The Arizona Rifleman

I’ve enabled dual-stack IPv6 and IPv4 connectivity on this site. There should be no problems, but if you experience any please let me know.

I’ve decided to test CloudFlare service on my blog.

It’s basically a DDoS-resistant caching service that should increase page loading speed for visitors.

In addition, it also detects potentially malicious traffic (ranging from spammers to botnet members) to the blog and will block them with a “challenge” page that describes why they were blocked and offer a CAPTCHA to proceed. While it’s supposedly quite good at not blocking legitimate users, it may inadvertently challenge ordinary visitors. If this occurs to you, please let me know (either by email or by filling in the appropriate field on the challenge page).

Sorry folks. Nothing much has been happening recently. I haven’t been to the range in months, haven’t taken new shooters out in a while longer, have been about a month behind the times when it comes to gun-related news, have fallen behind in reading other blogs, etc.

I’m alive (at least for now; I’m going to be skiing all next week), excited about having gotten into graduate school, and generally getting along fine.

As an aside, if you haven’t played the video games Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, you’re missing out. I was a bit skeptical of a third-person shooter/RPG, but I was wrong. They’ve seriously been the most-bang-for-the-buck entertainment that I’ve had in years (since Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic which, interestingly enough, is made by the same company as Mass Effect). Tons of replay value, too.

The university has licensed a particular brand of anti-virus software for all students, faculty, staff, etc. The department I do IT work for (my day job) has a central console that allows administrators to monitor the status of the anti-virus software on all the computers on the network.

I know it well, as I was the one who set it up.

Unfortunately, it’s a piece of crap and is two major versions out of date (the university only got the newer versions a short while ago). It’s also not going to be supported soon, so we had to upgrade it.

Most end-user software seems to handle in-place updates really well. Mozilla Firefox, Windows, even Acrobat Reader update really easily. Certain other software, like Apache, MySQL, and other such things also update reasonably smoothly.

This anti-virus console is not one of those things.

I honestly couldn’t think of something that’s more of a pain in the ass to upgrade.

It turned out to be faster and easier to simply install the newer console on a different server, configure it by hand, and then manually re-install the client software on the 200 or so desktop systems (again, by hand) than it was to try to upgrade the existing console.

The new one’s quite a bit better than the old one, but there’s still no built-in “upgrade in-place” feature, so in a few years someone’s (hopefully I’ll be in grad school by then) going to have upgrade to the next version. That’ll suck; a lot of the configuration is stored in some unknown way, and not accessible to the GUI or the configuration files. If even the tiniest thing gets out of whack (which happens on occasion), diagnosing the problem (not to mention fixing it) is a massive pain in the ass.

Compare that to Windows Server Update Services — a simple Group Policy change on the clients¹ and the clients get all their Windows Updates from the WSUS server, which can manage which updates are to be deployed to clients. Quick, simple, and scalable, all through an intuitive GUI.

Say what you will about Microsoft, but they have enterprise-class management down pat. This anti-virus company, though…not so much…

1. We don’t have an Active Directory, so we can’t push it from a central system, but have to do the changes by hand. There’s a lot of inertia and legacy systems here. Oh well. [↩]

Google evidently has two separate account namespaces:

• Google Accounts
• Google Apps account

Google Accounts can be, but are not necessarily, a Google Mail/Gmail account. One can have a Google Account without having a Gmail account (e.g. [email protected]) and can use such an account for accessing services like Google Reader, Google Docs, etc. I created such an account years ago for my personal email address.

Google Apps accounts are accounts associated with Google Apps, which are separate from regular Google Accounts. Google Apps provides email service for my personal domain.

Unfortunately, this means that both my Google Account and Google Apps account had the same username, which lead to considerable confusion.

I’m just now trying to get this all straightened out by only using Google Apps for email and XMPP chat and migrating all my other services (like Google Reader, Google Voice, etc.) to a single Google Account. This is exceedingly frustrating.

My personal, non-blog-related domain has used Google Apps for email for years. In essence, one gets all the benefits of Google Mail (excellent spam filtering, IMAP/POP/SMTP, huge amount of storage, reliable infrastructure, etc.), but for one’s own domain. Very handy.

One of the advantages of having one’s own domain is that one is not bound to a specific email provider; one can change the back-end provider relatively easily and with essentially no disruption. Over the last 11 years, my personal domain has had probably half a dozen providers handling email, with Google Apps providing service for about the last four years.

While I’ve been quite satisfied with Google Apps¹, I always like to check out alternatives at intervals, much like I do with car insurance.

Fortunately, Google makes moving away from their services extremely easy: it’s trivial to move mail to the new server by IMAP, and a few simple changes to my DNS records now direct mail to the new server. Everything was done with about 5 minutes of work.

There’s two quirks with moving away from Google Mail, though.

The first is that Google Mail is primarily web-based, and offers IMAP/POP service as a feature, while the new service is primarily IMAP/POP with webmail as a feature, and so their webmail is pretty basic.

The second is that Google has excellent spam filtering, mostly based on the input of its brazillions of users marking messages as spam or not spam. The filtering takes place on the server side, which keeps spam levels in one’s inbox to a minimum regardless of whether one uses webmail or IMAP/POP. Marking messages as spam or not spam is trivial and totally in-band (click a button on the webmail interface, move the message to an IMAP folder if using a client).

The new provider offers some server-side filtering, but it’s nowhere near as good as Google’s, and using the server-side filtering requires identifying spam or non-spam via out-of-bound methods (clicking a link in the email, which opens a browser window) which is a bit tedious. I can do better filtering on the client side, but that means that accessing my email with the webmail interface (which doesn’t have the filtering ability of my mail client) results in a massive amount of spam polluting the folder.

Slightly frustrating, to say the least.

I’ll give this other provider a few more days to see if their spam filtering can adapt to deal with the onslaught, but for my purposes (mostly webmail, with occasional IMAP use), Google Apps’ service appears to be better. However, in the event that Google turns to the dark side, it’s good to know there’s options.

1. Although there are a few quirks when using IMAP due to the fact that Gmail uses “labels” instead of “folders”, they’re minor and easily adapted to. [↩]

In 1993, I was but a young lad of 11. At the time, my parents purchased a PowerBook 165c, the first color Mac laptop. It had a whopping 33MHz processor, 4MB of RAM, an 80MB hard disk, and a 8.9″ 8-bit 640 x 400 color passive matrix display that could display 256 colors. It weighed about 7 pounds. According to LowEndMac, it cost about $3,400. Ouch.

Today, I was looking at a new netbook made by System76, a small, independent company that sells hardware with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. This computer has a HyperThreaded 1.66GHz processor (50x faster than the PowerBook if you only count one thread, 100x if you count both threads), 2GB of RAM (500x as much), a 250GB hard disk (3125x as large), and a 1024 x 600 LED-backlit screen that can display millions of colors. It weighs 2 pounds, and costs $389. It’s also physically smaller, has a battery that lasts about 4x as long, and has a stupidly fast wireless card.

All that in 17 years.

Firearms, however, have been around for quite a bit longer than 17 years, yet modern firearms are essentially the same as they were fifty years ago.

Where’s my Star Wars-esque blaster gun? Get crackin’, guys…

Until the latest version of Ubuntu Linux comes out.

I’m already using the release candidate on both my desktop and laptop and everything seems to be going well. The betas were, as expected, buggy, but the RC seems to do well. There’s usually a dozen or so updates released daily, but that’s hardly a problem, and normal for pre-release versions as they iron out the kinks.

First impressions:

• New default theme sucks. It’s like they took all the good parts of Mac OS X’s interface and make them worse. Horrible black-and-purple theme. I immediately switched back to the blue-tinted Human theme that’s served me well for some time. Honestly, I don’t know why they’d do this — most of the people who’d switch to Ubuntu come from a Windows background, so having the Mac-style, top-left location for close/min/max buttons makes little sense.
• The one major bug that’s been stopping me from using Ubuntu as my primary system for a few years has been resolved. When using the distro-supplied version of Firefox (but never the same version for Mac, Windows, or other versions of Linux), the backspace key in the WordPress admin interface (and only there) was slow and laggy. This has been fixed.
• I miss the colored “circle of friend” logo next to the Applicatiosn menu. The new gray one is a bit weird. Same thing with the lack of color in the Weather applet next to the system clock. Clearly more tinkering with the themes is needed, though I wish they made this a selectable option.
• One can now easily toggle the drumroll login sound. Excellent. I’m a fan of silent startups.
• Not supported with the scan-your-check-for-deposit service with USAA Bank. Strange, as the service uses Java, which Ubuntu has. Go figure. Emails have been sent.

All in all, it looks pretty nice. Many of the interface and usability quirks have been worked out, though I’m still not a fan of the default theme. So far, no major issues to report, but I’ve only been using it for a few days.

While it’s unlikely that Linux will displace Windows in the desktop market in the foreseeable future due to Windows’ huge network effect, Ubuntu is maturing quite quickly, and I suspect it will soon be the de facto standard for desktop Linux (something which is really important to many developers). It’s very nearly to the point where I’d have no problems recommending it to my mom.

I really, really, really dislike online advertising.

I find the claims made by many ads¹ to be offensive to my intelligence, and I am not remotely interested in teeth whitening or novelty means of losing weight². Fad diets and colon cleansing are right out.

No, I don’t want to punch the monkey or, for that matter, Osama bin Laden. I don’t want poorly-made faux Windows XP ads warning me that my registry isn’t optimized. I am certainly not the 1,000,000th visitor to a particular site, and I know I have not won any sort of prize. See “Free Lunch, No Such Thing As A”. Making them blink, flash, or vibrate around in ways that induce seizures will not make me click them. Sites that host such ads will likely have me take my eyeballs elsewhere.

I understand that advertising is an important means of funding the operations of many sites, large and small. I don’t begrudge non-intrusive advertising that tries to be somewhat related to what I’m reading. If I’m reading a page that’s talking about, for example, astronomy, advertisements for telescopes would be on-topic and related. So long as they’re not obnoxious, don’t blink, flash, pop-up, expand, make noise, or cover/crowd out content, I’m ok with that. If ads for teeth whitening or weight loss come up, that irritates me. If I’m reading a gunblog and there’s an ad for ammo, that’s fine…indeed, I might click the ad to see if the site in question has good deals. If the ad’s for some new TV show, I could care less.

Over the last few years, I’ve routinely used Adblock Plus, an outstanding Firefox add-on that allows one to block ads on pages one views. All this time browsing the web ad-free has been fantastic, and really sped up my browsing.

However, I realize that my actions may have resulted in a financial loss to several of the sites I visit, so I’ve decided to do an experiment: I’ve turned off Adblock Plus and removed the “opt-out” cookies from various advertisers³ so they can “target” ads toward my “interests”. Google makes it really easy to view and modify the categories and interests that Google associates with your ad-viewing habits. Cool.

First impressions:

• Holy moly, there’s a lot of obnoxious ads out there. I really don’t care that George Clooney and Anne Hathaway are “geeks”, nor is it relevant to my interests that a site exists for “Geek 2 Geek Dating”. Such ads are not remotely related to my reading of the news. Flash ads can go die in a fire, as can ones that play sound.
• On the other hand, there’s a lot of great, on-topic ads. Take, for example, this page. The site allows car owners to enter information about their fill-ups and does some neat stuff with it. On the left there is a color-and-style-matched Google text ad that blends in with the overall layout. At the time of my browsing, it was showing subtle ads for Honda Civics (hey, the page it’s being displayed on is about the Civic! Fancy that.), Hyundai Elantras (a competitor to the Civic), and a few other car-related ads. Not obnoxious at all, and relevant to the topic at hand. I approve.

I’ll continue this experiment for the next week or two, after which I’ll turn back on the various protective measures. Based on my results over the experimental period, I’ll consider allowing ads on specific sites that I frequent and that don’t have annoying ads. Those that have irritating ads will be blocked.

Additionally, I’m going to make the following statement: unless it’s absolutely necessary from a financial/operational standpoint⁴, I will not display ads on this site. In the event that I do display ads, they will be subtle and as on-topic and relevant as I can make them. Fortunately, this site requires on the order of $20/year for hosting, domain costs, and other related expenses, so such expenses are barely worth talking about.

That said, I do use services like SiteMeter, Google Analytics, and QuantCast to get some interesting information about visitors. Basically, I like to see where visitors are coming from, mostly so I can edit a post to say “Hi, visitors from [referring site]!”. That, and I like looking at shiny graphs. Having a third-party service do this is far less of a hassle than analyzing server logs, though I’m considering turning off Google Analytics, as it doesn’t do quite what I want it to. I don’t seek to gather any personal information. Hopefully this is not objectionable.

1. “Obama wants you to go back to school!”, “Obama wants you to refinance your house!”, etc. [↩]
2. If I was, I’d be talking to my doctor, not clicking an ad. [↩]
3. This add-on for Firefox makes your choices permanent, even if you clear cookies. [↩]
4. Or someone is willing to give me an absolutely outrageous sum of money. [↩]

Sorry for the recent downtime.

My host says the explanation for “Saturday morning’s downtime was caused by the hardware failure of a not-as-redundant-as-claimed power supply. Monday morning’s downtime was caused by a software error triggered by the rebuild process that occurred after the system came back online. On Saturday morning, we fixed the hardware problem, and now we are addressing the software problem.”

Things are stable now, and they’ll be moving the disk cluster from the existing hardware onto new hardware in the near future, hopefully increasing reliability.

Whee.