Afternoon delight. Er, um, I guess mid-morning delight. From the Return to Flight website:

NASA officials have announced plans to the begin the countdown to a July 26 launch of Space Shuttle Discovery. The countdown will start Saturday, with a test of the External Tank to follow early on launch day. If all goes well with the test, the countdown will continue to liftoff at 10:39 a.m. EDT on Tuesday.

I’ll have to tell Chuck I might be a little late on Tuesday morning. I can’t help but think of Bill Murray from Stripes: “Alright boys, just like last time… ONLY BETTER!”

Computer giant Apple made ripples through the industry in the last few weeks with (NO WINDOWS I WILL REBOOT LATER) the announcement they’re going to move from their IBM PowerPC hardware platform to Intel based chips. Apple has always had good hardware, even though it was more expensive. Although recently, it’s their OS that has been more of a pull for consumers. I haven’t read all the industry fallout from the announcement, but I’m sure when that finally happens and we can run OSX on a PC, we’ll be seeing more competition for Windows, and choice almost always helps the consumer. I tried OSX and didn’t really care for it, but I encourage people to try new things and use what they like.

Also significant in Apple news is on the RC5 front. I participate in distributed.net’s project to crack encryption with my computer’s idle cycles. I’ve been doing this since my freshman year of college (when 220k keys/sec was GOOD. Right now my computer is doing about 9Mk/s.) What’s significant is they store which OS each keyblock returned was cracked on, and MacOS overtook Linux for second place for RC5-72. (Windows is still in a strong, strong lead.) That’s significant because the G5 processor that new Macs use has incredible RC5 capabilities. (My 2.2GHz AMD gets just under 9Mk/s. A 2GHz G5 gets about 15Mk/s – a 2.7 over 20Mk/s. Of course all of that will change when Apple is running on the same hardware as Linux and Windows – then I suppose it will be sheer numbers, but for now the smarter architecture took the second place prize. After the World Series and the Final Four, I pay attention to the teams that come in second.

Also significant with respect to RC5 and Apple is the Turing cluster at UIUC (I’ll put links in later, I’m lazy.) Turing has a 640 node cluster with dual 2GHz G5s. That’s 1280 CPUs at 15Mk/s. That’s about 19.2Bk/s, or roughly 11% of yesterday’s total RC5 cracking speed. Daaaamn. I wonder who I have to convince to run dnetc on the cluster? Putting it in a different perspective, the #1 individual on rc5-72 has 22M stat blocks (2^28 keys in a stat block.) Turing would pump out 71 stat blocks A SECOND, putting it in the number one stats spot in just four days of runtime. We’ve been working on rc5-72 for 928 days and they could be #1 in four. That’s some serious cracking.

If you’re interested in RC5 and want to join my old team, search in stats for 1367 – we’re the Cracking Illini. Join up; we could use the numbers. If I ever get around to updating the static side of my site, I’ll put in a page for distributed.net, and you can wow your friends with knowledge of golumb rulers. (Almost as interesting as the origin of “Live from new york it’s saturday night,” but if I give you all of my stories I won’t be any fun at cocktail parties.)

Ha, one blog post with a single thought! And you thought I couldn’t do it. Also, I’m older than PacMan. (See, I couldn’t do it.)

Yesterday there was no mail. I don’t know why, but it’s like the mailman didn’t come. Maybe they took Tuesday off for National Teacher Appreciation Day (thanks Google!) I didn’t think much of it.

Today, the mail came with a vengance. The 100 Years of Illini Basketball DVD finally came, along with a big stack of bills. But, first, I refilled my allergy medicine prescription on the way home from work and it cost me twice as much as the last time — I guess only the first few refills are cheap. That’s annoying. (I need to review the benefits stuff and see if there are better prescription plans.) Then I gassed up my car at the unknown gas station at the corner of University and Mattis for $2.09. It’s bad that I’ve started thinking of $2.09 as a good price. (It’s the unknown gas station since it used to be an Amoco but it got bought out and they haven’t put up any signage for who owns it now.)

Anyhow, back to the mail. The bill from the ENT/allergy stuff from Christie came – I kinda knew that was coming, but it’s still a few hundred I wish I didn’t have to pay. The Property tax bill came – that sucked. Luckily, it’s been escrowed and will get paid by the mortgage people – but it’s still a huge chunk of money. Along with those bills came a Citibank bill, and a car insurance bill. When it rains it pours. The worst part is, all but one of those bills are due before the next payday. I better not hit the ATM in the next two weeks. (Shouldn’t be a problem, I’ve got plenty of cash, but that’s a blog post for another day.)

At least I’m not expecting anything bad in tomorrow’s mail.

The Hubble space telescope was put into service on April 25, 1990. See some of it’s stuff at the hubble gallery. Also, check out some of the best Hubble images, and vote for your favorite. This is the main Hubble site.

Unfortunately, I think the HST and the space shuttle programs are showing their age, and probably won’t be around too much longer. It will be sad to see them go, but also a little exciting to learn about what’s replacing them.

From the wikipedia:

RFC 1, entitled “Host Software”, was written by Steve Crocker from the University of California, Los Angeles, and published on April 7, 1969.

[Ed note: Should I make a "Technology" category, or should I continue to stuff things in Science & Nature?]

Note to self: when you want to get out of the office, don’t start a restore from your laptop, because then you need to wait for it to finish before you can go.

So, I’m killing time looking at how I put data into Wordpress. When I imported my stuff from the old blog, I dumped everything in the General category – which doesn’t help to find or categorize anything. I see search requests in the logs all the time that brings up a huge page with hundreds of posts, and I think that’s wasteful. So I’ve been thinking about how to best break up the site (both for blog entries and static information – WP calls the first posts and the second pages,) and I decided on some new categories (they should look familar to board game players.) The categories will also be tied to static content areas of the site – Arts & Entertainment will list the live concerts I’ve been to; Education & Development will have the school links, Sports & Leisure will talk about the IFUND, tailgate group, etc.

I fixed the categories from posts from March and from a few low-post categories, but it was pretty cumbersome. I’ll probably write a tool to help re-categorize WP posts. I also don’t like the way the category list is sorted. I’ll have to look if that’s something I can configure in WP 1.5 when I make that plunge.

While looking through the website, I found that Yahoo is good and actually calls /robots.txt before polling an RSS feed. Somehow, the RSS/blog fad/phenomenon didn’t follow some of the hardfast, Internet friendly rules – like, if a program or script is going to scrape/crawl a website, they should requests /robots.txt first and follow its instructions. I applaud Yahoo for their adherance to things that are supposed to make the Internet a better place, and I’ll ask Bloglines about it (since I’m using them exclusively now for my aggregation.)

Whenever Flickr is down, they pop up a message stating they’re having a massage (for those that don’t speak geek,) and then qualify for those of us who grok webhosting. Their blog mentions how getting bought by Yahoo doesn’t save you from hard drive damage. I think that’s about right.

I also ran across funny video about tape failures, which I understood. I’m really coaxing a few more hours of life out of an old tape library at work, and I never know when it’s going to go up in flames. We don’t do off-site backups, but we have two honkin’ big fireproof safes in different rooms in the building, so things like leaky pipes or 3000 degree rooms doesn’t scare me … I just need to remember to close and lock them before I leave for the day.

These links are me practicing my philosophy that if I try to blog about everything I’m doing, and fall behind, I never will get caught up and I’ll miss posting about the good stuff that currently is happening. I think it’s enough right now to say it’s March, there’s championship basketball going on, the Illini are still playing, and life is good. I was at the first and second round games in Indianapolis last weekend. I’m going to the sweet sixteen and elite eight games in Chicago this weekend. I’m going to Saint Louis next weekend and am going to try to score tickets to the Final Four games. I have to admit it seems like a little over-the-edge fan-dom, but our team, this season, this schedule, these locations… all of them have the chance to be really good to the Illini-nation, and I’m going to enjoy the heck out of it while I can.

In other quicky news, this is the first post (I think) typed from my new computer. It sure is FAST! I’m still installing things, and soon I’ll move the data over from the old system (and make backups of it to DVDR or CDR.) The dnetc on this machine is screaming away. My only complaint/obstacle is the keyboard. I bought one of those split ergonomical keyboards and my wpm speed has dropped a little while I learn new finger positions for some keys. I’ll get better.

I officially accepted the grad school offer, so I’m on for fall. I register in about a month; I need to get assigned and meet with my advisor before then.

I’ve been on allergy medicine for about a month, and besides a nagging cold that hasn’t gone away (especially with the last few weekends I’ve had,) I’m feeling much better quality-of-life-wise than before the allergy meds.

The DVR box from my cable company died this week, and took all the shows I hadn’t watched on it with it. I’m not too worried, because Lost and ALIAS are going to be on DVD before too long anyway.

Ummmm, what else? Gas prices suck, and some of the doomsdays stuff I’ve been reading leads me to think it might never get cheaper. I guess the next car will be a hybrid. Speaking of cars, I’m trying to get everything wrong with it looked at before it rolls over 36,000 miles (probably before the end of the year.) Next week, the radio is getting replaced.

The blogspace has been buzzing about Terri Schiavo and who gets to determine if she can be euthanized or not. I’m really torn on this – everytime I hear something new I don’t know what to think, and I can understand why this is a hard decision for the family, courts, even legislators. I already feel I should have a will drawn up with the house and everything. When I have that done, I think I’ll get a living will and medical power of attorney as well. I’m not sure yet if I’d want to live or die in Schiavo’s state, but I certainly wouldn’t want this much attention, or cause that much strife for my family.

But that’s sad stuff. On to good, happy stuff, like Illinois basketball in Chicago. Wheeee!

I used to get a new computer once a year. That was back when I was a self-employed and I needed the tax write-offs (and the newer technology was fun.) But that stopped in 1998, and I haven’t bought a new computer for my home use since. I used that 1998 computer up until the move this last summer; something with the motherboard/cpu didn’t POST right when I tried to bring it up in my new house. (I hope that it’s only a mobo issue, and my drives are still working okay. I don’t have good backups, and that’s one of the first things I want to address.) So, I fixed that today and bought a new PC.

Okay, technically, I bought the pieces to a new PC. New motherboard, CPU, memory and case (since all of those were required,) and a DVD burner and new keyboard/mouse. I could have bought a whole new cheap machine from Dell, but I got quality pieces (read: not Celeron/Sempron and the mobo has SATA.) I’ll upgrade the hard drive and video card later – what I bought was just enough to get me back up and running at home. I used the ARS Technica buying guides and basically spec’d the pieces from the Budget Box. Plus there’s something cool and fun about building a computer from pieces. (Although when I’m swearing because stuff isn’t playing nice together or I didn’t order the right stuff, you can laugh at me.)

The stuff should be here in a few days, and I’m sure I’ll post more when I get it up and running. I went cheap this run because I ultimately want to get a laptop for home use (daaaaamn you Kresl) but that’s going to wait until grad school.

I’m going to geek out here, so if you don’t like the data-mining nerd in me, move along now.

Campus is getting close to announcing their spam control solution for @uiuc.edu. DCS is going to mimic something similar to it for mail going to @cs.uiuc.edu. Chuck is upgrading our SpamAssassin installation this week so we get even better filtering and Baysian analysis. So, I figured I would generate some stats to have pre-upgrade to look back on later.

A CITES security brief email Friday afternoon told us their new anti-virus filtering on anything to @uiuc.edu deleted over 13,000 viruses from nearly 800k emails in the 24 hours before that message. This is excellent, and I’m glad to see campus is making progress towards keeping virii out of our mailboxes. (Forget about the few people in the CS department who actually enjoy getting viruses because they analyze them. For everyone else, it’s just mailbox clutter and disk space waste.)

I took my current SpamAssassin filtered spam mailbox and crunched some numbers on it. I flag anything with a SA value over 4 to go to this box. The first messages in this box appeared to be from January 1st, 2005 (the last time I recycled the mailbox.) The first number is the SA spam level and the second is the count. The rest of the numbers look at how that SA spam level statistically fits in with the rest of the values.

Total spam: 2916
2       1       (0.03%)         so far 0.03%    left 100%
3       1       (0.03%)         so far 0.07%    left 100%
4       125     (4.29%)         so far 4.36%    left 96%
5       200     (6.86%)         so far 11.21%   left 89%
6       204     (7.00%)         so far 18.21%   left 82%
7       256     (8.78%)         so far 26.99%   left 73%
8       317     (10.87%)        so far 37.86%   left 62%
9       251     (8.61%)         so far 46.47%   left 54%
10      261     (8.95%)         so far 55.42%   left 45%
11      237     (8.13%)         so far 63.55%   left 36%
12      191     (6.55%)         so far 70.10%   left 30%
13      172     (5.90%)         so far 75.99%   left 24%
14      154     (5.28%)         so far 81.28%   left 19%
15      103     (3.53%)         so far 84.81%   left 15%
16      93      (3.19%)         so far 88.00%   left 12%
17      70      (2.40%)         so far 90.40%   left 10%
18      72      (2.47%)         so far 92.87%   left  7%
19      50      (1.71%)         so far 94.58%   left  5%
20      24      (0.82%)         so far 95.40%   left  5%
21      33      (1.13%)         so far 96.54%   left  3%
22      11      (0.38%)         so far 96.91%   left  3%
23      14      (0.48%)         so far 97.39%   left  3%
24      22      (0.75%)         so far 98.15%   left  2%
25      11      (0.38%)         so far 98.53%   left  1%
26      11      (0.38%)         so far 98.90%   left  1%
27      6       (0.21%)         so far 99.11%   left  1%
28      10      (0.34%)         so far 99.45%   left  1%
29      2       (0.07%)         so far 99.52%   left  0%
30      2       (0.07%)         so far 99.59%   left  0%
31      1       (0.03%)         so far 99.62%   left  0%
32      2       (0.07%)         so far 99.69%   left  0%
50      9       (0.31%)         so far 100.00%  left  0%

I’m thinking of configuring procmail to tell all the spam with levels over 12 to just go to the bit bucket. That would eliminate 25% of my spam. Do any of you do level filtering on SA tagged messages? If so, what are your thresh-holds? If you sort the messages into different mailboxes, what’s your thinking for that, and how often do you review them?

I also tried to look at which email addresses that eventually get delivered to my box (all of the *.uiuc.edu ones, and several service aliases in cs.uiuc.edu) get the most spam. For example, could I block anything to ews.uiuc.edu because I don’t use that address anymore? But, I found that to be a harder analysis and I haven’t finished it yet. If you’re interested in running my script on your email, let me know. It scans a mailbox in mbox format and prints out the data.

I had a plan to fix up a few things around my website, and start a process that would migrate the older static data on the site into newer dynamic tools (like WordPress and Gallery.) So, I put a new version of phpMyAdmin in place. It’s a back-end tool I use to look at the databases that help run the site. No errors or problems with that upgrade.

Then I started on Gallery. I decided to move to the 1.5-RC1 version instead of an older 1.4x release. This upgrade went well enough, but I had a really hard time getting the image libraries it uses (netpbm or ImageMagick) to build properly. My webserver is an old Solaris 5.8 Ultra1, and I couldn’t get the packages to build from scratch or get the prepackaged tools to use. I finally though I found it and got things working, but now it turns out I can’t upload because of a shared library issue… So, I have to look into that. I might just move ahead migrating www-dave to a newer Linux platform that has more things already built in. So, the new Gallery is online, but I can’t upload anything to it. Yet. In the meantime, feel free to poke around the gallery and see the new features. The big requested one: RSS for the galleries. Although, I’m putting more pictures on Flickr now than I am my own gallery. *shrug*

In the not-so-far-away future, I’ll look at upgrading WordPress to 1.5. This seems harmless enough, but will change the look/skin of the site, and I want to get that figured out first. Plus, I think a 1.5 patch level release is coming soon, so I might just wait for that.

Now, to do something more exciting on a Saturday night. I think I’ll finish watching basketball and throw in a moovie.