Atown Inconsequential

Not long now

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:39:00 +0000

I'm really dying to get some runs in this winter. Alas I have to wait another month before I'll get the chance *sniff*. A little late for my first trip but, perhaps better since Summit County hasn't seen that much snow yet. We are doing it up right this time...none of the usual floor crashing. Renting a house in Keystone so we can rest in luxury in between sessions. Its gonna be pimp!

Making the treck up to Keystone

Earn Some Free Snow Gear

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:29:00 +0000

If you are a fan of snowboarding or skiing there is a pretty tight way to earn free gear. Rossignol makes all kinds of mountain gear and has a search engine that earns you points redeemable for decent stuff. It returns results from Google and Ask so you can earn while doing your normal browsing. They have some algorithm for preventing users from padding their stats with random searches and clicks but, there is potential to earn faster via referral.

Grid Computing Projects

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:47:00 +0000

While doing some research for my Computer Architecture class I came across this article 12 cool ways to donate your PC's spare processing power. Some pretty interesting projects here especially Enigma@home and the IBM World Community Grid.

Avoiding Online Scams

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:11:00 +0000

Check out The Complete Guide to Avoiding Online Scams @ lifehacker, a great article for the less "savvy" users in your life.

Snowboarding News

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:30:00 +0000

As I'm getting pumped up for the season been trying to see whats going on in snowboarding. I've found that topix has a pretty good page for discussions and the latest news. You can check it out here. God I can't wait to get in the mountains!

Windows 7...so far so good

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:04:00 +0000

Got a copy of Windows 7 Professional through the MSDN AA at my school. Turns out the image was bad....spent a day or so messing with that. After a couple of tries I was able to torrent one, use my student key, and get it up and running with little effort. I've been enjoying 7 quite a bit, some really great new features. My favorite so far is how Windows Media Player picked up my SimpleCenter installation and was able to instantly stream my movies without needing any additional codecs WOW! Aero looks great and operates smoothly and the new search seems like it will save some time. This OS has me so inspired I'm gonna give Security Essentials a try....lol I may live to regret that. Anyway 7 is worth a try, been good to me so far....thank you Microsoft for pulling it together.

This was all we needed!

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:36:00 +0000

Here in Atlanta it feels like we've had about two weeks straight of rain. Last Saturday a neighbors' tree fell on our house. Perhaps you can see the remnants of our deck poking up from the rubble. There was a picnic table on it that was smashed to pieces. Luckily the tree was rotten so the damage to our roof was minimal. A crack is showing on my ceiling and it began to leak yesterday. I have a feeling the whole inside of our roof is now soaked. The tree is still there because it can't be removed in the rain....today looks like it might be our first dry one in some time. Jeez this is one of those times when I'm glad I rent.

Winter 2008-2009

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:11:00 +0000

In recent years I've become an avid snowboarder. Living in Atlanta you are lucky if you see snow once a year though last year would be the exception. I've been averaging two trips a season.....saving up my PTO and thinking about it all year. Early December in Colorado will be my first trip of the season and as it draws closer my interest in what kind of snow I'll have is increasing. Last winter's record snowfall was awesome and I would love to see more of the same. This has got me looking into weather predictions for 2008-2009. The Farmer's Almanac recently released it's forecast and are predicting it will be colder and above average snowfall on the east coast while the Rocky's and Great Plains see slightly warmer temperatures with still plenty of snow. Our National Weather Service is forecasting below median precipitation overall and above average temperatures for the western half of the country. Both of these seem to be about the same and point toward a season minus the record snow of the last one. *sniff*

No matter, I mean how much faith can we put in these predictions anyway. The Almanac's come from one guy, Caleb Weatherbee who uses a secret formula and makes them almost two years in advance. Predictions from the National Weather Service are influenced by historical data which any trader will tell you is no guarantee of future performance. So basically I've learned that your average weather prediction past a week or so is pretty unreliable. I think I'll just stick to my wishes and finger-crossing......

IIS Redirect to HTTPS

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:38:00 +0000

I secured a site for my employer recently and ran into an issue. By requiring an SSL connection users were forced to enter https at the beginning of the website address. Those that did not were greeted with an error telling them to add https in order to reach the page. I had done this before with a little ASP and a custom error message but, after migrating the web server to a new machine was unable to get my original configuration to work.

Run a search on this and you will find 10 million ways to accomplish the redirect. I was unable to get most of them to work. I didn't realize that the easiest way is to perform the redirect completely with IIS config.

I simply set the site in question to require an SSL connection but, change the TCP port to one that is unused. Next create a new page (for the redirect) and configure it to use port 80. Once done, enter the page properties and set the content to come from "A redirection to a URL" and enter https://yourpageaddress.com. Restart IIS and you should be good to go. I spent way too much time on this when it was really something simple. Thanks to James Kovacs Weblog for the best article on the subject I've found.

Animal House

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:45:00 +0000

You need to check out soon to be HipHop's newest stars Animal House! These are some talented friends of mine from the deep South (Valdosta). Regional flavor with a twist...described as "southern hood-rock". None of that usual junk (ya know like tracks about a T-shirt or some club dance)....actual lyrics. Click HERE for artist info, download songs or see upcoming show dates. The track Sleepwalkin is my fav!

Check HERE for a video of a recent show Animal House did with ICP & Bizarre.

Gots To Get Yoself an SPF

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:36:00 +0000

Admins know the battle against unsolicited mail is hard-fought and never ending! Spammers always seem to be a step ahead, changing their methods as soon as a solution is found. Lately, the company I work for has been receiving a lot of emails supposedly from itself. These messages are definitely spam, usually containing some crap about Viagra but, bypassing our filter. After researching a bit I found the solution in SPF.

Publishing an SPF record allows you to specify which machines can send mail from a given domain. Lets say example1.com is sending a message and example2.com is receiving it. When example2.com gets the message it checks example1.com's SPF record to see if the server's IP is listed as OK to send. If that is the case, the message gets a PASS and is delivered. When a message originates from an IP that is not listed it gets a FAIL and can be rejected or sent through additional filters.

Creating an SPF record for yourself should be relatively easy but, does depend on your network setup and how many mail servers are present. If you don't have control over your DNS you may have to ask your ISP to make this change for you. I manage a small, single domain network with one mail server so my record was pretty simple.

"v=spf1 mx -all"
This simple record says that the mx servers for my domain can send mail. All messages that can't pass this check receive a -FAIL and are rejected.

Be careful, the syntax of the various mechanisms is very important. Simply putting a ~ instead of - in front of the "all" resulted in our server accepting messages that had failed the check.

Creating an SPF record is an important step in the battle against spoofed mail. There are some great resources on the Web that can walk you through creating an SPF record even generate it for you. Check out the Sender Policy Framework site for information, and an easy-to-use wizard. Several ways to test records exist though I found the one located here simplest to use.

Best damn trip in a while!

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 03:32:00 +0000

I've just returned from a hell of a trip to Colorado! Myself and seven other guys met up in Denver and drove to Breckenridge where we stayed with our friend Teo. We were lucky enough to catch a good bit of snow on the way in. Props to Drock and Rob for getting us there safely. We were on the mountains pretty much the rest of the week. As my first time snowboarding, I took a lot of falls the first day.....shit the whole time. So tiring too, i mean picking yourself up all the time wears you out. We lost one to pneumonia, sorry John there is always next year. Things progressed though and by the end of the trip I was really feeling it. Actually the whole damn group was doing blues by the last day!

Returning home I was a bit bruised but, all about some snowboarding. I can't wait to go again...long time till winter. Though I saw that its snowing again in Breckenridge, *sigh* Teo please hit a couple hills for those of us that can't be with you. I have fond memories of the vaporizer and lucious green, snow hotties, and the nightly jacuzzi that allowed us to get up every day. How we rented a pimp house in Gunnison while we rode Crested Butte and having the first proper steak I've eaten in some time. Thanks to the whole group for making it fun, Teo for everything, missing it already. There are way too many pictures to throw in this post so click here to see some more.

Spammy Spam Spam

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 05:21:00 +0000

Last year the company Exchange server I manage almost crashed because spammers got a hold of it (BZ you should feel me here). Not just relaying spam but, a simultaneous DoS attack flooding the server with NDR messages. Yeah I had to call in the big boys on that one (Microsoft). Anyway, the point is, after I stopped all relays (except me), cleaned up the messages, changed a password and finally got off all the blacklists I was pretty peeved. It didn't help that in the following days coworkers began to complain of increased spam in their inboxes! We run GFI MailEssentials which normally performs pretty well but, now it wasn't catching them.

Turns out the Bayesian filtering system that is it's highlight was my downfall here. By default outgoing messages are added to the legitimate database. This is because under normal conditions all of these messages would be sent by you. In this case, however, spammers sent thousands of messages which were added to the legitimate database seriously lessening it's ability to to detect actual spam. Another side effect was that the whitelist, which also auto adds the address of outgoing mail, had about 65,000 bogus entries.

Well I got it all cleaned up and it runs better than ever now but, I'm still a little paranoid. The whole experience got me really focused on security. Since then I've made a lot of improvements at work and I've been spending a good bit of time places like PhishTank trying to find a way to get one back at em. So much time I managed to make the top 10 list last month. I've got a page where I plan to put samples from work that range from "damn near perfect" to "why did they bother". It's interesting, at least I think so........

Sharefile got dat fire

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 08:53:00 +0000

Last week I signed my company up for a Sharefile account, Enterprise plan and let me tell you it's awesome!

Why? Well a little background first.......the company I work for receives a large amount of sensitive material daily, mainly medical records. Up until now this has usually been via email which causes all sorts of problems. Firstly, email is not encrypted so any accidental recipient or interceptor of the message would have full access to the files. The second issue is size limits; medical records, often 100 pages or more, have to be sent in 5-6 messages just to be received. Third and what I found to be my greatest issue, the storage problem! Files arrive via email and end up being forwarded around the office in addition to saved on a fileserver. We would easily end up with 4-5 copies of the same file. These files pile up in an Inbox, one dept and this is no lie, was 11GB! Anybody backing up mailbox folders on Exchange knows just how painful that process can be. (Yes I know about the new Veritas but we can't swing for it just yet). All that plus the dailys add up to hella space!

Sharefile addressed all three of these issues for me. Files are first uploaded to a Sharefile server then we receive notification that a file is available including a link, its that simple. You can send files in the very same manner as well as request files complete with a link to an upload site. One of the more advanced features is the ability to add clients with unique logins and assign them rights to individual file folders. This way clients logging in can only see and do what you want them to. All of this is encrypted and the admin functions allow you to set up users, assign quotas, check usage, etc. As for storage, it's their server so we can download a copy straight to our file server and all that goes to the inbox is the notification.

There are a bunch of similar products out there and I've tried a good number of them. We actually used Sendthisfile....still kinda do, easy to use and economical. In the end though, it couldn't meet our needs. Pipeline eXchange is a very high quality product , however, geared more towards larger companies. The pricing is a little out of our reach and the bandwidth allotment was weak. Enterprise plans start with 1GB and each additional costing around 20 dollars. It kinda hurt because we liked it so much but, when I saw Sharefile I was hooked.

We have used it for a weak now and it is great. Today an employee that happened to be in New York needed some software and wanted it overnighted to him. That means burning a copy, and paying a shipping cost over a hundred dollars. So Mike, the other IT guy at my company, zips the setup files and key and uploads it to the Sharefile server, takes about 15mins and then maybe 10mins to download it in New York and walla. You know 25min for a 300MB file sent securely ain't bad at all.

Lets get things rolling

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:55:00 +0000

I've been redesigning the blog lately and I have every intention of making regular posts again. This blog and my website have been sitting idle too long. Time to knock the dust off em!

Brief rest

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 16:32:00 +0000

I just got back from a short trip to the family place in St. Augustine. To be honest I wasn't in the mood to go but, Meghann insisted on it. The drive down was long...its about 5-6 hours from ATL plus the extra hour it took to get out of town on a friday night! One of my brothers was there at the time too with several of his friends. I was a little stressed out about this because we were really hoping to have the place to ourselves.

Picture from the balconey.

My fears were unfounded though as everything seemed to work out. By leaving friday night we were able to make use of the whole next day and my brother and his friends were fun to be around. I was even happier that they were there when a water hose burst in the condo above us and sent water pouring into our place! Its no fun returning home to water coming in every vent, light fixture, and seam in the ceiling. All the extra peeps came in handy while trying to stem the flow of water into the condo. We managed to get the place cleaned up and were able to prevent damage to any electronic equipment and furniture. Christ, I hate to think what we would have lost if we hadn't been down for the weekend!

A couple photos of Old Town that I took from the Castillo De San Marcos.

Something I always enjoy about St. Agustine is the restaurants! They must have one for every variety and country and nearly all of them are good. If you are ever in the area, check out Saltwater Cowboys and Matanzas Innlet. Those are my favs but, there are plenty more.

Time to go home....

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 16:41:00 +0000

Well it's the end of another disappointing World Cup for the USA. Somehow still we can't seem to put the ball in the back of the net. This seems to be the team's biggest problem and has been for some time. The match vs Ghana and the previous one against Italy were both rife with controversial officiating. Why is it impossible to get a consistent ref? Now I understand why FIFA asked the refs to be tough but, they are not supposed to decide the outcome of the matches. This World Cup has been a perfect example of this with cocky refs trying to make a name for themselves and ruining the matches. It didn't help that the US drew easily the toughest group in the Cup.
Hopefully, the USA can dump the coach and start rebuilding a winning team free from the emphasis on young players. We need experienced international players......not mostly MLS players that don't play top flight teams nor play on regulation fields!

BODIES

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Sun, 07 May 2006 11:12:00 +0000

I went to BODIES The Exhibition last night at the Atlanta Civic Center. I have to say that I found it pretty fascinating. The amount of time and attention to detail that must have gone into sculpting these bodies. There are real corpses in the everyday poses of life......Pretty interesting. For the squeamish, the exhibit is not too much of a problem due to the rubberised polymer they used that gives the bodies a plasticy, playdough sort of look. You might find the eyes a little freaky though. My favorite part of the exhibition was the Circulatory System. The designers injected the blood stream with another polymer and then used a chemical to dissolve away the rest of the body. This results in some extremely colorful displays of the body's blood vessels. Near this section was a display of the entire the nervous system....AMAZING! Other things of note were the various tumors and diseases on display. I have to say the lung cancer made me feel a little bad about myself. Of course my girlfriend made sure to point it out, as I knew she would. Besides that I found it very enjoyable. If you are interested in the human body I highly recommend this exhibit.

Been gone for some time

noreply@blogger.com (Astral) — Mon, 01 May 2006 14:29:00 +0000

I haven't been active with blogger for a good bit. I've been missing it and been meaning to get back around to it for a while. I'm no longer living in the Azelea City so I figured time to start a new one for my present ATL location. Hopefully, my friends will post here too so everyone can see what we are up to.