Author: spierzchala

I read my comics this morning, and there was Opus, my finely feathered friend…
…bloging with a Powerbook.
I am green with envy.

As many of my readers know, I have been pining for a Powerbook. However, one if the “fear factors” has been the need to switch to glide pad.

I am a “pencil eraser” pointer man. All of my laptops have had them — even the Dell Inspiron I am using now. But I can see that I am in the minority and that I will have to become a convert.

So, I have disabled the keyboard pointer and switched to the glide pad.
On a secondary note, the “What’s in your bag” meme appears to be catching. So many iPods and Powerbooks…I feel my geek cred slipping way down.

Off to walk the Damnation in the latest 10 inches of snow.

Joi Ito’s Pack
And so many others.
Man…my man purse (2 year-old Targus backpack) is not that geeky…<pout!>

Someone has been abusing the Anonymizer system and hammering my system. Again, IPTABLES is my friend.

/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s 168.143.113.125 -j DROP

This IP Address points to vortex.anonymizer.com.

dig -x 168.143.113.125
; <<>> DiG 9.3.0 <<>> -x 168.143.113.125
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 52723
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;125.113.143.168.in-addr.arpa.  IN      PTR
;; ANSWER SECTION:
125.113.143.168.in-addr.arpa. 10800 IN  PTR     vortex.anonymizer.com.
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
113.143.168.in-addr.arpa. 10800 IN      NS      ns1.infonex.net.
113.143.168.in-addr.arpa. 10800 IN      NS      ns2.infonex.net.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.infonex.net.        172693  IN      A       168.143.113.201
ns2.infonex.net.        172693  IN      A       168.143.113.202

If someone at Anonymizer can bring these requests under control, I will turn the access back on.

The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun To Be With.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,” with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.
Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”
© Douglas Adams (c/o PlanetClaire)

Describes many marketing teams I have worked with.

Seems that some firewalls with Content Filters are brain-dead. I found another firewall that provides the same anti-compression “service” for its customers. [here]
Thanks to Alexy Titov for the link.

Here is a little tidbit that we discovered while trying to debug an issue at work. One of my colleagues found that the Symantec/Norton Personal Firewall/Internet Security mangles the “Accept-Encoding” header sent out by any application — browser, streaming media, etc.
More can be found here.
This is a serious problem, and has a negative effect on Web performance in general, as one of the key methods for improving bandwidth consumption and user performance is Server-Side Compression of as much content as possible.

What the client wants to send:  Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate\r\n
What is sent:                   ---------------: ---- -------\r\n

What is the problem? Is this because Symantec can’t parse compressed content on the fly?