R.I.P. Don Smith of the Desert

Last night my friend Don Smith aka Don of the Desert died in a fire at his residence in Twentynine Palms. Don was a master welder and could fabricate anything imaginable out of metal. Rest in Peace Don.

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Body Worlds Exhibit Photos

You're technically not allowed to take photos at the Body Worlds Exhibit. The reason being is that they have a contract with Gunther that says nobody can take pictures. It is not a request from the cadavers that are on display. It is so they can make more money selling the posters. I think it is silly, but I still only took one photo of the exhibit. Btw, the California Science Center's site about the exhibit has been taken down but here is the new one for Body Worlds 2.

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Flickr Exporter

So I recently signed up for flickr. I then created an export system where I can send selected images to my flickr page. Cool deal!

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Freedom and Liberty - from The Daily Show

I didn't get a chance to watch the daily show last night, but I found a link to the best part of it on a whole lotta nothing. It is quite hilarious. The final score: 27 freedom and 15 liberty.

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Google Fights Comment Spam

Google has added a feature to they search algorithm that ignores links that have the rel="nofollow" tag in them. This is great because it let's google know what information is your and what information was just posted by somebody commenting. They have recommended the nofollow tag be used on all links that can be posted by untrusted users. MSN Search and Yahoo! are both supporting it. Most blogging applications have already incorporated it. I am going to add it to my system too. Here is the link to the original article on Google's blog.

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Drive Slagging Featured In LISA '04 Presentation

In 2004 Simson Garfinkel gave a talk at the USENIX LISA conference about data on old hard drives. The report he wrote was actually what made us decide to do the drive slagging site in the first place. He featured our method of data removal in his slides which can be found at the link below. If you just want to see the slides click the permalink.

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Snowshoeing Trip

Just got back from a snowshoeing / backpacking trip with my lovely fiance Penelope. We had a great time and got plenty of good exercise. Check out the pictures. We even brought the snow monkey.

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Steve a.k.a Kemst

This is a random picture of Steve Kemst that I took after respect. As you can see we are standing outside. I posted it instantly with my new photoblogging feature that i just programmed a few nights ago. Fun stuff.

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Imported and Captioned Akihabara Photos from Japan Trip 2003

Here is a link to the newly captioned photo album of the Akihabara District in Tokyo. I took them a couple of years ago on my trip to japan . There are 5 pages with 20 images per page.

I am currently folding the jp.eecue.com mini-site into eecue along with several other of my mini-sites. Each site will retain a unique design but will be part of the main eecue site. The articles will be integrated in to my main (b)log. Current links will still work.

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This is a random and pointless photo of some sauce at dinner

This is a random and pointless photo of some sauce at dinner

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Cool Places in Southern California

Here are some Cool Places in Southern California that I found on HowStuffWorks. I plan on checking out most of them throughout 2005... I will post pictures.:

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Photos of One Wilshire (Los Angeles Meet-Me Room)

A few years ago I got a tour of One Wilshire in Downtown Los Angeles where I took some cool pictures. Some of them were also at Pajo Networks which is now called Tier Zero. I host my servers with Tier Zero. Here is the gallery

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Unnamed University's Misconfigured Email Adventure

A few days after Christmas I received an email from an upset University server admin who thought my servers were attacking his servers through email. What was actually happening was that a spammer was sending email using random fake address at his server's domain name which I will call anonymous.edu. It wouldn't have been a problem if the server was correctly responding with 550 errors which mean Permanent Failure, but the servers were sending 450 which are Temporary errors, so all the servers that were trying to deliver the bounces, kept trying.

So here is the first email I received from postmaster@anonymous.edu:

    From: 	  postmaster@anonymous.edu
    Subject: 	Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
    Date: 	December 28, 2004 2:19:23 PM PST
    To: 	  [a bunch of my email address]

Network/Security Administrator,

I'm sending you this mail because one or more IP addresses in your domain
are currently attacking our electronic mail server with a denial of service
attack consisting of multiple, rapid attempts to send mail to randomly
generated, non-existent email addresses.

Please take action with regard to the below hosts immediately to stop this
worm or virus.  This attack may be reported to the U.S Federal Bureau of
Investigation for criminal prosecution.  These hosts may also have been
blacklisted from sending mail to our server.

    64.239.136.142  (www.eecue.com)

To which I responded:

    From: 	  eecue AT eecue.com
    Subject: 	Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
    Date: 	December 28, 2004 2:32:16 PM PST
    To: 	  postmaster@anonymous.edu

Hi you will notice those emails are not actually coming from my server.

The spammers are using my domain as their From: address.

Is this email for real?

-Dave

My guess was close, but I had it backwards...

After getting three more of those emails they sent me this:

    From: 	  postmaster@anonymous.edu
    Subject: 	Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
    Date: 	December 28, 2004 2:59:32 PM PST
    To: 	  [a bunch of my email addresses]


Excuse me if this email is a duplicate. I forgot to list the IP address
of the victim of this attack.  It is: atlantis.anonymous.net (192.168.139.69)
Also, I can be contacted at:  postmaster@anonymous.edu

I'm sending you this mail because one or more IP addresses in your domain
are currently participating in a distributed denial of service attack
consisting of multiple attempts to send mail to randomly generated,
non-existent email addresses at our site.

Please take action with regard to the below hosts immediately to stop this
worm or virus.  These hosts may also have been blacklisted from sending
mail to our server.  They can be re-enabled once the DDoS attack subsides.


    64.239.136.142  (www.eecue.com)

To which I responded this:

    From: 	  eecue AT eecue.com
    Subject: 	Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
    Date: 	December 28, 2004 3:01:28 PM PST
    To: 	  postmaster@anonymous.edu

Hello,

Please send me the full email in question including the headers
so I can track down who is sending said email.

Thanks

-Dave

I didn't hear back about it until today when I received this email:

    From: 	  anon_admin@anonymous.edu
    Subject: 	Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
    Date: 	January 3, 2005 12:42:57 AM PST
    To: 	  eecue AT eecue.com


It was for real, but was the result of a mis-diagnosis of the problem...

Things have returned to normal, there is no need to do anything on your
side.  Our domain was the subject of a massive spam forgery ("Joe Job")
with randomly generated reply-to fields @anonymous.edu.  This occurred for over
14,000 domains, and our mail server was sending a 450 temporary error.

Basically we told 14,000 sites to keep trying to deliver bounce messages
back to us, with no valid local recipient, at whatever rate they did queue
flushes.  Making it look very much to us like a Distributed Denial of
Service Attack.  When really this whole thing would have been only briefly
painful if we had changed the failure notice to a permanent failure,
causing those 14000 servers to trash those invalid messages.

It was not apparent to us what was happening (since we never received any
of the bounces) until someone said, "Hey you know this bounce says that you
are replying with a 450 temporary failure..." It has now been changed to a
550 (permanent failure) response.

Thanks again for looking into this!

Well that was nice of them to fix everything.

    From: 	  eecue AT eecue.com
    Subject: 	Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
    Date: 	January 3, 2005 7:17:39 PM PST
    To: 	  anon_admin@anonymous.edu


Glad you worked everything out.

I thought it was somewhat humorous, so I posted about it on my website:

http://eecue.com/

I changed the names to protect the innocent.

-Dave

....
A. David Bullock
eecue : programmer / designer / admin / human
http://eecue.com/  -
anything is possible

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Google has posted Ways to Help with Tsunami Relief

Here is the link.

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Old Bauer, Curtis and Bullock Family Photos

I have scanned a number of my old family photos, some dating back to the mid 1800's. Here the galleries:

Curtis Family

Bauer Family

David William Bullock (my father)

Virgil William Bullock

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Back from Las Vegas...

Just got back from Las Vegas. I had a great time. It was really nice spending the holidays with my whole family and my lovely fiance. We stayed at Harrah's last night, ate some good food and drank some good liquor. Here are some pictures.

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My Fiance's Website

For Christmas (as you may have read about in my last post) I registered a domain for my fiance Penelope. I also set her up a site just like this one only prettier. Check it out!

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Design Updated

Well as you can see (or maybe not if your don't run a CSS compliant browser) my site has been updated. The design update was the easiest one I have ever done! All I had to do was change 1 file and my entire site was updated. I am all about separating content from design!

I have also improved the way the images work so that they can be cached by your browser (and save me bandwidth). I am about to update slacker and created a whole plethora of sites. =]

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Caching Files...

Right now the files are still being cached... it takes a bit of time to create all the flat files so you may find some links do not work... they will just wait!

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BMC: Basic Mountaineering Course

This weekend I attended the San Bernardino Sheriffs Search and Rescue Basic Mountaineering Course. This course covered all the skills necessary for an alpine search and rescue mission in the San Bernardino mountains.

The course actually started a month ago with 16 hours of classroom time. This weekend was the field exercises where we got a chance to apply the skills we learned about in the classroom. It was important to know the skills at a level known as unconscious competence, which means you can execute the task correctly without having to think about it.

• Here are some of the skills we covered:
• Ice Axe Self Arrest
• 2 and 3 Person Roped Travel
• Snow Anchors
  • Picket
  • Ice Axe
  • Deadman
  • Bollard
• Crampon Travel
• Ice Axe Travel
• Snowshoe Travel
• Snow Shelters
• Belaying
• Avalanche Beacons

All in all it was a great training and I had a great time and learned many valuable skills. I plan on attending the next two trainings.

Here are the pictures I took.

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Search and Rescue

I found this blog entry about Search and Rescuefrom my feedster search: Feedster Search: Search And Rescue... The owner of the blog is a member of the St. John's College Search and Rescue team, which I was a member of when I was in High School. =]

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Old Photos Integrated Into Gallery

Ok I have set up my gallery to show in a hierarchal mode so that they are easier to navigate... I have integrated all the old photos into the gallery.

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Japan Photos Imported...

I have finished importing my japan photos and they are now located here:

http://eecue.com/japan

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Check the Archive Feature!

Ok so during the update I added a really cool feature. The calendar now displays thumbnails for each event / photo group / post from this site... check it out:

• June 2004 (a busy month!)
• July 2004
• August 2004
• September 2004
• October 2004
• November 2004

It may take a second for all the thumbnails to load so be patient! Also there is a problem viewing the page in Internet Explorer (it looks like a long list of links instead of a calendar...) So use Mozilla or Safari.

=]

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In Memory of Fractal...

My cat died a few weeks ago... I just wanted to post up these pictures of him in memory... I miss you little guy!

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Cicadas a Party for Forests

Every now and then cicadas invade our forests, and as it turns out, the forests love it.

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I Am Engaged to Penelope!

As of November 24th, 2004 I am now engaged to the lovely and beautiful Penelope Proffitt. I love her very much and am looking forward to a wonderful life with her.

=]

more pictures of Penelope

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