Blair's Blog

Best wishes to you all as we begin the new year. We are all back to our regular routines as of yesterday – at school or work or around the house. We had a great holiday with lots of full days of activity and visiting. We celebrated my brother-in-law Barry’s 40th birthday with a big LAN party on the 22nd with a bunch of guys and played some silly racing games on the computers, a little Carcassonne, watched a movie and ate a lot! On the 23rd, we followed up with a family party for Barry with all of the Langendoen side in attendance. We had a day to prepare for Christmas and then had my side of the family over on Christmas Day for turkey dinner.

After Christmas day, there was still lots going on, including taking the family to see a play, having folks over and going out too. New Year’s Eve was over at my folks place for dinner and a night of game playing including favourites like Boggle, Pit and Dutch Blitz. We had a mini LAN party on New Year’s Day and then a couple of down days to relax, just in time for me to catch a cold!

ps. I’ve built a little weather widget over on the sidebar so that those of you who are wondering what the weather is like at our place can wonder no more!

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This is the webmin view of memory and disk allocation for my webserver:

Not too encouraging. Particularly since when I grabbed the image, there really wasn’t that much going on with the webserver. The machine is an old and tired (c. 2000 – who’d have thought that a computer from the dawn of the new millennium would be described this way?) PIII-550 with only 256 MB of memory and a 10 GB hard drive. It used to have an astonishing 384 MB of memory but one stick went bad and caused a host of wonky errors when I tried to rebuild the box with ubuntu. Things were OK (mostly) while the blog was mainly text based, but all of the messing about with extra plugins and the photo galleries is starting to put some strain on things. Most of the memory use is the mysql database, so things don’t get much better than what the image above shows, only worse. Last night I tried to upload and open a 4.3MB zip file and ran out of free memory. Not too good.

So now I need to think about how to retire this box and get something with a little more oomph. The first thing that comes to mind is to get a nice shiny new powerful box for Brenda and I; then I can shuffle all the old hardware in the fleet down one notch in the food chain. Sadly that means 4 rebuilds – I’m already tired out, just thinking about it. But wait, in the spirit of never raining without pouring, my Dad called earlier this evening and his computer is kind of dead … 5 rebuilds.

I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend…

ps. 27 December 2007 – On the weekend of 15/16 Dec, I upgraded to a AMD 1700 with 512 MB of RAM and an 80 GB drive. This is the new webmin view of things:

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Well, instead of working on figuring out the vexing problem of how to get a photo gallery attached to this blog, I’ve been fighting malware on my main computer. Brenda was doing research on how various schools approach the issue of background checks for volunteers and, while on the website of one of the two big school boards in Calgary, managed to get a virus. It was one of those unpleasant ransom-ware style “virus scanner” deals, the virus pops up a WinXP style system tray alert box that warns of nasty viruses detected on the computer. Well, Duh!

The hook is that the malware tries to get you to buy a “full featured” version of some product (in this case, something called AntiVirGear) to remove the infection. Of course, if you’re dull enough to fall for it, the likelihood of being rewarded with a clean machine is pretty low. Anyway, it was a bear to get rid of: Norton, Adaware, Spybot and TrendMicro Housecall all were unsuccessful – although each one did find and remove some parts of the infestation. The last remnants of the virus relied on a randomly named and timestamped dll file in the system32 directory which had to be discovered and deleted by hand. Eventually I did clean it all up, but it took about 8 hours of effort.

I still think that I may rebuild things from scratch, just to be sure.

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I quite enjoy the fine autumn days on the prairies; clear skies, mild temperatures and the endless vista of farmer’s fields. Today was one of those days – really, it was too nice to be stuck in the office. Once the workday shackles were loosened I headed home on my motorbike, the long way home. I headed north out of Calgary and then east to Delacour and past Keoma and north to Irricana. Then I turned around and went south to the Trans-Canada and then home. It was just over 100 km and almost certainly the best commute in recent memory!

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