Blogs

Due to the unique way my brain works and the size of my CD collection, whenever I hear a song by one artist that I know I have different versions of, I have to queue up all the other versions and get the whole shootin' match.

This morning, I heard versions of Wild One (Real Wild Child) from Jerry Lee Lewis, then Iggy Pop, Lou Reed (different song but I still had to) and Brian Setzer. Now I'm on Honey Don't, first by Carl Perkins, now (Memphis band we met at Sun Studios) The Gunslingers, and next Wanda Jackson.

Videos!

Jerry Lee:

Iggy:

Lou Reed:

Brian Setzer:

Honey Don't

Carl Perkins (But actually, Ringo!):

Gunslingers:

REDEX - But, I strongly suggest you take a trip into historical times and listen to this track on Myspace. This was a super fun bonus of having gone to Memphis, was grabbing this guy's CD at the end of the Sun Studio tour, they were good.

Wanda Jackson:

csFlickr 10 years ago ago by xrayspx.

Last of the big V8 Interceptors. I had to grab a new Pro before they decided only to sell those insane coffee magnets with no internal drive bays. Last one lasted 7 good years, here's to another computer in 2020.

I'm no longer forwarding cookie thieves to Natalie's site. I had been fussing around trying to make IPTables block all the botnet machines, and when that didn't work, I was just using deny rules in Apache, which sucked, because my include file of blocked hosts was 100,000 or so. That's in addition to the default "Block all of China, India, Eastern Europe" rules I apply. It also sucked because I'm still serving pages and so there were tons of ESTABLISHED, FIN_WAIT1/2, etc. connections, most of which were holding open Apache processes, which was crushing my machine.

The reason IPTables wasn't working turned out to be because of the VPS solution used by 1and1. There is a hard limit of 400 rules on the host, and I can't work around that, so I can't use IPTables with huge blacklists, at least, not that I've figured out.

What I'm doing now though is to use the LimitExcept directive to only allow GET requests in the virtual host which does the rewrites for nataliecurtiss.com. So now those fuckers are all just getting 403's or, in some cases, 500's (don't know why that is).

So yeah that was fun. A case has been opened with SquareSpace, since this attack traffic was all really directed at them. And the only logical thing I can think of is that the attackers are trying to guess session cookies of site admins who aren't explicitly logged out of their site admin tools. This would let the attackers exploit any XSS inherent in code generated by SquareSpace, or use the targeted site to infect more end user machines for this botnet.

Still, it's an awful lot of trouble to go to just to get your hands on Natalie's what, 12 legitimate users per month?

Now I just have a zillion connections in TIME_WAIT, but at least my site seems quick, all my services seem to be working at full speed ahead, and I'm going to stop thinking about this shit for a while. I'm not going to bother figuring out why I can't set tcp_tw_reuse to clean up all those TIME_WAITs.

Update:
The 500's are because I didn't set an auth-type for the user to be able to POST. Well, fuck 'em, they get 500's, since I never want anyone to ever do anything but GET, everything else can DIAF.

If I'm glad for one thing that Facebook has given me, it's that it has shown me which people who count me as their friend are consistently racist, homophobic and sexist.

Thanks Facebook!

I am in the market for a new computer. Apple has left me seriously disappointed with the new Mac Pro, what with its inability to hold many 3.5" SATA drives, and has driven me to the iMac after all this time. Internal storage and the fact that the iMacs of the time (2006) sucked was the main driver for me getting the Pro I have now in the first place. However, time marches on, I have a 32-bit EFI and can't upgrade past Lion, and the install is getting kind of crufty, and so I end up having to bounce the machine every so often, which sucks.

So the new Pro is out, might as well go with a maxed out iMac. I had two questions:

I asked a friend about the CPU thing. His response was "HP will sell you a way better machine for half the price anyway". Was that what I asked? Do I give a fuck what HP sells? Have I not already proven this to be false when I bought this Pro in the first place?

If I roll up in a BMW 535i, is your first reaction going to be "You could have bought a v6 Nissan Altima for half the price and only lost 30hp". No.

I have very specific needs, which Apple meets much better than Microsoft + HP (or whoever), my reasons are not "Because it looks cool" or "Because I am a hipster".

My reasons are:

• I am not an Apple fanboy. I am a Unix fanboy
• Use Cygwin, it's just as good
• No fuck YOU, I don't like rewriting every goddamn little bash script every time I deploy to a different platform, the differences in output between GNU and BSD toolchains are annoying enough, I don't want to deal with MS tools on top of that.
• Don't like Windows? Use Linux!
• If Linux was a serious option, I wouldn't be ditching a perfectly good 4 core 2.66Ghz machine with 16 GB of memory just to get an iMac. Photoshop does not run on Linux. Illustrator does not run on Linux. I run many things on Linux, my wife's primary home machine is not going to be one of them.

• Well dual boot Linux with Windows!!!
• Explain that to my wife, and explain to her how her workflow must change because we're using Windows now because we're cheap.
• Why should I reboot my machine, ever?
• What if I want to quickly get a unix environment outside my work environment for testing, should I remote reboot into Linux? Manually change boot menu options before rebooting? Sounds like a waste of time.
• But GAMES!
• But I don't care about games. Anything I want to play I can either play on my HTPC or in a Windows VM on the Mac.

...And on, and on and on I could go.