A work related email I received the other day:

thank you Corey you are the best

That smiley is courtesy of the HotBar. Our network at work is ripe with these other spyware apps that our users willfully install. The latest trend in spyware is to create something that people could plausible want, make it literally viral (clicking on the image in an email will either install automatically or prompt to install depending on security settings), and track and spy and muck up the workstation and profit.

While it is not normally part of my job to work on desktop stuff, I did make some time to clean up a few PCs the other day and I heard that user was upset that I removed the Hotbar and they put it right back again!

My niece had a very similar spyware program installed and I convinced her to try use spyware free, paid-for product called Emoticons Mail from MaxPlugs, that I paid $22 for. I don’t think I could make the case that we should spend money on a program to generate smiley faces at work, but assuming threatening and training don’t work the only choice will be to move everyone to a least privilege  model and take away the rights to install anything at all.

Google has brought the interactive mapping goodness of Google Maps to your mobile phone.

Google Maps Mobile is a free download with a look and feel just like that of the Google Maps you’ve come to know and love, offering directions, local search, movable maps, and satellite imagery of your location (I’ve been using it for ten minutes and I’m already hooked).

If you’re curious to see if your phone will work with Google Maps Mobile, check out the list of supported devices.

Just a couple of points to recap my friend Jared’s bachelor party weekend.

• You can demo/rent golf clubs from New York Golf Center on 35th between Broadway and 7th Ave, they gave me a really nice set of Ping G5s, $50 for three days. I’m in the market for clubs and I’m going straight for a good set, no starter business for me. My American Express points are worth either a set of irons or a set of woods, but not both. The first set of clubs I played with were my grandfather’s Pings and that combined with good marketing mean that I’m not going to buy any other brand of iron, but they offer a number of different lines that I still need to choose from.
• Limo rides over twenty minutes in length are a mistake if you suffer from car sickness. The privacy screen goes up, you can’t see the road and worse you could be sitting sideways or backwards. Our three and a half hour trip to the Connecticut woods from the city was pretty much a constant struggle to avoid vomiting.
• At the Mohegan Sun casino
  Jared: See <name withheld>? That’s a $500 chip he’s got; he’s gonna lose that.
  Corey: Oh yeah, on what game, blackjack, craps?
  Jared: No, no. I mean he’s just going to lose it.

I had started growing my beard back in February in preparation for this event, but I never achieved the competition level growth I needed to get up on stage.

It looks like they are selling out this event and ticket’s aren’t going to available at the door. Also, there’s this from the latest email announcement:

 if you know anyone who is interested in competing, or want to compete yourself (there are categories for “artificial” and “patchy”), then go here and sign up: http://nycbeard.com. we’re almost out of spaces, and we’d like to have as many friends as possible on stage.

Speaking of spam, I just checked the blog database to see how my blog spam filter has been working.

11,664 blog spam messages blocked. Holy smokes, that is way more than I thought it would be.

I use a SQL trigger method, which I documented once before on this blog: http://www.coreyh.com/blog/archive/2005/01/25/1349.aspx

I still get maybe one message per week that makes it through the list, and I always find at least one word or url part to add to the “BannedWords” table, just to be sure I never have to delete the same message type twice.

On my way home last night, around 11pm, I was riding the 2/3 train as usual. I strive for consistency in my commute so I always stand in the same spot on the same car in middle of the train (smoothest ride), even in there are seats available I stand, listen to the ipod with Etymotic ear-phones and read Time magazine.

The trip is express, and takes about nine minutes. I looked up as the train approached my destination and realized that a man, black, 40’s, suit, had been sketching me the entire time.

I really wanted to get a closer look and ideally take a camera phone pic, but the guy was grinning ear to ear when he noticed that I noticed the sketch and figured I didn’t really want to engage in a whole lot more discussion about it, so I pretended like nothing happened and moved on.

If you sent me an email anytime between Saturday night and Monday afternoon and didn’t get a response, please send it again.

Ack. Running your own mail server is not without its challenges.

Back when I ran Exchange from home, I had created a separate SMTP connector to send mail to certain domains via my ISPs SMTP servers instead of sending direct because some bigger servers (AOL, etc) had blacklisted all mail coming from my IP range. Except I mistakenly left the “allow mail to be routed to these domains” on.

Although this setting had been there for months, it had not yet been “discovered”. Well sometime Saturday, they came with a vengeance. Mail finally stopped completely when the drives filled to capacity. It actually took quite a few hours of working before I figured out what had happened. The SMTP queues were full of hundreds of thousands of messages, mostly to and from German/middle European domains. I started deleting these by hand, but after four hours, I had barely made a dent. Fortunately I found aqadmcli.exe, a command line tool from MS that allowed me to delete the queues en masse. I calculated afterwards that this saved me 40,000 clicks of the mouse. The downside was that I was unable to filter out the good mail from the bad and for the first time in six years of running my own mail I lost messages.

Of course, now I’ve done all the tightening and securing that needed to be done. I’ve even implemented an SMTP tarpit, a feature included in Windows Server 2003 SP1, which will hold onto connections from outside servers attempting to relay mail through me and prevent them from releasing right away, which should slow them down.

If you can read this, that means my server move this weekend was successful.

For the record, what I did was physically move my hosted-at-home VMWare GSX server to the shiny new datacenter in Brooklyn.

<technical section>

The main thing that changed was moving from a Linksys router port forwarding to the VMWare NAT Service. This involved changing the ip addresses for each guest which turned out to be moderately painful when it came to Active Directory and Exchange.

I ended up having to create a whole new virtual NIC for the Exchange server. System Manager would not even come up since it wasn’t connecting to the AD controllers. Let me tell you there’s nothing more frustrating than having a broken server, where the server admin console doesn’t even start.

Things are going ok at the moment, the VMWare NAT service has crashed a few times already which is very not cool, but since there’s a new version of VMWare Server out in beta, I’m confident than an upgrade will probably solve it. Also, while less than ideal, setting Windows to auto-restart the service is working well enough.

</technical section>

Why did I do it?

1. No more worrying about my home internet connection going out on me while I’m out of the house or on vacation.
2. ~100X Faster
3. Frees up home bandwidth for expanded use of FolderShare (more on this later)
4. Less power usage ($!) and noise at home

http://www.lasikathome.com/foureasysteps.htm

This is almost certainly a joke, but still, they did a lot of work building a site for it. I checked the WHOIS information and it goes through a Domains by Proxy Co, which doesn’t tell you much. You can’t actually place an order for this $99 device, but you can buy t-shirts and hats from Cafepress. I wonder if someone came up with the idea as a way to sell shirts and mugs.

[via Cynical-C Blog]