Chris Matthews bitch-slaps Darrell Issa

On MSNBC's Hardball 26 Feb, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) blamed the "Democrat Congress" for the current deficit. Host Chris Matthews brought the Congressman up short for misusing a noun as an adjective. Listen here.

The great snowstorm of 2009

... arrived in the Twin Cities at noon today. This is Lowertown Saint Paul from my apartment window at 1:00 pm.

"Name one."

From Daily Kos TV:

[MSNBC's Norah] O'DONNELL: John, you were just here squirming in your chair as the President was speaking. What's the big deal?

JOHN FEEHERY: Well, he passed the biggest, pork-filled stimulus, whatever you want to call it, bill in history and now you're talking about fiscal responsibility [blah, blah, blah] but they go first with this huge pork bill...

O'DONNELL: Name one piece of pork.

JOHN FEEHERY: Ummm, ummm, babble, you can't do that to me right now. I can't think of it right now. But it was filled, huge, bunch of stuff that we don't even know what's in there.

In which Pigpen is attacked by Russian bandits

Pigpen, my Linux server, is a small former desktop workstation, way underpowered but still more moxie than I ordinarily need. Yesterday it was acting funny, so I rebooted it. That made it worse. Couldn't get the Gnome UI to come up. It was down for two hours while I fretted.

I considered hitting the hard reset button, but I don't like to do that if I can avoid it. I tried Ctrl-Alt-different keys and accidentally got it to resume its startup sequence. So the daemons were functioning, just couldn't get graphics. No big deal.

Syslog revealed that someone in Russia, or maybe in Luxembourg, was hammering my nameserver daemon with random cache poisoning attempts from IP 62.109.4.89, over 65,000 DNS queries per day. That was enough to slow down all the other processes. It started at 17:43:40 on 2/17 and continued until I took the server down at 13:19:19 on 2/21.

As the internet was built upon mutual trust among like-minded techies, a lot of conventions were adopted that relied on that trust. Spammers were the first to take advantage of it, and now, black hats abound. Just like squirrels at a bird feeder, they see an opportunity to use a public facility for other than its intended purpose. That's a crime, but it's hard to catch the bad guys and impossible to prevent their misbehavior.

So at the moment my router is now dropping all traffic coming from 62.109.0.0/20. I suppose there's a more difficult way to solve the problem, but this one is a start. The myriad Russian viewers of this site will no doubt be heartbroken

'Michele nose this'

A Minnesota Independent blog reader comments:

jeff

Comment posted February 20, 2009 @ 12:46 pm

Michele Bushman is a smart an wisest person in congriss. Thier is a conpisrcy to take over by muslems an make ameirca muslem an Michele nose this. You peeple shood listen to her an me when we tell you Barack Obamam is a terrioist an will spend are tax money to teach kindygarten kids how to have sex. This is a shame!!!! I hope michele become president an i will vote for her an all my friends like me will vote for her to. I vote for her to be a congrissman and i tell all my friends vote for he to!

I'm wondering whether "jeff" is real, or a parody of Michele's constituency.

My favorite Dunn Bros. is closing

The one at 2583 West 7th, near the airport, next to Nedved's Flowers.

I found out today when I saw a sign in the shop announcing their last day is this Sunday, Feb. 22. Of course I'm not helping much. I spent less than $2 on a cup of coffee and occupied a table for over an hour. If I were running a coffee shop chain, I'd also prune the ones that aren't breaking even.

On the plus side, another Dunn Bros. franchise has moved into a former Starbucks at 242 West 7th downtown, where parking is more of an issue.

Still, it makes me sad.

Worst pun EVER

George Bush's legal advice was politically tainted

Who would have thought?

An investigation by H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, reached "damning" conclusions about numerous cases of "misconduct" in the advice from John Yoo and other lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration, according to legal sources familiar with the report's contents.

And the point of the AP's graphic is ... ?

(The above is a screen grab; the original URL is http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hwu7ZlKE7WeLk16elRjtCJD26tKgD96A96TG0. They may have fixed it by the time you read this.)

It's so simple when you figure it out

Two war stories, one telling a tale on my colleague Bobby, another on me.

Bobby was testing out some PHP code on a Linux machine, trying to insert new rows into a SQL Server table. The code ran without error, but on the Windows machine where the database resides, Enterprise Manager wasn't seeing the updates.

I suggested adding a SELECT COUNT(*) statement before and after the INSERT. The row count was incrementing by one each time. Odd, that. The changes were being made locally, but not globally. Was it network latency? A Microsoft bug?

He called back later, sheepish. He forgot he had duplicated everything onto an Access database for testing. This was the one the PHP code was updating. Enterprise Manager was looking at the original copy.

OK, my turn to blush.

I've been trying for a day and a half to get past the error message Fatal error: Call to undefined function odbc_connect().

Google and Yahoo, normally my friends, this time took me off in all sorts of unsuitable directions. You have to reinstall Apache. You have to recompile PHP. Finally, I switched search engines and found what I needed to know at Answers.com:

You have to add the line extension=odbc.so to the php.ini file, then restart Apache.

And behold! It's working! Gosh, I feel dumb some days.

Lost Generation

This video was created for the AARP U@50 video contest where it placed second.

Mitigating the damage

From IT Blogwatch at Computerworld, where the discussion is about the recent incident of attempted sabotage by a disgruntled ex-employee. The individual still had admin privileges on all the servers where he placed a script that, had it worked, would have erased all data and backup data on those servers by overwriting with zeros.

To the rescue comes a commenter at Slashdot:

Technically, all of the data in a computer is really just a bunch of ones and zeros, so assuming a fairly even mix of those two possibilities, writing over everything with zeros would only change half of their data.

I'm losing my Yahoo Briefcase ...

... and you're losing yours as well, if you have one.

Last day to retrieve your stuff will be March 30.

30 MB of free storage seemed like a lot, almost ten years ago when I was an early adopter. Now I find I have a few Quicken archives dating back as early as 2003, and very little that I'll need to save before Yahoo pulls the plug.