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Tuesday, May 21, 2002
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Eugene McCarthy. "It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember."
5:12:53 PM
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Theodore Roosevelt. "When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not Guilty.'"
5:12:52 PM
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Richard M. Nixon. "Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too."
5:12:51 PM
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Oscar Wilde. "I am not young enough to know everything."
5:12:50 PM
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Richard M. Nixon. "Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too." (Courtesy: Quotes of the Day)
5:12:37 PM
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Over at Jeff Cheney's other blog comes a story that is highly amusing and has me oh so slightly altering Monty Python - "Sit on my fleece, and tell me that you love me..."
5:12:36 PM
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OmniWeb hits 4.1 sneaky peek 86. OmniWeb 4.1sp87 (Updated 5/21/02) - The Omni Group offers an update to OmniWeb 4.1 sneaky peek 87 today, following quickly on the heels of 4.1sp85 which caused problems for longtime users who temporarily lost access to their bookmark files. The update still doesn't squash the table rendering bug that is one of the last hurdles remaining before OmniWeb hits a final 4.1 release...
Update: The Omni Group offered yet another update to OmniWeb late this afternoon. It looks like the push to reach the final release of OmniWeb 4.1 is underway...
5:12:35 PM
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Why I stopped using iPhoto. I made a big move today. After using iPhoto since its unveiling in January, I removed the program from my PowerBook today. Why? Because the combination of my having just 192 megabytes of RAM and a photo library for this year that is 800 shots and growing, combined with iPhoto 1.1.1 was dragging my laptop to its knees anytime I wanted to do anything with my photos.The decision to dump iPhoto was really pretty easy to make. Ever since I started using it, iPhoto has been a serious compromise. It fails to render photos clearly in its slideshow feature - at least on my machine and with the large TIFF images I had stored in the database. It also takes up extraneous hard disk resources with all of the thumbnails and other features built into each day's photo database. In additional to iPhoto 1.1.1 being a 63 megabyte application, the database it created to hold my 800 photos took up another megabyte of space over and above the actual photo data. Yes, I know that storage space is cheap, and I will buy new RAM soon to make this laptop more snappy with OS X in general, but in my use, iPhoto just doesn't offer as many pluses as minuses for this photographer. I will take a look at other photo management options now, including iView MediaPro 1.5 and using my old system working with the excellent GraphicConverter program and its folder browsing capabilities. iView MediaPro offers higher-end features than iPhoto for its $65 cost, while GraphicConverter offers access to more file formats than you could imagine for its $35 cost. I am not advocating that anyone else stop using iPhoto. Like Apple's Mail application, if the simple capabilities of iPhoto work for you then there is no reason to look for more advanced photo managment solutions. I was just tired of my Mac slowing down every time I wanted to scroll through my images in iPhoto. After all, iPhoto is little more than a shoebox to store your photos - especially if you do your photo editing in another application. The shoebox just doesn't fit me any more.
Do you have a comment about this story? Click the Comment link and let me know what you think
5:12:34 PM
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Constrictor 2.1 sounds like a useful screen shot utility. Constrictor v2.1. - Constrictor is a scriptable screenshot utility for OS X. It lets you position a frame and then snap the area inside, applying border effects and saving in a variety of formats. New in this version: Saving as PDF and EPS. Backdrop and full-alpha snapping. Copy to clipboard in all image formats. Generate thumbnail icons for snaps. Now includes sample AppleScripts. Keyboard control over frame position & size. Customizable size presets with command keys and names. Snap to preset sizes, with live snap guide display. New Italian localization. Bug fixes. [AppleScript Info]
5:12:31 PM
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NotePod bumped to version 1.1. NotePod v1.1. - NotePod is a personal note manager and reminder which is available for Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows (Note: functionality will be limited under Windows due to its lack of AppleScript). Version changes include: Notes can be rearranged in the list by dragging. Multiple data files can be saved in any location. [AppleScript Info]
5:12:29 PM
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Forbes looks to MacWorld Expo in July. In its article about yesterday's speed bump and enhancements for the iBook product line, Forbes looks forward to MacWorld Expo in July and what future product announcements could be waiting in the wings."Given Apple's early lead in wireless networking using the Wi-Fi standard, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to see Apple creating what is essentially a touch-sensitive screen that can display the contents of any computer it is connected to."
5:12:28 PM
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Conversant 1.0b1 leverages Radio. Macrobyte Resources today offers a beta version of its upcoming groupware and content management system, Conversant 1.0b1. The program leverages the capabilities of UserLand Frontier or Userland Radio to work its magic on OS X, OS 9.x and Windows. A final release of Conversant is scheduled to be available by June 2, with pricing of $499 per year for a production server, $249 per year for an educational server, or $99 per year for a developer license.
5:12:25 PM
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Application can recover some corrupted mail in Outlook or Entourage. EntourAid v1.0.1. - EntourAid, which has been converted from a BBEdit script to an AppleScript Studio app, attempts to recover e-mails in any Microsoft Outlook Express or Entourage e-mail database that is reported as corrupted and irrecoverable. Version changes: Allows recovery of between 1% to 99% of original database. Improved recovery algorithm for better detection. Added support for Outlook Express and Office:Mac 2001 Entourage databases. Minor bug fixes. [AppleScript Info]
5:12:24 PM
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CD offers tips on creating QuickTime VR content. A new CD from Lightspeed Media offers step-by-step instructions and tips for creating QuickTime VR content for multimedia projects, Web sites or whatever else you want to do. The disc is on sale for $39.95 through the end of May.
Over the last few years as I have done research and taken thousands of photos for books and for my Weblog, The Equinox Project, I have been in some unique places where I have wished I knew how to create QuickTime VR content. Especially a few years ago when I made four trips into the still-steaming crater of Mt. St. Helens with some geologists (Mt. St. Helens is the volcano here in Washington state that erupted on May 18, 1980). The general public is not allowed in the crater or behind the lava dome, where Volkswagon sized-rocks fall from the steep crater walls and roll toward the lava dome and where sulphur blooms on the crunchy top of the lava dome paint yellow and green patterns across the soil, hiding the fact that a few inches below the surface the ground is still heated to more than 300 degrees.
Take a live look at Mt. St. Helens from a few miles away on Johnston Ridge - the place where a scientist stood on May 18, 1980 and quickly yelled into his radio, "Vancounver...Vancouver...This is it!" before the hundreds of miles an hour blast of heat and debris overwhelmed him.
5:12:22 PM
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Bush's Upcoming Visit Draws Protests in Berlin. With a visit by President Bush a day away, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched through Berlin today to protest widening the U.S.-led war on terrorism. By The Associated Press.
5:12:06 PM
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Stocks Slide for Second Straight Day. Despite good news including better-than-expected retail earnings and a settlement for Merrill Lynch, stocks closed lower for a second straight day. By The Associated Press.
5:12:03 PM
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O'Neill Starts Africa Tour With Bono. Bono of the band U2 and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill met today with President John Kuffour of Ghana at the start of an African trip that will focus on anti-poverty programs. By The Associated Press.
5:12:02 PM
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Boxes and Arrows: Designing on both sides of your brain. Scott Berkum. Later in life, having read about our best thinkers and problem solvers, I learned that there is a natural balance that can be mastered between both intensely imaginative, and passionately logical lines of thought. It's my claim, echoing many people before me, that we need to seek out this synergy to be good at design.
5:12:00 PM
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Stephen Jay Gould, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 60. Stephen Jay Gould, one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century who helped to reinvigorate the field of paleontology, died on Monday in Manhattan. By Carol Kaesuk Yoon.
5:11:57 PM
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White House Secrecy.
"NPR Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr understands the Bush administration's efforts to keep certain information secret. But Schorr argues that these efforts would have more credibility were it not for the administration's general obsession with secrecy and the selective leaks of classified information coming from the FBI and CIA."
(By Daniel Schorr for NPR's "All Things Considered," 5/20/2002.)
Earlier: Bush View of Secrecy Is Stirring Frustration
5:11:55 PM
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Star Trek, Present at the Creation. "Can you imagine a world, a universe, without Captain Kirk? Today, the very thought somehow seems... illogical. But to network executives in the mid 1960s, a television galaxy absent of Star Trek hardly seemed out of the question."
(By Margot Adler et al for NPR.org, 5/20/2002.)
5:11:53 PM
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The architect of Enron's downfall.
"Mr Kaminski was not alone in his disdain for Mr Fastow, then Enron's chief financial officer. According to more than 800 pages of investigators' interview summaries with Enron employees, Mr Fastow was much-feared and frequently despised within the company, who many believed would destroy Enron with his financial machinations."
(By Peter Spiegel for the Financial Times, 5/20/2002.)
5:11:52 PM
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Marc Barrot has the kind of weblog I want. One where you can see seven days at a time, but only today's posts are expanded. Screen shot. It's been quite a while since I've had weblog envy. 
5:11:49 PM
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An idea worth passing along. On Ecademy, pwainewright says: "[O'Reilly] could have encouraged these real-time bloggers to subscribe RSS feeds of their blogs to an aggregated 'event blog', effectively pooling all the commentary and attracting more participants into the feedback process." Good idea. Perhaps we can try this at the Open Source Convention in July. A simple registry open to all attendees. Give us the URLs of your RSS feeds. An aggregator runs once an hour, reads all the feeds, and spits out a communal event-based blog, with pointers to the originals. Easy to implement with current technology. 
5:11:45 PM
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USA Today: "Morgan Stanley estimates that US companies threw away $130 billion in the past two years on unneeded software and other technology." 
5:11:25 PM
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Reuters: "Technology buffs have cracked music publishing giant Sony Music's elaborate disc copy-protection technology with a decidedly low-tech method: scribbling around the rim of a disk with a felt-tip marker." 
5:11:23 PM
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Internet News: "The United States Copyright Office on Tuesday rejected an arbitration panel ruling on Webcasting royalty rates, a decision that is sure to rankle the recording industry and bring smiles to the face of Internet radio executives nationwide." 
5:11:19 PM
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Keith Teare received a letter from Microsoft, which he published on his weblog, which among other things, demands that he stop publishing his weblog. 
5:11:18 PM
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Ben Hammersley has a story about weblogs in the UK Guardian today. A good trend, another BigPub piece that isn't dismissive of amateurs, and doesn't predict the end of the world for professional writers. 
5:11:15 PM
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Tim Jarrett quotes Justin Hall: "A friend at Deloitte & Touche asked me to talk with these kids about my career as a freelance writer. And so I stood up in front of them and shared. 'I'm homeless, in debt, and my clothes smell because I live out of a beater car.' And they looked at me confused and a loud little girl with long thin braids in a bright pink parka down in front during the second section said, 'Why should we listen to you then?' and I said, 'because I do what I want and I love my life.'" 
5:11:13 PM
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5:11:11 PM
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eWeek. KaZaA virus discovered.
5:11:06 PM
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NandO. We might have the first war between nuclear powers in the next couple of days. Kashmir is getting very ugly. 1 m soldiers on the front.
5:11:05 PM
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eWeek. (granted, this is five days old, but excellent analysis is always worth waiting for). Allchin opts for the absolute worst defense. Patriotism is the last defense of cowards. It is even worse if Microsoft is engaged in keyword logging as part of their settlement with the DoJ. This would mean that the US could, if conditions warranted it, keyword log all the computers in a country like Pakistan. This would occur under the assumption that anyone outside the US isn't entitled the same freedoms we enjoy. They are fair game. In exchange, Microsoft would get a pass on anti-trust from the DoJ for a decade or more. This is the probable scenario.
>>>A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed.<<<
5:11:03 PM
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US warning on terror weapons. The US says it is "inevitable" that terrorists will acquire and use
weapons of mass destruction, as New York is warned of possible
attacks.
5:10:44 PM
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Sharon fights to save his government. The Israeli PM presses ahead with an austerity package as he tries to
shore up support for his government with new coalition partners.
5:10:41 PM
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Bush faces European protests. Germany assembles a force of 10,000 officers to protect US President
George W Bush during his visit to Berlin.
5:10:40 PM
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Been busy all day so far producing 20 second commercials for the last batch of tickets available for the Reflex of the 80's. It's a concert BNN is throwing next Friday night, live at the Ahoy, 10 thousand seats in the house with a live radio and tv broadcast. Gonna be fun!
5:10:34 PM
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PC World: "A team of researchers at the National Taiwan University here report they have developed a prototype rewritable optical disc that can store 100GB of information and is compatible with existing CD and DVD technology."
5:10:28 PM
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Idea for a website. If you’re a developer starting a new project it can be hard to know if you have a good idea or not. I had an idea for a website that would be a cross between Slashdot and AmIHotOrNot: OSXIdeas.com. People could post ideas for OS X software, and people could rate the ideas and discuss them.
Developers could then get feedback on their ideas before investing in them. Non-developers could post ideas for software they’d like to have and see if any developers go for it.
I probably won’t do this website—but if somebody else does, that would be cool. (I’d be willing to help, but I don’t have time to build it and run it all myself.)
5:10:14 PM
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Conversant. Major congratulations and best wishes go to Seth Dillingham and everybody at Macrobyte Resources for releasing Conversant, their Internet groupware platform that runs in Frontier and Radio UserLand. Good job, folks.
5:10:12 PM
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Monday, May 6, 2002
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I'm working on the new underpinnings for Radio's Instant Outliner. It feels very right to have the pings float over instant messaging. I'm using Eric Soroos's new tool that implements AIM.
4:15:09 PM
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Testing 1, 2, 3...
1:45:46 PM
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Business Week: Lawrence Lessig: The "Dinosaurs" Are Taking Over. They've succeeded in making Washington believe this is a binary choice -- between perfect protection or no protection. No one is seriously arguing for no protection. They are arguing for a balance that avoids the phenomenon we are seeing now -- one where the last generation of technology controls the next generation of industry.
11:53:39 AM
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NY Times: Access to Free Online Music Is Seen as a Boost to Sales. Disputing the position held by the major record companies, a report issued on Friday found that people who use file-sharing networks to obtain music at no charge over the Internet are more likely to have increased their spending on music than are average online music fans.
11:53:38 AM
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This is a test post to help me develop the multi-author weblog stuff.
11:46:40 AM
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To Daniel Berlinger: "I think I can shed some light on your queries about centralization and decentralization."
11:46:39 AM
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Centralization in blogging tools. First, I'd like to thank Burning Bird for elevating the level of discussion about centralization in weblog tools. As I wrote on Scripting News this morning, we can cover the tools ourselves, as long as we do it scientifically, and with an appreciation for diversity. This is a product category that's just waking up. There's a dearth of real comparative data. It's not about good-vs-bad, it's time to learn and advance the art of weblogging software.
Anyway, I've been weblogging for quite a few years, and I've tried out a lot of the ideas Shelley talks about. I had a discussion group, I've not done comments. I'm watching other people run comment-based sites, and participating where the rules allow it. (Shelley posted a rule a few weeks ago that excludes me from participating in her comments, and of course that's her right, and I am respecting that by commenting here on my Radio weblog.)
I of course think community features are great. I love reading referers lists, for my sites, and others. It helps me ponder the flow of this thing we call the Web. I like knowing what are the most popular RSS feeds. The inter-relation of sites is a never-ending fascination for me. It's the stuff that Jon Udell is writing about. And Josh Allen, the WebMonkey reviewer who organized our little industry so well, is writing about that too.
The community is an important aspect to blogging, imho. We're trying out a new method of Internet-based discourse that's different from the ones that came before. In "blogspace" respect is possible. The weblog is the proxy for a person. We choose the level at which we want to invite others into the space. I like distance, always have -- it helps people be respectful, and that means we can learn new stuff. This discussion of centralization in weblog tools is a perfect example of that. Had we been doing this on a newsgroup or a mail list or discussion group, the Stop Energy would likely overwhelm the intelligent discussion.
So anyway, here's a question for Shelley. When I see your site update on Weblogs.Com, I usually go for a visit to see what the bird is burning about now. I think of that as a community feature. Do you think it's valuable? If not, why do you participate?
11:46:39 AM
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Getting bytesInUse back in synch with the content. This is a test. Back in a minute with some notes, if it worked. (Or not.)
Boy that took a lot longer than I thought it should. Here's what's going on.
After the baling-wire-workaround we had a bit of cleanup work to do. With the fix in place we couldn't keep track of bytes in use, because the static server was inaccessible to the community server. So the per-user bytesInUse attribute could be wrong. Now we have to fix them.
Looping over the folder to set bytesInUse used to be fast, a long time ago, before Radio 8 shipped. Now it take a few seconds. First I wrote a utility script, started running it, and realized that it would take a long time to complete. So I opted for a different approach, I did a getUserTable callback, so that when a user connected, either through an upstream or just a ping, the bytesInUse att would get fixed. But the slowness caused timeouts. Quickly backed out of that approach.
I went back to the utility script, and modified it so that it can be restarted. It'll probably take about 10 hours to run. It waits five seconds between users so it can't take up too much of the server's resources while it's running.
I'm going to keep my eye on it today, while I do other cleanup chores and start digging some new holes.
11:46:38 AM
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Outage cleared. The lights are back on, with one caveat. We're now running Apache on Windows to do our static serving. Midway through the transition it locked up and we had to restart the machine. Of course since we serve at the pleasure of Murphy, the machine failed to restart. Why? We had installed a new 120GB hard drive, and W2K got lost on its way to restart. Once we cured that, the system started, Apache did its job, and the static server has been fast and reliable since. (It's only been a bit over an hour.) So we will pray for more good luck, it's really gone quite well today, net-net, and we're thankful for the lessons we've learned so far, and look forward to learning many more. 
11:46:36 AM
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Test post #2.
11:46:36 AM
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Test post.
11:46:35 AM
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Outage update, 8AM.
We have a new static server, it's fully installed at Exodus, with a copy of the content taken overnight. As with the last restoring, if you updated between last night and the time the switch is flipped (probably around 11AM today), some updates will not be there. Rather than having ten hours of downtime, we opted for this approach. We'll provide instructions on updating UserLand-hosted Radio sites after we flip the switch.
The rest of the day today, Murphy-willing, will be spent looking for breakage, and fixing stuff, and undoing the baling-wire and scotch tape we put in place to work around the outage.
I posted a note last night on the Radio-Dev list explaining the strategy for those who are curious and technical.
Dave
11:46:35 AM
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WebMonkey: "Radio manages to create a dynamic environment for the exchange of information without asking too much of each individual user. They've made it simple for beginners to get involved in a kind of active network that would've required much more know-how a few years ago. If you're looking for more than just a tool, but an effortless way to get a site launched and incorporated into an online community, Radio may be your best bet."
11:46:34 AM
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Outage update, 3:16PM. At 1:10PM we turned off the static server because we were pretty sure it had been hacked, for two reasons:
1. We had received a notice from myNetWatchman with a list of attempts the machine had made to compromise other systems that had the monitoring software installed.
2. We had just finished installing a new sharepoint, and as we were preparing to reconfigure the content system to write through that point, Apache stopped responding, and we saw a flood of traffic coming out of the machine, consistent with what the email said the machine was doing.
At that point we shut it down, and I posted an outage report on Scripting News.
It appears to have been a false alarm for two reasons:
1. Lawrence had the presence of mind to read the email carefully, and noted that all the dates were before we had done the switch to the new server. So the email contained no new information. It was simply telling us that the old server had been hacked. We already knew that. ;->
2. Then we re-examined our assumption that the current static server had been hacked and decided it was worth a test to see, if we backed off the new share, if the machine would go back to its previous performance. It did.
While you can never assume that you're in the clear, and we serve at the pleasure of Murphy, it appears that the static server is working, and we're assume it it was our newbieness with Linux that caused the outage, because it's running OK without the share.
We had a Plan B, which we are now getting ready to execute. It will take a few hours, but we're really optimistic about it.
Dave
11:46:33 AM
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IBM: Web services need Sun. In an about-face, Big Blue is paving the way for its rival to join a Web services standards organization, hoping to quell infighting that could put a damper on the emerging technology. [CNET News.com]
11:46:32 AM
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Exec exodus continues at Sun. A senior executive responsible for bringing Sun Microsystems closer to open-source technology has left, the latest in a series of high-profile departures for the company. [CNET News.com]
11:46:31 AM
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On a wish and a prayer. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls..
I was able to string some baling wire, with the help of lots of scotch tape, and now have a very temporary workaround to the outage.
It will be glitchy, for sure, but as you can see -- I am now able to post to my UserLand-hosted Radio weblog.
This buys us a little bit of time now to get the real outage cleared.
Pray to Murphy for our little community.

11:46:31 AM
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Tuesday, March 12, 2002
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| Hello World! |
This is a test post. Fun, isn't it? Now we have a title...
3:04:00 PM
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Saturday, February 23, 2002
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Another test post to my test category.
7:10:42 PM
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Test post to my test category.
6:55:26 PM
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Wednesday, February 13, 2002
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Still testing...
11:18:42 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Jake Savin.
Last update: 5/21/02; 5:13:41 PM.
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