Info
2007-03-30 result of the half marathon
The half marathon was great but I knew before I took part that I had problems with my ankle and shin. What I didn't remember was that my knee can give me some jip some times. I've booked a physiotherapy appointment on Monday, but I'm going to try and get as much time in at the pool as possible to try and loosing things up, or work some gently exercise into it.
What is really annoying for me right now is that I cant really do any work in the weights room, and I'm pretty sure that I cannot, or should not do any running. I tried on Wednesday and I think I just made things a little worse. Who knows, lets hope it's all in my head, but I'm pretty sure it's not as I can definitely hear some funny sounds when I crouch, little pops and crackles here and there in the joint's movement.
2007-03-25 so... it begins
Wow! Just finished the Reading Half Marathon. It was a brilliant race, loads of spectators all around the course cheering us all on! I had a superb time!
Starting tomorrow I am sure the pain will make itself known. Right now my knee feels as though there is something weird in it's movement. I guess I will have to see a physiotherapist as it might just be all in my head and the odd popping could be normal behaviour.
Secondly, I put together a php class for creating submit links. It works rather simply. The code is here: submit_class.php.
2007-03-24 what is a broken 360?
Tomorrow is the great Reading Half Marathon (RHM). I've done *some* training. Never enough though is it. I know some people have trained six months for this event. Others have spent their lives training. I have spent a few weeks and built my training up to 10 miles.
Unfortunately I have hurt my ankle Thursday night, squeezing in some extra training. I caught a bit of a cold last Sunday and I think generally being run down a little this injury occurred. This week I really should have been getting more sleep in preparation.
A friend told me his 360 is broken. I asked if he has two 180's.
2007-03-23 the night of no keys
As Sunday draws closer I sent a sponsorship request to the company email list requesting for people to donate money to Diabetes UK if I complete the Reading Half Marathon. This of course meant that about five or six people responded to this and pledged some funds, whilst I went on a trip around every desk I could to ask for sponsorship. I had a very good turn out, almost everyone agreed to sponsor me and Diabetes UK will be very pleased with the donations.
As lunch time approached myself and two other colleagues decided to play the weekly routine basket of golf balls at the driving range. We went in the best car available (belonging to Jim).
The day drew to a close and I found myself short by one set of car and house keys (and Tesco's loyalty barcode). I found myself walking between desk and car to retrace all my steps from the day. This is such a horrible feeling to be stuck without any means of transport and no means to enter the home.
My best efforts were made to raise people who I had been in contact with that day to see if they had seen my keys.
The following day (today) I had to double check everything that I could, including the driving range. It was entirely possible that I had removed my keys and put them to the side work my way through a basket of golf balls. As it turns out my keys must have fallen out of my pocket whilst on the way to or from the driving range, but even on my first day off from work this year, I still made my way to the office to collect my keys!
Just knowing my keys were safe was a huge weight lifted from my mind. Sadly it also meant that I could not get to my weekly Russian lesson. This is the second lesson that I have missed from the start of the course. Every lesson is so valuable though that I have probably missed several sections of dialogue.
2007-03-20 dealing with the spammer, part 4
Today I noticed a sharp spike in the number of messages the mail server had been processing. I knew immediately that something was up, but what could it be?
After a little hunting I notice that the number of messages in the mail queue was low, but the number of recipients was extremely high. So time to start greping for keywords in the header. After a little time I noticed that a common factor with several of the messages which could indicate who put the message in the queue. Great. Now I can grep the rest of the queue for the same keywords.
Again after a little while I had it pinned down. So I do the normal sequence of actions, stop the qmail-send program, remove the messages and start the send program again.
svc -d /service/qmail-send # wait a little svc -i /service/qmail-send rm -rf /var/qmail/queue/mess/appropriate message numbers svc -u /service/qmail-send
After doing this a few times to make sure all traces of the mail was gone, I noticed the same messages reappearing, at least I thought they were the same. Only to find that the spammer was logged into his mail account and was still sending messages!
What a swine! I remove the same messages again, changed the account passwords and started the queue up. What a pain this guy had become.
It's quite nice to catch the spammers in the process as one can fool around at this point, if possible and make the account respond with a warm message to say they should check their computer for viruses and worms :-).
Still today was something worthy of dusting off the rune stone of system administration practices.
2007-03-11 godaddy!
First we saw godaddy migrate to ms and now we see that there are patching issues surrounding the DST alterations for 2007.
To be quite honest, I cannot see why godady made this move to ms, other than perhaps to get a backhander. A serious move like this costs much money, it's really hard for an ISP to make money when the cost of hosting is driven up by the cost of the OS.
2007-03-07 xss vulnerability on ms site
See for yourself here, interesting how this has slipped through the cracks. Personally I'd hash all the articles in a table and reference the article content by ID rather than by URL.
2007-03-06 im in!
Looks like the BCS have approved my membership. That's pretty cool. So now I can put some more letters after my name. That's something that I've wanted since I was at college and the representative visited us during a tutorial. I'm well chuffed!
2007-03-03 pro membership
A short while ago I applied for membership with the BCS (British Computer Society) who are a professional body in the UK that industry workers can apply to be a member of in order to continue eduction and self development in addition to getting regular news and event bulletins.
Turns out today that I've been charged for the membership (which looks good), however, today is the 3rd day of March 2007, yet the money has left my account on 5th day of March 2007. How is this possible? I'm beginning to really, really hate banks (bar Lloyds/Nationwide).
More to the point, who gets the interest during this time. I'm pretty sure the BCS don't get the money until later this next week, maybe 5-6 days time.
web 2.0 in under 5 minutes
short sighted
A short while ago I spoke to a friend and told them that I was considering lasik eye surgery. My friend said that contacts where much better and that there is a large chance of complications from the surgery. So on this advice I proceed to Specsavers opticians.
So I arranged the sight test and the contact lens consultation (£37 total).
At the end of the test I was asked to read a piece of paper with the intended prescription glasses on, everything looked ok... Then the glasses were removed and I said "I can still read this ok!" to which the optician replied "well that is because you are short-sighted with astigmatism". This is a total surprise to me as I have worn my spectacles for nearly 20 years and never knew this.
The reason for this I think is because I wear my glasses from the moment I awake to the moment I go to sleep, so I have at most gone perhaps 10minutes without my glasses per day and I have never noticed... The only related memory I have is of being around six years old and not being able to see a school chalk board well.