Just updated some information on the Virtualization page adding some information about virtualbox which I have spent some time with lately.

I’ve also had a big vpn/dd-wrt project going which I’ve teased out a bit of information on my dd-wrt and openvpn pages. I haven’t given our “recipe” for it yet, but it’s a vpn that can bridge between any two networks (regardless of network address collision issues…. well there is a small subset of cases where we could still find network address collision, but it’s much more robust than anything else I’ve done in that area.

I’ve also added a bit to my Online Virtual Servers page. I’ve been trying out gigenetcloud as an alternative to slicehost/vps.net – not for any particular reason, just to have options. Their billing is a slightly different model which may be of interest to many. By the way, I am still a HUGE fan of VPS.net. I can’t recommend them ENOUGH as a cloud VPS provider. It seems as though they are always rolling out great new features and they have great pricing and data centers in so many locations to boot. Their setup is soooooo resilient and their support is superb.

I think I’ll have to hold off on any of the other stray thoughts that I’ve had the last few weeks to post here as it’s looking like another busy stretch… here’s wishing everyone a good start to summer and a good 4th of July coming up!

Scanners, Virtual Machines, more bash scripting, malware and openvpn are just a few of the things I’ve been hip deep in over the last few weeks. Things have been (and continue) fairly busy….. but I’m hoping to get a few things organized and posted here in the next few days to serve as a dumping of links of the different trains of thought that have been going on (and for future reference.)

I don’t think it will happen today as there are a few more irons in the fire still (although it might happen today yet)…. Update – it will probably be several posts scattered over a few days (and some may be updates to existing pages.)

I’ll go ahead and warn you this is a very non-technical oriented post – just some musings about science fiction – life, health and a few other things including this site and my computer work.

The Doctor Who series is premiering the finale of The End of Time tonight and I’m greatly anticipating that although it’s the end of David Tennant’s run as the Doctor. I’ll be sorry to see him go, but I think I can say that about most of the Doctor’s I’ve seen portrayed over the years with maybe one exception. Anyway in the lead up to this finale there have been hints that “your song is ending” which in many ways resonated with me as well. In many ways I feel as though the way I’m doing what I do is going to be changing dramatically……

Many of you that have stopped by before or know me personally know that I was diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease a couple years ago now (2 years December). Leading up to that I had roaring and pressure in my right ear accompanied with hearing loss, random dizziness and the occasional vertigo spell on a fairly random and unpredictable basis. I would go weeks without hearing out my right ear, sometimes a week or to of mild to moderate dizziness and the stray “swhirling vortex of death” that I’ve called vertigo.

There seemed to be a correlation to my allergies, I was tested and started immunotherapy (allergy shots) for dust mites which was my more severe reaction. So, for the better part of two years I’ve been getting those shots every other week and going through a cycle as follows. Day 1 get shot, day 2 feel like I’ve run a marathon on day 1, day 3 exhaustion continues. Day 4 ear starts to roar. Day 5-7 intensity in ear increases, day 8 dizziness, fatigue, day 9-14 symptoms subside and rest up for next shot.

I should note that has been an improvement on where I was prior to this because when I first went to the allergist I couldn’t recall the last time I was able to hear out my right ear. So, those symptoms have improved and are at the very least more predictable (which in some ways is a good thing.)

Unfortunately though the way I have worked for the last 13 or so years has been far more demanding. Computer appointments are the most demanding usually requiring correspondence, research and then of course the onsite time. Everyone wants things done YESTERDAY and some would be willing to come and drive you out even if you had malaria to try to get you to fix their problems (and complain if it’s not finished right.) Don’t misunderstand, I am very fortunate to have some very kind, understanding customers, but you know how the world is, there’s always someone that would come and ask you a work question on your deathbed. “One more quick question…”

Between the computer work, piano lessons and my other work (including online projects amounting to around 30 or so sites….) I’ve been typically working 60-80 hour weeks. Not that I’ve done that for ALL of 13 years, but in recent years that’s been the norm. When I’m feeling well that’s fine in a way…. I guess one of the things I identify with about the Doctor Who series is I’m fascinated with most everything and love the “thrill of the hunt” of solving problems/etc. Drop in, fix something and leave…… I know, it doesn’t always work out that way, but….

Sometimes (like around Christmas/New Years) I’ve been able to force a 2 week break from the race that has been my work life. That has worked out well and even this year has been able to somewhat recharge my batteries.

However, in October I started having other symptoms that were hard to explain. Really some of these go back a bit longer than that. Nerve pains and numbness in one thigh which was diagnosed as a simple injury to the nerve. I was told to take B12 and it would heal slowly. (That was April.) In October though I started having left hand shooting, electric pains which I at first thought may have been an injury climbing up and down out of the floor doing PC installs. I asked my Physician about it and he did a couple screenings and suggested that it would heal slowly. I had suspected carpal tunnel as a possibility although thought I always have a fairly neutral/good hand position for most of what I do….. piano/typing/etc. But I god a wrist brace to sleep with for a while to see if immobilizing it helped. It didn’t and what’s worse my right hand started doing similar things. By Thanksgiving it was more than just my hands… all my knuckles have a dull ache, my lower back, my upper back and neck is sore and stiff, my shoulders hurt, my feet, knees, hips. Really and truly at this point in time every joint in my body aches. It’s typically a bit worse in the mornings or if I’ve been in one position for too long, but sometimes something just suddenly hurts for no apparent reason.

Add to that…. I’ve had burning sensations in my left and right arms on occasion where the skin was painful to the touch. I had to roll up my sleeves as it was like having a bad sunburn. Fortunately those have been short lived experiences, but the joint pain persists. I was realizing just a bit before Thanksgiving that it hurt to grasp the steering wheel and doing small work with my hands was either 1) too painful or 2) at risk of being too painful to really want to attempt it.

I turned down several appointments (laptop work) in large part because of this. I wanted to see if things could get better over the Thanksgiving break. I thought if I rested more and “caught up” things would get better. They haven’t. After Thanksgiving I had just enough in the “gas tank” to make it to the piano lessons I had scheduled (I have about 23 students now), a few high priority computer appointments and tried to email the others that had called to let them know it would be January before I could schedule.

I’ve rested up somewhat over the Christmas/New Years break and visited my GP again. He suggested about 5 blood tests for Thyroid, B12 level, Folates, and two Rheumatoid related tests. While the tests are not back yet, and the Rheumatoid related tests are not definitive I’m suspecting that Rheumatoid arthritis may be the culprit… the symptoms seem to match. He did refer me to a Rheumatologist and it may be 6-8 weeks before I’m scheduled, but at least the ball is rolling to try to figure out what’s going on.

So…. in a way my song is ending…. I have spent a good part of the last year or two working my tail off through the week to keep up with Piano, computer work, and my online work only to spend most of the weekend sleeping and resting up for the next week. When I say most of the weekend sleeping that is not far from the truth. I remember weekends that I slept until 12 or so and then took an afternoon nap 3-5 or so and went back to bed around 12 midnight…. so what is that up for about 10 hours? On top of that I didn’t even feel like doing much of anything in those 10 or so hours but sitting around. In the new year I really can’t keep doing things the way I have. I have been trying already to prune back to the things that 1) I like the most and 2) are the most cost/benefit effective. I like solving computer problems, but am at a point where I will not be able to respond nearly as quickly as I have in recent years. So, there are a few businesses that I’m making more of a priority to continue supporting and a few individuals, but just looking at what I have ready to do in January I am essentially booked through the end of the month unless something ELSE happens. That is taking into account the people I’ve already talkd to and will be contacting this coming week for scheduling.

I have moved more towards piano lessons in the last year and that is actually a good thing as they’re more sedate/less stressful and usually if you’re sick they don’t want you to drag out anyway because (“oh we’ve already had that”)….. This site? This site has had a high benefit for me as have all of my online work and I expect to continue posting here and working on those sites as I’m able. But…. depending on what I’m told by the Physicians…… there may be long absences here because there are a lot of things that I want to do before time robs me of my ability to do them all……

Back to your regularly scheduled content……

I wish this were a computer related post. Then I could give instructions, a removal tool suggestion and all would be better, but this is health related. For the last week and a little bit our household has been dealing with the current H1N1 outbreak on a very personal level. Friday October 23rd my wife took our 20 month old to the doctor for his seasonal flu shot and while there found that they do have the H1N1 vaccine on hand. Given his age he would need it in two doses separated by a month. So, she went ahead and got him the first shot that day and scheduled a time for our 8 year old to get the H1N1 shot and a followup for our youngest. At this time we are outside the age range that they are allowing to get the vaccination. Saturday (the next day) our oldest came down with a sudden high fever. Actually I think it started with chills. He slept a good part of the day and that night we made plans to take him to urgent care the following day (Sunday) if his fever continued. It did. Urgent care (5 hour or so visit I think) confirmed H1N1 via a nose swab and prescribed tamiflu.

He continued with fever and rest most of Sunday and got his first dosage of Tamiflu in and within about 6 hours was starting to sound more like normal. He told us that one student had missed Thursday and Friday with Swine flu and so we estimated that he picked it up Wednesday prior and started his symptoms 3 days later. Well. Monday I had a sore throat and cough which was a bit different from his symptoms. He had a cough after the fever onset. I went ahead with my work on Monday. Tuesday my wife had a fever and aches although at the time she didn’t admit that she was getting sick. Wednesday our oldest went back to school as he had been without a fever for 24 hours and both my wife and I had a fever and were definitely sick. She went to the doctor and was told that the CDC is limiting tamiflu to the very young, very old and immune compromised so… they were surprised our oldest got it and the only thing they could suggest was to take ibuprofin and acetamenophine (advil/tylenol) to combat the fever and aches.

My cough had continued and entire ribcage has felt as though I’ve been used as a piñata. Unfortunately just two weeks ago I had some sort of upper respiratory bug (which until this week I had thought was a mild H1N1) during which I apparently reinjured a rib (cracked several years back). I had been prescribed codeine for the coughing and that has helped tremendously. My wife has not had quite as much coughing, but has had a fever every day from Tuesday through yesterday (Saturday). Our youngest, the hope was, had enough of the vaccine in his system that he wouldn’t get it. Unfortunately, he did anyway. So, Saturday (yesterday) we made the trip back to urgent care. (His fever started Friday night at 7:30). Another 6 hours to confirm what we knew and get the 20 month old a prescription for tamiflu.

Today I feel worse than yesterday, probably because it was such a long day waiting at the Urgent Care. I’ve also tried to avoid the tylenol/advil today. My cough is still fairly active (tomorrow will be a week since the dry cough started). My throat still hurts (at this point it feels bruised though). Fortunately both of our children seem to be doing much better thanks to the tamiflu. (Our oldest bounced back really after about four days total. He did miss another day of school later in the week, but after his first day back seemed tired out.)

We learned that my sons class had 10 students missing on Tuesday of this last week (out of 21) and 7 missing on Wednesday (don’t know what, if any, overlap.) It has been at least 3 weeks since I remember first hearing of the H1N1 cases in his school and about 6 weeks I think since I remember hearing of an acquaintance of a coworker that had H1N1. Unfortunately my oldest missed the seasonal flu vaccination at his school (Tuesday while he was out.) So, now we are trying to find him a shot for that. (According to one sign I saw the seasonal flu vaccine clinic at one local drug store has been canceled due to a demand for them to shift production to H1N1 vaccine.

Needless to say at this point we WON’T be getting an H1N1 shot, we’ve had the real thing. I read in the news this weekend that there are expected to be 50 million vaccines available by mid November and 150 million by mid December for H1N1. Get that barn door closed GOOD and tight! Judging from most of what I can see we are currently at a peak for this pandemic. At least here in the US I suspect by mid November most of the country will have already been exposed to H1N1. Most of the CDC data indicates widespread activity in most every state. A survey from the first weeks of October reflected that 1 out of 5 children in the country had experienced flu symptoms… I suspect if the survey were at the end of the month we may be up to 3 out of 5 or more. A survey by the end of November I suspect would show the outbreak on the decline. What’s sad is that immunity from a vaccination can take several weeks to build up. Which means if you get a shot in mid-November (assuming you haven’t caught H1N1 by then) you won’t really have immunity until about the end of the month/start of December.

I’m thinking that the seasonal flu may be a bit worse this year because all of the focus has been on H1N1 and the seasonal flu shots have been in short supply due to the rush to shift production over to H1N1 vaccines now.

I am just thankful that this pandemic has not been as deadly as it first appeared in the spring. It is evident that we are NOT prepared to deal with pandemic flu as it seems each and every measure has been too little, too late. I think the restriction on tamiflu came about Monday (one day after our oldest had to visit urgent care.) If he had been sick one day later he would have had to go without tamiflu and judging from how long we’re taking to get over this without tamiflu, he would have had a good 4-6 days of fever and then some.

What mystifies me is that tamiflu seems to be something that can be manufactured regardless of the flu strain. It doesn’t (at least from what I have seen) have to be custom designed for a specific type of flu. We have known this has been coming since spring and apparently still there are shortages. The vaccine, I do understand takes time to create and has to be designed specifically to the strain that is active. I hope public health officials, government leaders, etc. are taking notes though because if this were more deadly a pandemic there would be a lot to answer for our unpreparedness. I think there likely is a lot to answer for in spite of this being less deadly than first thought.

This has been an even MORE fun week for me due to my Meniere’s symptoms which were acting up last weekend and I had started a round of prednisone for. With all of the congestion – those symptoms haven’t cleared up so I have the ocean roaring in my ear at the moment as I wonder if I’m well enough to make my scheduled appointments tomorrow. Updates may be added as necessary……

I’ve been running a series of how to remove articles related to some of the current nasty rogue security applications that has really been getting a lot of traffic the last week or so. I can see that there’s definitely demand for more. Frankly, I hate these programs that claim so many problems (that it brings) and offer to fix it if you pay. I’ve made some links to these recent ones at the bottom of my antivirus removal tool page. I’ve also put up a page on ppt security – mostly centered around powerpoint security.

So, what might you expect to see in coming days? I’ll probably be doing some more in the malware removal series because there are some particularly nasty bugs out there and a thirst for some sort of guidance in removing them. I suspect beyond that I will be focusing more on antivirus and firewall areas because those seem to be in the highest demand right now (judging by the traffic I see here.)

Just a quick note that I’ve updated the Antivirus Removal Tool list to include VIRUS removal tools. (I originally intended the list to be those utilities to clean up a system so that it could deal with a fresh install of an antivirus product. (Can’t count how many times I’ve had to use Norton’s tool.)) Anyway, it’s such a popular page, I thought it would be a bit more complete to add links to the antivirus vendors free tools for removing viruses/virii.

I just wanted to mention that I’ve added a new page with a rundown on the various Voice Broadcast or Voice Blast services out there on the net. It was only recently that I came to know these services as anything other than automated outbound voice messages as I think I referred to them in my old voiceshot review back in 2008 when I first ran across voiceshots’ service. I have heard them called robocalls as well….

Anyway, I’ve heard less than great things from others about Voiceshots support and so I wanted to get a more thorough look at who else provides similar services and how their offers compare. (It’s a sub-page of my new VOIP services page.

Sorry for the vague title, but there are various thoughts floating around at the moment. The first is a big thanks to the support at Westhost for recovering my VPS over the last weekend. I had started an automatic upgrade of wordpress in one of the sites hosted in this vps, it hung… so I ssh’ed in and found the vps was essentially ruined – it managed to wipe out quite a bit. I’m not sure if it was a coincidence or if the wordpress upgrade was really the culprit, but it managed to destroy quite a bit. The support at westhost though had things back up within 24 hours. It wasn’t just a matter of the site and database getting deleted, but files in /etc were gone (mail configuration hostname resolution wasn’t working, scp wasn’t working…. it was trashed in a bad way.)

Anyway, I’ve still been tinkering with the free morse code mp3 ringtones. In particular I’ve been tinkering with the Text to morse code mp3 generator. I’ve been trying to add utf support. The backend generator does interpret morse for utf characters, I’ve managed to get a way to decode the url encoding if they’re placed in the text box, my big challange at the moment is the file name. I have to truncate the filename so that it’s not too long, but most everything I’ve tried to truncate counts bits instead of characters. Some, even if I tell it to count characters will assume that 1 character=1bit and I wind up with some of the utf characters cut short which gives unusual filename results. In the testing version of the script I’ve just decided to sanitize things by replacing an extended character with an x….

I may spend some time in the coming weeks here giving a peek behind the curtain at some of the scripts I’ve written for that site, or for some of those that I use myself to generate a morse code mp3 from an rss feed for instance. I’m a bit reluctant to get the code of the generator script out there though for concern that I haven’t dotted all the i’s so to speak.

I have noticed in the last few weeks that java updates on windows now clean up old versions of the java runtime. (At LAST.) Java traditionally left it’s old counterparts installed making you go through and manually remove the older version. Why remove the older version you ask? Well, the java runtime engine version can be specified by java code. The default is the most recent, but if someone wanted to do something mischievous, and take advantage of a vulnerability in an older release they could specify that release and if it was installed, then it doesn’t really matter that you’ve updated.

I did notice that it failed to remove something as old as, I think, update 5 of the latest version of the java runtime engine. (Current AFAIK is update 13.) So, it would be worth a check in your control panel/add remove programs to clean out the oldest ones and then in the future it should tidy up on it’s own. (THANK YOU SUN!)

I’ve got ideas for several fairly large pages here – collections of ideas in one place. For quite some time I was pretty fond of the blog post style of entries and for many things that makes sense, but…. there is also a place for collecting lot’s of information on a single topic on a single page so that you’re less likely to “lose anything…” Sometimes I feel like the blog posts are somewhat like a large and jumbled junk drawer and the pages are neat organized boxes with labels telling exactly what is inside.

I should also mention that this site will likely be on the move soon. My webhost provider is in the midst of transitioning away from their current vps model and it sounds as though things will be heading towards more of a shared hosting style setup. This (and many of my other sites) have become complex enough in their demands that I’m thinking I’ll be moving many to a Xen vps hosted environment. I’ve used the morse code ring tones site as a first experiment of my own hosting in that xen environment and among other things I’m blown away by the responsiveness. It will (hopefully) mean a performance boost if things work out right. I haven’t finalized plans yet, but I think that’s the direction I’ll be heading. It looks as though it’s going to be a cost increase for me though as much as 50% more for my overall hosting, so…. I’ll be looking for an overall improvement in speed/responsiveness if that’s the case to at least make it worth spending more.

It seems as though there are a few other notes I was going to write here, but at the moment I can’t recall what they would be….

I’ve spent a bit of time over the last week putting some scripting together to build a new website. The site is morseringtones.com and as you might imagine there are morse code mp3 ringtones available there for download. I’ve put together a list of over 9100 names and there are 4 ringtones available for each name. These are played at 4 different speeds in morse code. For the quicker speeds the names are repeated multiple times to make sure you have a better chance to hear them if you’re using them on a cell phone. I’ve put things up to where you can submit ideas for further names if you like. I may be adding prosigns at some point in the near future and at some point may make it possible for people to go ahead and generate custom morse ringtones from a web interface. So if you want a morse code ringtone for your phone step over and take a look.

I’ve also bundled up the whole collection of them for download via lulu.com, more details can be found on the Purchase morse mp3 ringtones colleciton page.

In the future here I may detail some of the scripts that I’ve used to build this site. It’s all built on a linux server ( the generation of 9100 ringtones at 4 different speeds took about 6 hours.) I’m sure the scripts could have been designed differently but was quite proud of putting together the process for making the whole site so that future maintenance is minimal.

Anyway …-.-

I’ve started using a “universal translator” plugin for wordpress across most of my sites lately. In the past I’ve seen many people using google or bablefish translation to view pages (according to the logs.) I thought it would be a great convenience and perhaps open up my posts to be searched by viewers who read other languages. I’ve studied Spanish for quite some time and previously have studied German and French. Since, the universal translator plugin is based on google’s translation engine I know it’s not going to be perfect. But, I did a bit of proofreading in the languages I could and from what I could see it was more or less intelligible (obviously there were some problems, but I’ve seen (MUCH) worse translations of Japanese news-stories to English..)

Anyway, the nature of the plugin is that it’s not possible to manage the translations (they’re dynamically pulled from your pick of several translation services.) I have had relatively NASTY feedback from one reader that the Danish version of the page was jibberish (gibberish?) and there should be a link to the original as it MIGHT make sense. Well, for those that are interested there are links on each page to the original as well as the various translations. Just look for the various flags in the sidebar. (I know a flag does not equal a language, but that is the way a good many sites do it and it makes sense to most everyone.) This, and my other sites are originally written in English. I would love to manually translate everything into other languages, but at present the time/expense of that is prohibitive so for the present time, machine translation is the only way we’ll have multi-language content here.

(The Spanish language translation alone could take me several years to complete the way my current schedule is….)

I hope viewers will appreciate at least the attempt to make this site more accessible.