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i guess i got everything i expected out of tonight’s speech by President Bush. i got the same thing i’ve been hearing for the last 6 or so months. few, if any hard facts flying in the face of credible reports from UN inspectors. Now, thanks to this threat of war, the UN inspectors have been instructed to leave Iraq (as well as the UN Food-for-Oil folks).

Congresspeople on both sides of the aisle are kicking in support for our troops — and why shouldn’t they? The troops do vote, after all. I say we support our troops better by trying to get them the hell out of there, and not dying because of a squandered non-attempt at diplomacy.

Krikey. We’ve pushed away a good number of allies (in the UN and otherwise) that would have helped us with Iraq after we steam-roll over them. Our economy is flagging, talk of more tax-cuts are on the way, and this war and subsequent “re-stabilization” [attempt] is going to cost us a pretty, pretty penny that we just don’t have.

What the hell happens long-term? That’s what I’m truly worried about. I could care less if I have to shiver my way through a SEVERE terror alert, but if my children and children’s children have to live through international isolation and hatred… that is something I just can’t stand for. That’s all speculation, for sure! I don’t know whats going to happen… but I know that we aren’t appeasing anyone like Hitler. I know that North Korea and possibly Iran are far more feasible nuclear threats. I know that weapons inspections were continuing at an accelerated pace (albeit through increased military pressure). How will this all play out? I can’t say, but from my meager information, I don’t think that attacking Iraq is going to stop a terrorist from gaining WMDs and attacking America. War is not solved with war.

flew a my herring at lunch a little today! sporadic thermals, and a couple of multi-minute flights over the building. good stuff altogether.

First up, a couple of NEW NEW NEW galleries! Saturday, the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in the Highlands was all that I hoped it could be! We met Geoff and Cabrina down near the Outlook (where she lives), and I was greeted in her English garden with a fistful of homemade beer (nummy!), and then we went up to the parade where we met Matt and Sara (and Kelly, who was waiting for me).

Later that very day, Kelly and I took a little stroll Down by the River. It was fun.

This morning you should…
watch the new Strongbad short, then play the
Trogdor Video Game!! “Stomp 10 Peasants to Achieve Burnination!”

I run a mail server on linux. the mail daemon is Postfix. the H Dizzle asked me about SPAM filtering. Spamassassin does a good job of killing SPAM. Google found me a nice HOWTO on using SpamAssassin with Postfix. I tested, it worked. Yay!

Heh, yeah, well…

From whitestripes.net:

WHITE STRIPES TO ROCK CONAN

At the end of April, to celebrate the release of Elephant, Jack and Meg will be performing on the Conan O’Brien show. Thats the good news. The great news is they will not be on just one night, not even two. But all week! Yea, you heard me correctly, they will be the house band for Conan, performing for one week in late April. Keep checking back here for the exact dates. What are you waiting for? Get those VCR’s fired up and ready to record!

Jackson, Kelly, and I went on the hunt for more geocaches on Sunday — caches were found, pictures were taken, llamas were petted.

The caches:
Lynn’s Paradise Cafe
Joe Creason Nature Reserve (now with more LLAMAS!)
Tyler Park
Seneca G.C. / Bowman Field

Navigator extraordinaire Jackson has also updated his geocaching gallery with the new pics!

when I went to go upload a new gallery today, Gallery told me I had a folder that it didn’t create in the albums/ directory. Low and behold, it was some “warez” directory with an MP3 recorder or some junk in it. Doing a little more research, I find that there is a phpshell script in there (so that your browser acts like a shell), an ftp script to download a PHP Exploit Lab script.

Well, scanning my Apache logs I find that the culprits came from Russia, or at least were using dialups in Russia. The offending hosts:

213.158.2.85
82rez.telegraph.spb.ru
213.134.206.99
161ppp.telegraph.spb.ru
85rez.telegraph.spb.ru
160ppp.telegraph.spb.ru

Further, some of the referrers for these hits lead me to this URL (a forum), which is another exploited Gallery. ( some ICQ numbers of folks on that board include: 2243057, 321381, 118407481)

So, I check out Gallery’s website — and first notice this security notice about a possible security hole. Turns out, it’s not a security hole in Gallery, but in any shared webserver. Well, that IS true. However, what DOESN’T help is that there WAS an exploit with version 1.3.2, which I was running. I’m assuming this exploit allowed for the upload of a file, namely phpshell.php, and thus… script kiddies from Mother Russia had their day. Their day as an unprivileged user, mind you.

Gallery x1.3.2 exploit

I received an email from a fellow geocacher who saw Jackson and I down at Brown Park, and mentioned he saw a man and a woman poking around a cache. Well, at first I thought — “Hey! I’m ALL MAN, man!”, but then looking at Jackson’s photos of our geocaching, I realized that from 300 yards, my sunglasses on my head do look like a fasionable hair-clip. Oh well. Peep his photos for more.

Jackson and I did a little geocaching on Saturday. What is geocaching, you say? Geocaching is finding hidden treasure with a GPS device, essentially. Someone plants a little something somewhere, records the latitude and longitude thanks to their GPS receiver, and then tells others. Yay! We hit 4 out of 5 of the caches. Music in the Brown, Stroll Along – Farnsley Park, Des Pres Park, Pee Wee Park, and the appropriately named String Along a Broken Bridge (which we didn’t find).

Also included — Grandma Betty’s 70th Birthday Fiesta and Kelly and I spend a lovely Valentines Day at the airport.

So I played a bit of Freelancer last night, and despite early warnings of its demise, I must say that this game is great. There is something about space-trading/dogfighting games that really grabs me — and I played Privateer quite a bit in my youth. Freelancer is more of the same, and BETTER. In Privateer you could pick your ship and outfit it will all sorts of firepower and such, and Freelancer does much the same. Your alignment with various groups in the game is affected by what you blow up, and who you screw over/do nice things for.

As far as the dogfighting goes — well, I will tell you that this game has NO JOYSTICK SUPPORT. No, at first glance, that’s fairly disappointing, right? Wrong. The mouse control for flying is really quite smooth and easy to do. You dogfight third-person from your ship and the handy targeting system (how far should I lead my firing to hit the enemy?) is challenging enough to stay interesting. The environment in which you play is quite open and large — you can explore all you want, or you can use the “space highway” system within the game to get where you want to go in a hurry. In relation to dogfighting — whereas in Privateer you couldn’t “abort”, that is to say, run away, from a fight — in Freelancer, if you are fast enough you can do damn well what you please!

There is a multiplayer side to this thing, replete with an in-game browser. The server for the game comes along with the install, and there are already a number of servers out there to play on. I can’t really say any further than that as I’ve only played single-player so far, but I’m assuming it’s a free-for-all out in cyberspace, yay!

Oh, I bet you are wondering what kind of monster system you’ll need to play this thing, right? Well, the specs call for a 16 meg video card on a 600 Mhz machine, and they are probably right — I’ve got a 1300 Mhz machine with an ATI RADEON 8500 card, and the game is smoooooth to me. The graphic in this game are not simple, but they are certainly CLEAN. The planets and spaceports are not extremely detailed, but the “fog” or “particle cloud” effects look quite good… altogether a nice, clean presentation.

Anyway, that’s my horribly written pseudo-review. I give it a thumbs-up so far.