Mailinator spameter

Posted on 2008-07-29 by Jim Vanderveen

I was just checking out [Mailinator][], and I wondered: if I posted a “throw-away” email address here, how fast would the spam start rolling in? Well, there’s only one way to find out!

M8R-3cqng3@mailin8r.com

Once this post has been online for a while, I’ll post the number of spams I’ve received at that address.

For those unfamiliar with Mailinator, it’s a slightly odd email service. There is no registration or password required (or even permitted!), so don’t use this for anything where even a hint of privacy is desired. Most people use this for disposable email addresses, e.g. for sites that require registration. See the [Mailinator FAQ][] for more information.

[Mailinator]: http://www.mailinator.com/
[Mailinator FAQ]: http://www.mailinator.com/faq.jsp

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Caroline arrives next week!

Posted on 2008-07-26 by Jim Vanderveen

[Caroline][]’s flight is scheduled to arrive next Friday evening at 19:53, and we’re all pretty excited. It’s almost like Christmas, except it’ll last three weeks!

Several people have been asking us about hosting, how we found out about this, etc. Our daughters took/are taking French at [Rio Americano][Rio]. Their teachers, [M.][] Hodgins and [Mme.][] Murray, are both involved with the [VIE][] exchange program. M. Hodgins organizes the biannual trip to France, while Mme. Murray organizes hosting for French students every year. If any Sacramento-area residents are interested in hosting a French student during the summer (usually 3 weeks in August), contact Mme. Murray–she was only barely able to place all the students this summer, due to a shortage of host families!

[We’ve got some trips planned for Caroline’s visit][plans], although Mme. Murray tells us that some of the most interesting things for the visiting students are (from the host’s perspective) purely mundane: Things like going to the grocery store, making dinner, going to school, etc. (Yes indeed, Caroline gets to spend the final week of her visit going to Rio Americano with Caitlin. We’ll have to come up with some fun things to do in the evening to make up for that!)

If it stays on schedule, Caroline’s flight will arrive in six and a half days. Well… 6 days, 11 hours and 56 minutes, but who’s counting? 😉

[Caroline]: http://carolyn-b.skyrock.com/
[Rio]: http://www.sanjuan.edu/RioAmericano.cfm “Rio Americano High School”
[M.]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsieur “Monsieur”
[Mme.]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame “Madame”
[VIE]: http://www.vistasineducation.com/ “Vistas In Education”
[plans]: http://sonicchicken.net/blog/wordpress/20080429/2008-exchange-student/

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

FreeBSD openssl-stable broken

Posted on 2008-06-04 by Jim Vanderveen

While upgrading some software on one of our [FreeBSD][] servers at work, I ran into the following problem with openssl-stable:

# cd /usr/ports/security/openssl-stable
# make clean
===> Cleaning for openssl-stable-0.9.7m
# make
===> Extracting for openssl-stable-0.9.7m
=> No MD5 checksum recorded for openssl-0.9.7m.tar.gz.
=> No SHA256 checksum recorded for openssl-0.9.7m.tar.gz.
=> No suitable checksum found for openssl-0.9.7m.tar.gz.
*** Error code 1
Stop in /usr/ports/security/openssl-stable.

The problem is caused by a [recent change in openssl][1] which deleted the checksum information for the stable version (0.9.7m) of openssl. The fix is pretty simple: just restore the checksum info for 0.9.7m to /usr/ports/security/openssl/distinfo. I’ve submitted [a PR][2] to the project which contains [a patch file][3] for folks who’d rather use patch(1) than copy-pasting three lines of text. 😉

[FreeBSD]: http://www.freebsd.org/
[1]: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/security/openssl/distinfo.diff?r1=1.44;r2=1.45
[2]: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=124281 “PR for openssl-stable”
[3]: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?prp=124281-1-diff&n=/patch-1.diff “Patch file to restore checksum info for openssl-0.9.7m”

Posted in FreeBSD, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Aerial remodel photo

Posted on 2008-05-17 by Jim Vanderveen

Google Maps managed to snap an image of our house right in the middle of construction. Look closely at the lot in the center of this aerial photo of our house. You can see piles of lumber in our front yard, the redwood insulation (aka mulch) over the existing part of the house, all the tools, construction material, and junk in our (then uncovered) garage, the addition on the south side of the house, Barb’s quilt shop out in the back yard, and even the garden. Pretty cool, I think.

Hat tip to Andy for pointing this out to me. You da man!

I would have included a copy of the image, but Google’s T&C’s forbids it. 🙁

Posted in Our home remodeling project, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 1 Comment

California “hands free” law

Posted on 2008-05-15 by Jim Vanderveen

California passed a “hands free” cellular phone law almost two years ago, but it hasn’t gone into effect yet. That’ll change on July 1, a little less than seven weeks from today. Neither my wife nor I have purchased a hands-free headset yet, but it’s probably about time for me to look into it.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles has a helpful [hands-free FAQ][] on their web site. High points (IMO):

– Minors are prohibited from using *any* device, hands-free or not, while driving. (Neither of my children drive yet, but I’m looking forward to pointing this out to them anyway. Insert evil parental laugh here.)
– The law is equally applicable to out-of-state drivers.
– The fines are pretty minor, and no violation “points” will be added to your driving record for an infraction.

I don’t drive much, but I’ve missed several calls while commuting on my bicycle. A hands-free device would have allowed me to hear my phone ringing over the traffic, probably–Watt Avenue can be *very* noisy! If I’m going to use my phone while riding, I’ll need to find a headset with good noise cancellation to block wind and traffic sounds from the mic.

[hands-free FAQ]: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/cellularphonelaws/index.htm

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Demolition party article in LA Times

Posted on 2008-05-14 by Jim Vanderveen

We were quoted in a [recent article in the Los Angeles Times](http://www.latimes.com/classified/realestate/news/la-re-demoparty11-2008may11,0,2980359.story). The author interviewed me a few months ago, but after the WSJ article I was hesitant to talk to another reporter. However, Michelle did a great job, didn’t misquote me or spin the story.

I don’t know how long the story will be available online, so if anybody is interested–check it out quick!

Posted in Our home remodeling project, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Ejecting stubborn Mac OSX disks

Posted on 2008-05-14 by Jim Vanderveen

I’ve been using a Mac for several years, and I’ve had in intermittent problem: about once or twice a year, a CD-ROM will get “stuck” in the drive. In the past, I’ve only been able to eject the CD by rebooting my Mac. I’m sure a Windoze user would rejoice at only being required to reboot once or twice per year, but I find it annoying. Just a few minutes ago, I popped a recordable CD into my drive and got the following error:

“This disc cannot be used because it is not recognized”

So now I’ve got a blank (useless?) CD in my drive, but there’s no CD icon in Finder to eject, and the eject button on the keyboard isn’t causing the CD to eject either. To the Internet, Batman! A little searching on Google turned up a helpful post: [Use disktool and System Profiler to eject stubborn CDROM discs][1]. The short instructions (excerpted from the article) are:

1. Run the System Profiler (Apple menu -> About This Mac -> More Info).
1. I happen to know that my ComboDrive is an ATA device by Matshita, so I just clicked on the “ATA” section under “Hardware” (left pane of System Profiler), then looked for a Matshita device in the ATA Device Tree (right top pane of System Profiler). Clicking on the Matshita device in the top right pane shows detailed information in the *bottom* right pane: I needed to know the “BSD Name” of the drive. In my case, it’s “disk2”.
1. Open a Terminal window and enter the following command:

disktool -e disk2

Poof! Out comes the CD! That just eliminated about half of my annual reboots on my Mac. 🙂

[1]: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031203232530190

Posted in Mac OS X, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Kyocera EP510DN printer

Posted on 2008-05-13 by Jim Vanderveen

We got a new [Kyocera][] printer at work a few days ago. The model we’re trying out is an “[EP510DN][]”. We had a heck of a time finding information for this printer on the Kyocera web site. In desperation, we called their sales/support people who informed us that a Kyocera “EP*whatever*” is an **E**co**P**ro unit, all of which show up on the [KyoceraEcoPro][] domain. (Personally, seems like having completely different domain names for the same company is a good way to dilute your brand.) As soon as I added “EcoPro” to my Google query, I got meaningful results on the first page.

We are setting this up on a [FreeBSD][] print server. We had DHCP and DNS configured and tested, so we created a [printcap(5)][] entry for the printer, and got… errors (from the /var/log/lpd-errs log file):

> lpd[32955]: /dev/lp: No such file or directory

After much head-banging, I finally figured out the problem–there was some whitespace at the end of one of the lines in the printcap. Doh!

Some other notes and information about this printer:

* Web-based configuration doesn’t support https:// protocol. 🙁
* The configuration username is “admin”. Default password is “”. Get IP configured on the printer, pull up the web interface, and change it–ASAP! (Ideally you would set the password on a private network, *before* putting it on the Internets. Not that it’ll do you much good–see previous note.) I’ve seen a pretty gnarly [security exploit for Kyocera printers](http://evader.wordpress.com/2006/02/16/kyocera-printers/), which seems to bypass what little security *is* available, but I haven’t tested it on our unit yet.
* The printer supports [Bonjour][] protocol, although it doesn’t seem to be a “real” PostScript printer. (My Mac sees it as a “Generic PostScript” device.)
* The [EP510DN PPD file][] is available for *nix operating systems. I’m still looking for a Mac driver for this printer.

I don’t know if we’ll keep this printer or send it back. The print speed is *definitely* nice, and print quality seems alright. I’m a bit disturbed about all the network services that this printer provides, without securing them in any meaningful way. I’ll try out the cracking suggestion above and see if this model is vulnerable.

[Kyocera]: http://global.kyocera.com/
[EP510DN]: http://kyoceraecopro.com/EcoPropub/jsp/Kyocera/productdetails.jsp?pid=100009
[KyoceraEcoPro]: http://kyoceraecopro.com/EcoPropub/jsp/Kyocera/default.jsp
[FreeBSD]: http://www.freebsd.org/
[printcap(5)]: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=printcap&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+7.0-RELEASE&format=html
[Bonjour]: http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/bonjour.html
[EP510DN PPD file]: http://kyoceraecopro.com/EcoPropub/jsp/upload/resource/100258/0/EP510DN%20Linux_en.PPD
“Postscript Printer Description file for Kyocera EP510DN. Right-click and ‘Save Link As…’ to download”

Posted in FreeBSD, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Apple “enchiladas”

Posted on 2008-05-10 by Jim Vanderveen

A few months ago we hosted a family gathering/dinner in our new kitchen. (Yes, a dozen of us spent pretty much the whole evening in or around the kitchen.) We were having El Paso-style enchiladas for dinner, and Barb wanted a dessert (other than flan) that fit the theme. She came up with [apple enchiladas][] which we modified thusly:

* 8 granny smith apples (or any tart apple)
* 1½ c white sugar, divided
* 2 Tbsp flour
* 1 tsp cinnamon
* 6 flour tortillas (~8″ size)
* 3 Tbsp butter
* ½ c water
* ½ c packed brown sugar

1. Set the oven at 350°F.
1. Core and chop the apples, place in a bowl. Add 1 cup of the white sugar, flour, and cinnamon. Mix well.
1. Lay out all the tortillas and divide the fruit filling among them. Roll up the tortillas and place in a baking dish.
1. In a heavy saucepan, melt the butter. Add the water, brown sugar, and the rest of the white sugar. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for a few minutes, stirring constantly. (You’re trying for a slightly runny caramel consistency.)
1. Pour the caramel sauce over the “enchiladas” and bake for 20 minutes.
1. Serve with vanilla ice cream for maximum decadence!

They’re surprisingly filling, so you may want to cut them in half. Enjoy!

[apple enchiladas]: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Apple-Enchilada-Dessert/Detail.aspx

Posted in Recipes, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

We passed!

Posted on 2008-05-07 by Jim Vanderveen

We passed our final inspection on the first try! **WOO HOO!!!**

Unfortunately we’re not yet finished with our remodel/addition. There are still a few items on the [punch list][], but the rest of the work is basically:

* Telephone/network wiring
* Finish the trim work (doors, windows, baseboards, touch-up paint)
* Some extra work in the dining/game room
* A few exterior finishing touches

We can’t put much effort into the house right now because we have to get our [next inspection on the quilt shop](http://sonicchicken.net/blog/wordpress/20080506/final-inspection-today/) by June 18, about 6 weeks from today.

[punch list]: http://sonicchicken.net/blog/wordpress/phase-1a-punch/

Posted in Our home remodeling project, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment