. They'll deliver it a week from Saturday. That's our first piece of furniture for the downstairs. Tomorrow night we stop by another furniture store to look at a sectional couch again. It felt pretty comfortable when we looked at it last week, but we wanted to check out the colors of the window treatments at the house to make sure we get a good color match on the couch.

Not much excitement at work today. I did some more work on the new design of the Security pages for the Intranet. Most of the content is the same, I just organized the various pages into a more logical format. I write web pages in Dreamweaver MX (these pages also), which I like quite a bit. It has a few quirks, but I am used to them. It works pretty well, and has an FTP client built in so that it's easy to upload the pages. It's really an advanced program, so there is a bit of a learning curve, but I've been using it for a couple of years. I made some changes to the style sheet, mostly font stuff for paragraphs and lists. Using a style sheet makes it a bit easier to make global changes to a style of a site.

I also used it to build the "Digital Choke" story pages, which are on this same site in a different area. That was my first attempt at using frames, which is a tricky concept to understand. I think that it turned out OK, though. New readers of this place (both of you) might want to check out the story. It's my first attempt at fiction, and was sort of interesting to write. There's more about the whole thing on the first pages of these Daynotes. This link will get you to the beginning of this Daynote journal.

Daynotes	a daily journal of our activity	Send us email
Digital Choke	an action that is sometimes needed for your computer; also a short techno-story available here.	Send us email