Performance Zen

Author: spierzchala

  • RIP: Shelby Foote

    Shelby FooteShelby Foote, the the primary narrator of Ken Burns’ Civil War mini-series, died Monday night at age 88. [here]
    His voice was like butter melting in a hot frying pan. I loved listening to him speak. I will miss him.
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  • ZoneAlarm Borked…Again!

    I hate running Windows.

    I hate that the firewall app that I have run for years has suddenly decided to go and melt down into a giant puddle of goo, taking the CPU with it.

    About two weeks ago, ZoneLabs released a broken update for their ZoneAlarm product.

    Whoops! I did it again!

    Yesterday, my Dell laptop slowed to a crawl, and began acting erratically. I thought it was me, and tried to re-boot. The re-boot hung, and I had to pull the battery out to go to shut down. Re-boot, and poof, it happens again.

    Oh well, too hot to work anyway. Go to bed.

    Get into the office this morning and the same thing begins to happen. Task Manager shows me that vsmon.exe is sucking 90%+ of my CPU. What the hell?

    Turns out that this is the Vector Service that ZoneAlarm uses. Ahhh, corrupted ZoneAlarm. Uninstall, re-install, and poof! It happens again.

    So I am sitting here, feeling VERY exposed right now. I am not enabling the Microsoft firewall, because it doesn’t play nice with IPSec apps, like my VPN app.
    ZoneAlarm was rock solid. What happened?

    And would anyone like to donate an iBook or Powerbook to your dear author?

  • LACNIC Connectivity Borked — My Damn Fault

    Apparently, in my infinite wisdom, I threw up the following iptables rule:

    /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s 200.128.0.0/9 -j DROP

    Guess what? This is the exact range that the LACNIC servers are hosted in! No wonder no LACNIC data had been coming into the GrabIP database lately!
    This has been fixed.

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  • Mukhtar Mai / Mukhtarana Bibi Gets Appeal

    Mukhtar Mai/Mukktaran Bibi (I have seen both names in print, not sure which one she uses), is going to have her appeal against the acquittal of the men who gang-raped her heard by Pakistan’s Supreme Court. [here]
    Her courage serves as a model for common decency trying to fight back against “cultural” norms.

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  • MIT Blogger Study

    Take the MIT Weblog Survey

  • Connectivity changes coming up shortly.

    After 4.5 years of customer loyalty, I have decided that I have had enough of Comcast’s outrageous prices. I will be switching to Verizon DSL as soon as the install kit arrives.
    Due to the way that my DNS is managed, you may encounter issues connecting to the server during the couple of days that it takes for the DNS to migrate and propagate.
    Comcast has lost another customer. Does that surprise anyone?

  • Psst! Dick! … BOO! Ooops…

    Dick Cheney’s heart bothering him again. [here]
    Aawwww, poor baby!
    RESIGN! RESIGN! RESIGN!

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  • You expect blogging today?

    Look, it’s supposed to be 95F with a nearly matching humidity. In an old house with no air conditioning, you are unlikely to see me near the laptop between now and 9PM tonight.
    For all of you folks at Gnomedex…PPPPPHHHHHHTTTTTT!
    Back to your regularly scheduled disdain and employment dis-satisfaction.

  • Giving up logging my blog traffic

    I should explain that. I am no longer inserting the blog traffic into my Web server log database. The amount of crap was getting ridiculous, and taking up too much space.
    By doing this, I reduced about 50 days of logs from 450,000 rows to 81,000 rows, a better representation of the traffic that my other domains get.
    I am continuing to monitor and capture traffic using a combination of AdSense counters, the built-in logging capabilities of b2evolution, and StatCounter. These sources will show the traffic that I am interested in, and not lose the true visitors in with the idiots.

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  • It’s the suede denim secret police…

    Followed a link trail to this post. Read the whole article here.
    Ok folks. Your time has come. You may be incarcerated without your consent in the future by your government (not my government, your government) because they “suspect” you are mentally ill.
    So, what are you going to do about it?

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