reesesWeb

Popi (the new kitten) has driven Peko and Pixel into hiding. Two five-year-old cats, both very intelligent, cowed by a three-month-old mite. Admittedly, neither of our older cats has seen many people or cats in the past half-decade, but sheesh. Peko just hissed and growled at her, and she looked back at him with an "aren't you cute!" look, then resumed her grooming. Peko didn't know what he was supposed to do after the yowling, so he didn't do anything. I'm kind of ashamed of my boy. ;>

I wrote a colormap generator this morning to generate optimally-separated color lists based on a user-entered number of items. I might slap a servlet interface on it and put it online, but it's one of those things that's so trivially easy that it seems not worth it. It's kind of like all of those pathetic twenty-line Perl scripts on freshmeat. Anyway, if you want to recreate it, just remember soh-cah-toa. Oh, and the Java Math.cos() call takes its argument in radians. Oops!

I am so ready for Halloween.

Yes, we brought home a new baby bengal kitten. As you can plainly see, she doesn't really like the eyeballs we fed her for dinner.

Beware! Taunting fearsome bengal babies will result in photographer mauling.

Friday, October 26, 2001 8:46:25 PM Unrecognized access from 62.178.18.60:4573 to TCP port 27374

Saturday, October 27, 2001 4:40:38 AM Unrecognized access from 64.242.74.15:3710 to TCP port 27374

Saturday, October 27, 2001 4:40:38 AM Unrecognized access from 64.242.74.15:3711 to TCP port 12345

Saturday, October 27, 2001 4:40:38 AM Unrecognized access from 64.242.74.15:3712 to TCP port 139

Oops. Couldn't get back in?

I got 0wned!

I had been fairly vigilant about keeping this machine up to date with Redhat patches, but I had left one important hole open. D'oh! What's amusing is that it was a hole in the attack detection mechanism that provided root access to my box.

I had been infected for quite a while. The skript-kiddie was very inexperienced in covering his tracks, and within about thirty seconds of my initial suspicions, I had verified that I had been rooted, and five minutes later, where he had come from. After I'm done cleaning things up and securing them, I'll go after his upstream, but it was probably also a hacked machine.

I love referrer logs. Most of them are pretty boring. Friends, blogger, whatever. The ones that are hilarious are the search engine referrer entries, though. Take some recent examples:

http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=hawkins+tinasky&hc=0&hs=0

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tinasky+wanda+hawkins

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=wanda+tinasky+hawkins

http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=thomas+hawkins+tinasky&hc=0&hs=0

http://www.google.com/search?q=tom+hawkins+tinasky

What's so funny about these is that they're all from the same person. It's not enough that they tried changing the search by just re-arranging the words or going to yahoo instead of directly to google. It's that they kept clicking on the same link. The especially funny part of this is that this page will end up in google, so the next time they try it, I'll be peeking at them again.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22retarded+superman

I actually have "retarded superman", so how the person got here isn't a mystery. What baffles me, though, is what the heck were they actually looking for?

http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=scary+halloween+pics&b=121&hc=0&hs\=0

Hope mom found something good for the kids.

http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=%22basic+accounting+concept%22&hc=&hs=0

Huh???

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Pumpkin+carving+experiment%22&\btnG=Google+Search

Another of the "exactly what were you looking for?" variety.

http://www.google.com/search?q=goth+pumpkin+carving&hl=en&start=10&sa=\N

http://www.google.com/search?q=new%2Bjersey%2Btemplate%2Bbmp%2Bformat&\hl=en&start=10&sa=N

No comment. Just weird.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Poetry+about+the+idiom+Hit+the+books&hl\=en

I hope this person found what they needed to avoid having to do their homework.

Are you sure this is just a coincidence?

Damn, woke up tonight with my first asthma attack in years. Kat said I was making choking sounds in my sleep, and then I woke up with the,"Holy God, I'm on my way!" feeling. It may be sleep apnea, but I've had asthma since I was a pup, and I imagine it was just a flare up since I've not been doing much aerobic conditioning. Kat was great, though. "Did you open any suspicious mail lately? Maybe you're going to die. You should go into the emergency room tonight so you don't worry." Umm, baby, I wasn't worrying, until you piped up!

Datadocktor'n - din hj�lp bland ettor o nollor

My head hurts.

Nat was such a crackhead. ;>

Whee, added another plugin. I can't believe some people actually prefer Java gui work.

I was called back into the office this afternoon, to watch and take notes on how one of our IT guys does part of his job. This is pretty foul, basically walking in and saying,"Hi, you're not going to be here, so tell us how you do what you do." I'm starting to get an especially bad feeling that the claims of executive "up-front"edness are false.

Oh well. C'est la vie. I knew this would be happening, I guess. It's just that this place looks like one of those sad department or drug stores in small towns. No shoppers, one clerk up front, and a bunch of dusty, lonely merchandise, like horrible toys that no kid would ever want to play with. I'm the blue-skinned original Star Trek series action figure that no one remembers from the show, and the guy across the hall is a box of ColorForms.

Wow. We laid off three people today. I'm not really happy with how it was done. The CEO/COO/President/Whatever did it directly, and some of the managers didn't have any idea what was going on when people below them were laid off. Bad form.

I'm working from home today. I went in around 7am, and it was completely deserted. I waited until 8am, when half the office should have been in, and nothing -- it was like a ghost town. So, I rode my bike home before traffic got foul. Another day working in my undies.

Hmm...need to find a hosting provider if Kat and I move. I don't know if I want a "full control of the box-inna-rack" type setup, or just a virtual host with jsp/xslt support. I'll have to ask the guys what they use.

So, Kat won. We're driving into the hinterlands of Eastern Washington to look at Bengal kittens this coming weekend. It's actually only about an hour from my parents, so I want to call them and try to get them to meet us for lunch.

Anyway, it's only with extreme reluctance that I agreed to another cat. Kat used the emotional bullying tactic that I hate so much, but how do you reason with someone who cries and accuses you of controlling her when you disagree? Do we not have two other cats because of this?

I had a phone screen yesterday afternoon that went pretty well. The guy had a mild australian accent, and when he asked about my favorite patterns, I thought he said 'patents', and much hilarity ensued.

I got good sleep last night, though. I slept from around 10:30 until 4:30 this morning. I'll probably want my nap around 11am, but I'm cool with that.

I whipped this up last night to open dictionary.com on whatever is selected in IE. I've been Mr. Automation lately.

I know you'll find Home Improvement For Missile Bases as useful as I did.

First day back to work since last Monday. It was really nice having a week off. It's amazing how much lower my basal stress level has been. I should take more vacations that are at least a week long. It took about three days to unwind, and then the rest was cake. I have been a little stir crazy, but just enough to do some personal projects.

Somehow, Kat has gone from wanting one more cat, to wanting two. That makes four cats total. She started emailing random apartment managers who are listed on one of the big corp apartment sites (homestore, homesite, something like that), asking if they considered applicants with three or four spayed and neutered cats. She only emailed places that were "pet friendly", and so far, the one guy who responded just said,"No."

And he was in Berkeley!

This is pretty cool. I have the Audrey now controlling the Win2k box. I don't listen to many MP3s, simply because the audio quality is so dreadful, but this and a USB-connected external DAC might be good. Now I need to find a good USB DAC. I just want to ask for Yew-Ess-Bee-Dack in a store.

Who says children are exposed to more inappropriate stuff than they were forty years ago?

http://www.backwash.com is pretty amusing. The site itself isn't, but it's a mine for hilarious links. http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/avenue/rdd18/playground/ is funny stuff.

Hrnk. First log entry in quite a while. I just went over some old posts from late last year, and apparently, I had a great deal of vitriol for someone at work. I have _no_ idea who that was, though. I'm going to have to go to work on Monday, look at my old mail archive, and see who was interacting most with me.

Kat has been on about another cat again. I've told her that three cats crosses the line from "normal" into "weird, smelly, cat people," but it doesn't seem to help. I'm anxious about the amount of work we're going to have to do if we end up moving to Manhattan or DC. It's not going to be as easy as it is here on the west coast. She threw a raging fit, though, and I'll probably give in. I can't get the ring back at this point, anyway. ;>