Well, here it is Sunday already. The end of a busy weekend. Well, sort of busy.

Friday wasn't too exciting. The reorganization is in place, but not much change yet, just a temporary boss while a new one is recruited. Pam was starting to get a cold, so we just stayed home and watched "Joan of Arcadia" and some old movies.

Saturday morning was dedicated to a bit of cleaning and a trip to the hairdresser (for Pam). I puttered around in the garage. I replaced a single-socket outlet for the workbench with a dual socket outlet. The workbench has a power strip, but I needed the second outlet for the "DustBuster" (small hand-held cordless vacuum). I mounted that to the wall above the workbench.

Then I installed some flip-locks on the front door and the door to the garage. Those are the flip-over locks that look like a hinge. Not very strong, but useful for when the grandkids come over so they can't escape.

Then I loaded up the single bed and frame in the truck. It belongs to Christine; we've been storing it for a while. By that time, Pam was back from the hairdresser, so we drove over to their house.

Christine is pregnant (1st trimester), and also has been working on the cold (shared among various members of the family), and the house has gotten away from her a bit. So we were able to help out a bit by taking a bunch of laundry to the laundromat for cleaning all at once. Christine had to go to the medical offices for a lab test, so her husband Jared took her there. Pam went to the laundromat, which left me at home with the two grandkids. (Tough work when you can get it.) The youngest (Liam, 2) is getting over a cold, and he went down for a nap. Joelle (4) and I watched some movies ("Snow White", which I hadn't seen for years), until she fell asleep cuddling with me on the couch. (All together now, "Awwwwww".) She is starting to get the cold, and had a slight fever, so the rest was good for her.

Everyone got home a bit after 6pm, so we unloaded the laundry and left, since Pam was quite tired. We came home and relaxed a bit, then watched a movie.

Today, I went to the weekly morning meetings for church, then home to relax and serve as helper to Pam while she works on her cold. She relaxed on the couch, but did have enough energy to make some home-made rolls using the bread maker. That went well with the dinner of stew.

After dinner, I watched "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". Pretty good movie, comic-book style, lots of special effects, but a good story.

Other than that, the usual things are in store for next week. Not much excitement, and nothing interesting to report from various web-surfing excursions.

One thing: if any of my two regular readers sent some mail via the form here, it may have gotten lost. I (along with the capable help of Brian Bilbrey and Greg Mazin,members of the "Daynotes Gang", and the hosts of this drivel) did some rearranging of the mail services. I've been getting a lot of spam here. I suspect that it was due to posts to Dr. Jerry Pournelle's site, where I included my email address here. The mail harvesters must have collected my address there.

I had thought that it would be best to block mail at the server here, but it is actually easier to apply rules here to get rid of all digitalchoke.com mail other than that sent by the response page here and on the Digital Choke book site. So, a few minutes with the Outlook Rule Wizard got the rules set up, and each mail run from here now puts the spam mail in their place (the trash). I tested the response pages here, and they work just fine. And if those addresses get spammed, I'll just need to change the mailing addresses here, and tweak the Outlook rule a bit.

On Friday, Pam and I met with the new cardiologist. The doctor is very nice, and seems knowledgeable about my problem. She is not convinced that the ablation procedure is best at this time. There is a risk of stenosis (narrowing of the vein around the ablation area), which is not a good thing. And since we have an appointment with the electrophysiologist (the specialty of heart electricity) in a couple of weeks, she wanted us to wait for their evaluation before we make any decisions.

There are some newer drugs that might be useful and better than my current one -- less long-term problems. There is some time to decide that after the next visit. She did recommend that I reduce the dosage on the Amiradarone for now. So we'll see how the next visit progresses. In the meantime, the current medication seems to be working for now.

John Dominik mentioned in a post last week (towards the end of that day's post, at the "1515" entry; and remember that links around here open up new windows) that he was getting some strange emails (well, even strange for him) with what appeared to be random words in the visible message text. The text of the message included this:

Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2004 09:14:55 -0300
From: "Peterson Hilda"
To: <his email address -- take that, you mail harvesters!>
Subject: Re: CJSEEBU, bandits!' ivan shouted

dodo intervention magnum housebreak antecedent bluejacket transpose
blackbody church bindery belligerent commentator kazoo walkway ambush
sherman though antiperspirant extrapolate carcinoma

He was wondering wassup with that. I've seen those also, at work and at home. It all relates to a new technique that anti-spammers use called "Bayesian filters ". If you want more information one link that Google found about this subject. It's an anti-spam tool that "learns" how to detect spam by assigning probability factors to a message based on it's word content. The more 'benign' words there are, the less chance that the message is spam. So if you take a pile of spam messages, and some good messages, and classify each one with a scoring system, the Bayesian Filtering software learns your threshold for determining whether a message is spam or valid email.

The theory is that if the BF is properly taught, it will act more like you do as you look at a message and determine it's category (spam or OK mail). The more benign words, the less likely it is spam.

So, if the spammer is smart (and some of them are, and other spammers learn these same techniques), he/she includes a bunch of 'benign' words or phrases in the text area of the message, as in the one that John got. The message may also have HTML content. So the anti-BF words are not displayed, since most mail clients will show a message in HTML mode if that content is present. The result is that an anti-BF message, like the one to John, will evade Bayesian Filtering software, and perhaps some other anti-spam techniques also.

I'm not sure what the pro-BF people are doing about this, since I haven't investigated it much (we don't use Bayesian Filtering at work, and at home, I've got a rule that throws away most of the spam, since it seems to come from my site here). If you are interested, Google away.

Some consternation from the network services guys from their weekend's work. The Novell NDS 'tree" (a database holding all of the Novell network objects such as users and server information) got trashed over the weekend, so today (and probably most of the night) was spent in rebuilding the tree. This caused some problems for users, since they might have problems logging in, and difficulties in printing. It also affected the ability to change or reset passwords (many people have memory failures over the weekend). It also meant that I couldn't do any auditing or analysis of the network, so I worked on a few other projects, including a user-level security presentation to one of the other departments.

So the presentation is tomorrow, along with another blood test to check out my "rat poison" level. Tonight's plan is more "geek couch potato-ing". Pam's still working getting rid of her cold; she stayed home today because the cold is not letting her sleep at night.

Nothing that exciting yesterday. Except mail from Brian C. (the unofficial editor and catcher-of-mistakes and apostrophe guru) noting that I had some missing links (in these pages, not my genetic makeup, thank you very much). So I fixed links, and also added an extra 'mail' link in a couple of places. There may be some other changes necessary, like a change to the weekly index page (for those of you that are bored enough to want to read earlier postings).

The mail from this site is being processed by some Outlook rules that are throwing away the junk. Still a bit of tweaking to do there, such as determining the actual 'to' address used by the spammers. The forwarding process here changes the mail header a bit, so I can't see the original value (although I am still not deep enough into Outlook to make sure). A few rules to sort mail might help that. And, to make things easier for Brian, I'm trying out a mail link at the end of each post. What'cha think?   How's that icon look? Got any better ones?

The network at work is slowing recovering from a big problem that started when another department's network admin decided to install a patch (a beta patch) to fix a problem on his server. It was done without coordination from anyone else, especially those in charge of the 'master' tree. The result was that the Novell NDS "tree" got very damaged. It's taken three-four people most of the past 6 days to recover the damaged NDS objects database. (In a Novell network, a database stores information about the various 'objects' in the network, such as user id's, printers, servers, etc. If the NDS database is damaged, there are major problems accessing those objects). The result to the end user was problems logging in, printing, accessing files, etc.

The problem is that network administration is very distributed, with no centralized coordination. Another problem is the tendency of many network admins to not think 'globally', or enterprise-wide. There is minimal thought to the effects of their actions on the rest of the network. With the size and complexity of our network, it is important to think globally when working on the network.

The problem really needs to be fixed by a total reorganization and centralization. This is going to be difficult for many departments -- it's hard to take away the rights to pieces of the network. But it really needs to be done. The problems we've had the past several days have gotten the attention of the very big bosses (since the resultant difficulties affected that top-level office). The cost of this problem hasn't been determined, but the hours could have been better spent on other projects than this.

An organization needs to learn lessons from problems, and progress and move on. If there are structural problems in the network, whether in the infrastructure, the organization, the support, or the people, you got to learn from episodes like this. It may require additional staff, additional infrastructure, and more dedicated adherence to standards and policies. Our last major incident (the "Nachi" worm) taught us some lessons about the need for change. That outage cost big bucks. But the changes haven't been put into place. Perhaps this one will. We shall see.

A quiet evening at home tonight. A bit of 'geek couching' is in order, and there is "West Wing" to watch. Although I may not agree with all of the politics on that show, it is still entertaining.

Your comments appreciated....   

John Dominik (he of the obsession of building a Pinewood Derby car with a paint finish you can also use as the reflector in a small telescope -- see his Tuesday post here -- standard warning: all links around here open up new windows so you won't get lost) had a reference on his Thursday post here, scroll down past the goofy picture) mentioned my explanation of the random words in some spam mail (up there on Monday's post). In my post (up there on Monday) (are you confused yet, or just don't care?), I put forth a theory that the random words were an attempt to defeat the Bayesian Filter theory of spam filtering.

Which I still think is true, and John's not arguing that point (I think). He did complain about the lack of links on each separate post here. They are quite easy to put in, and I used to do it (as both of you long-term readers will recall). There used to be a separate area for each of the days of the week, and a link (an A NAME tag, for you purists) for each of the days. But this last month I'd been having difficulties doing one post a day (they wouldn't let my laptop into the ICU, and the increased episodes usually wipe out two or three days).

So, as I was thinking about a new 2004 design for these pages, I thought that I would do away with the divisions (and links) for each day of the week. Instead, you get this design. You still get one post a day (most of the time), but it also allows for an extra post (like yesterday). The downside is that you don't get a link for each post, but you do get one for the 'latest' one.

And while A NAME tags are useful, you sort of have to know where they are in order to tell others about them. The days of the week are easier to figure out. For instance, John's pages (and others) have every day name to the left of each new day's post. So you can copy the link for a specific day if you want to reference it. But, as in his post for Thursday, if he does two posts in a day (like Thursday), there isn't a link to his second post.

But, I suppose that this is all just fluff and filler. I really enjoy John's pages; his is one of the places I regularly look at each day. In fact, his visit counter just hit 10,000 -- quite impressive.

And, just for John, you might have noticed a special link to this post. See the little icon? It's a special one just for John. If you really want to be scared, look at it here (you'll understand if you get to John's pages). It's there to give you a helping hand in case John wants to point to today's post. You're welcome.