January 30, 2010
This week has been very busy on our network. With a staff of approximately 100, plus around 80 students, and about 100 other networked devices, our network is busy.
In fact, we’re exploring ways to increase bandwidth, which is amazing, because this current setup was supposed to be enough to handle the organization for another year.
Since I started, about 4 months ago, spam has not been much of a problem. But the past few weeks, we have been getting more and more.
As soon as we get some spam, we track down the IP and add it to our firewall. We do some research to see where it’s coming from.
Last week, most of our spam was from Russia. This week, we’ve been receiving spam from Mexico, Brazil and Japan.
Most are innocuous “male performance” enhancements, but we have had a handful of messages with Trojan Horse attachments.
They appear as a fake message from DHL. The subject line indicates a problem with delivery of a package. This is apparently the Bredolab virus.
This snippet comes from a Symantec security blog by Daren Lewis, “It comes from the Cutwail (aka. Pandex) botnet, which is one of the largest mass mailing botnets in existence, with over one million ‘zombie’ machines under its control.”
Spammers are scum.
August 11, 2009
On Top of Portland
Originally uploaded by a.k.a. Little L
Yesterday, Mooj & I rode in the Providence Bridge Pedal. It was fun.
This was our third time. We missed last year, but the year before was a cluster. I think that the event suffered from its own success. It was so crowded that we were caught in a couple of big traffic jams. For example, a couple of years ago, it took us about half-an-hour to cross the starting line. We crossed a bridge and hit another jam, where we crawled along for about 45 minutes. It was very frustrating for a little one.
But this year it was very smooth. When I see the large crowds and the combination of riders of various skills and good/bad manners, I’m amazed at how well it works. But this year was the smoothest ever. It was fun!
In our previous two attempts, we did not get to the Fremont bridge before it had to open back up to traffic. This year we were determined to make it.
As we were waiting to start, the organizers announced the availability of a shortcut. We missed the Ross Island and the Hawthorn.
Lots of cool pix from the Portland Bridge Pedal photos on Flickr.
My sister-in-law shares her experience on her blog. We met at the beginning of the ride, but were separated shortly after the start.
August 7, 2009
I just uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr. Over the past 6 months, I’ve been moving from iView to iPhoto, transferring tags, and updating sets, etc.
I’ve taken quite a few self-portraits of my son and me. They’re arm-length and now, after eight+ years, becoming a quite a collection.
If you look in the widget over at the side of this page, you’ll see my Flickr stream, but it doesn’t give you a feel for the chunk of pix that I’ve just tossed up.
I still need to fix the titles and add some comments. Another project!
