At least that’s the theory…. someone has done a google sponsored search with a black background thinking they’ll save 750 megawatt hours a year. Blackle.com is the site. Of course, I don’t know if there REALLY would be that significant a difference in consumption (margin of error in observation equipment?) I REALLY would like to know how long they estimated traffic stays at google as that would make the result vary widely anyway. If the average house used 24kwh per day (I have NO idea, just a number that seems like a decent baseline… that’s 8Mwh/year… so that would be the equivalent of less than 100 houses power consumption… of course, these are just off the cuff estimates as well (just like theirs.)
Month: July 2007
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Residential VOIP
Of course, we’ve heard of skype, vonage, and our dsl/cable providers hawking VOIP. I thought I’d make a note of this one though as the name is a bit more obscure… packet8
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HP Vista CLFS.SYS error
I’ve had a fun time this week dealing with a STRANGE Vista problem on an HP computer (I doubt it’s HP specific, but don’t know for certain.) The error goes like this… “A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.” “CLFS.sys” “Page_Fault_in_nonpaged_area” “If this is the first time you’ve seen this stop error screen….” And the stop error code looks like this “stop 0x00000050” The real problem is everything tried leads to the same place.
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Bellsouth/ AT&T mail problems
I would dare say there are more than a couple people “out there” right now that are puzzled as to WHY some of their mail is bouncing back to them as being rejected. Right now I’m talking about Bellsouth / AT&T mail users…. it appears that this week AT&T is in the process of transitioning it’s outbound mail relays to a new address block. 207.115.11.51 – 207.115.11.56 – the names of these machines are fmailhost01.isp.att.net – fmailhost06.isp.att.net …. Yesterday I noticed 4/5/6 had been moved – today 3 has been moved over and I noticed only because a test message that I RUN through a (formerly) bellsouth system bounced back and made it through…. The problem is the address space that AT&T is making use of used to be in the dial up block of their service and SEVERAL online blacklists have not been notified of the change. It is not possible for an end user to FIX this problem, AT&T technicians need to contact http://www.au.sorbs.net/ (SORBS) Among other locations to help their customers. The only thing techs in control of individual mailservers can do is whitelist the new AT&T addresses. (Well you could disable whitelisting altogether, but that would probably be a big HELLO SPAM).
It may be even murkier a situation – they may using BOTH sets of IP addresses (old and new) for the time being… here are two log entries that would seem to confirm that…
Jul 25 16:47:09 xxxxx postfix/smtpd[7812]: disconnect from fmailhost03.isp.att.net[207.115.11.53]
Jul 25 16:47:09 xxxxx postfix/smtpd[7812]: connect from fmailhost03.isp.att.net[204.127.217.103]Strange… They may have some scheme to help work around this – because the connect from the 204. address immediately followed a DNS block of the connect from the 207 range address.
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Why? (Why couldn’t AT&T make sure their mail servers weren’t using old dialup IPs that are blacklisted….)
Why do I always wind up being the one to discover problems? …. Today in checking mail I found a mail that had bounced back from one of my clients that uses bellsouth… Now bellsouth has recently been bought by AT&T and it appeared as though the mail had been rejected because the mailserver trying to deliver it was in an email blacklist. *(What – a bellsouth mailserver in a blacklist?) Well, we’ve gone through this before with some of the passive blacklists where people might relay junk through their isp, but… on searching the AT&T outbound mailserver 207.115.11.54 was in the dial up block lists at sorbs and nomorefun…. (as was 207.115.11.55) These seem to be the new fmailhost04.isp.att.net and fmailhost05.isp.att.net outbound mail machines.
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Middle Ages Tech support – early books
I guess anytime technology changes it takes a bit of getting used to…. this video was recommended to me by a customer.
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Graphviz and dot
I’ve been puzzled a bit by the graphing output of gramps – it leaves me with a file with a .dot extension that I didn’t know quite what to do with. It opened in text editors as just markup, no image viewers I used seemed to like it, so I researched graphviz (as that is what is used to make the dot file…) and found that there are ways to get an image out of a dot file… (the easiest is a command-line $dot -Tsvg strangedotfile.dot>strangedotfile.svg ) which should give you a scalable vector image with the same information as the .dot output (of course you can use -Tpng to specify png as well.) (BTW, the default settings with gramps give you a single page maximum so things may be VERY scrunched to fit in.)