Archive: General Site Info

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 tea…

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…

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 Doc…

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 househo…

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…

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 wi…

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…

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 starte…

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 availabl…

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 th…

In the last couple months I've been "farming out" several domains from the averyjparker.com site. I previously hosted my South Carolina Genealogy, North Carolina Genealogy and Online Radio TV sites a…

Everything seems to be back to normal now after the server upgrade and the migration of one of the "child" domains out of the account. I do have several other "child" domains that will be migrating o…

The South Carolina Genealogy Site is the first of my other sites I'm farming out to another server, so at the moment while dns settles that is redirecting here. Sorry for the inconvenience if you're …

I knew for some time that a server upgrade at my hosting provider was coming - they were essentially upgrading the underlaying software. (New versions of apache/php/etc. the entire system.) The origi…

I think things are settling back to where I'll be doing some more routine posting here. I know I've been sporadic for the last several months, but the truth is that at one point I had poured so much …

Update - you can follow more about my experiences with Meniere's Disease at my Meniere's diagnosis blog. Well... after several doctors visits, I have been diagnosed with Meniere's Disease. Let me bac…

As you can tell, it's been a little while since a post here. Partly due to health/partly due to being busy. I wanted to note a few upcoming posts are coming to round up a couple trains of thought tha…

I've got a home project to run more network cable here lately and found techtoolsupply to be an interesting resource for network and other cabling supplies. I don't recall who I ordered from last tim…

Deleting TONS of comment spam that had slipped in unnoticed in the last couple months. I may have to generically disable pingbacks as well as comments. (Sad...) I hope I haven't dumped legit comments…

The last few weeks have been fairly eventful and I've accumulated quite a few web pages open in tabs that I'm still holding open (just counted 49 tabs across two windows.) Many of these things are ju…

So... it's ~70 degrees out and springish I have network cables draped over my desk to support a couple systems that I'm imaging right now and am really not wanting to sit here, but... I do have a few…

Wow... just took a glance at the error_logs and saw numerous errors from Trackbacks and started browsing to find that the last few days we've been weathering a spam storm. Thanks to akismet and anoth…

Spam spam spam spam.... the last couple days have been busy for the akismet spam plugin for my sites. They've been catching a lot of spam comments it appears. Many of them (the comments) seem to be f…

It almost seems like I'm back to the 6-10+ posts I day I used to do around here... I should mention that I'm just clearing out a few things that I wanted to get posted and clean out the bazillion tab…

Yes, I'm still around and even though I haven't posted, it's been a busy few months. In some ways it's been very nice to not force myself to read through a couple hundred news feeds a day to keep up …

This is a fairly significant "state of this site" type post and well... if you're a usual visitor you might want to read/skim this one. It's been about 15 months or so since the last big redesign of …

As you mgiht can tell, I've been trying to "clear the deck" of posts that I've been meaning to put up. Some are just links to several pages that I've kept up for a few days because it was interesting…

I've been really itching to test this again since I first tried the Vista Beta. In my test of IE7 in the beta of Microsoft Vista, I found that this page came up as "Internet explorer cannot display t…

I've added yet another category for "data leaks". This is where I'll put news along the lines of X company leaked data on yyyyy customers. It's unfortunate that this is something that likely happens …

I've got a slew of articles open that I've been holding to post about. I've also got a few other things to post, so this may be a busy posting afternoon. There's quite a bit going on here, but things…

As I said, I mistakenly uploaded a page of links that I use for the main administration across many sites to this domain. Unfortunately, the server preferred using the index.html to the index.php tha…

I have a page that I've been working on that gives me direct links to the administration and stat pages for many sites including my own, but also those that I host. It also has links to various and s…

Some time back I complained about the Google indexing of the site after the Big Daddy upgrade. For a good while before Big Daddy, there was usually about a week delay between me posting and there bei…

The computer security landscape today is such that pretty much ALL software, whether it's Operating System, Office Suite, Web browser or device driver is at any given time "the weakest link". One of …

Just by way of information..... I've seperated out the www.computerrepairasheville.com and www.ashevillecomputerhelp.com domains now to point to a seperate web site with the main goal of simplifying …

I've been out of town for several days (about 4) and came back to a dying hard drive and a two day project, so.... I've not been able to get any updates here for a bit. So, hopefully I can start play…

I've detailed some of the struggles I had for a bit with FLOODS of comment spam. Details of the issue and a fix which has been rock solid for Wordpress can be found in the following posts (reverse ch…

From time to time I've done product reviews on this site and I'm getting ready to do a first impression review on something else. I'd like to take a step back though and give you my thoughts on produ…

Last week our Church held annual Vacation Bible School and I am just now catching up on some of the items I've been intending to post over that period, so.... today will likely be a fairly active pos…

I've tried to ask myself if I'd trust someone enough to let them run a remote session on my own desktop to solve a problem. I think the answer is "it depends". If you think about it, I do tech suppor…

So, I had the script all ready, I've got my x11vnc custom compiled to be as widely compatible as possible, I've tested thoroughly on the internal network. The next step was to test my x11vnc "one cut…

Well, I've got a nice way of doing "easy" one click (or one cut and paste) light desktop support for windows or linux, one uses ultravnc sc, the other uses x11vnc with a special wrapper script. So, w…

I've got to say, one of the things I really like about linux are the myriad of options for remotely administering a system. SSH is the one I use the most, but for the graphical you have x (especially…

As I said in the earlier posts, I was essentially looking for a "Single click" solution for linux VNC remote desktop support. A solution that doesn't require the remote support client to change firew…

So, the idea is that I wanted something "like" the Ultranvnc Single Click download, only for linux. The main idea being is that if someone is looking for a bit of desktop tech support on linux, we do…

Ok, some time back I'd done a writeup on UltraVNC SC, which is a nice customizable (windows version) VNC server that essentially let's someone doing remote support build their own downloadable .exe t…

It's funny, some days there seems to be nothing happen that really is outstanding or different, or noteworthy. I don't know, you see the same news stories, feel like you fix the same problems, etc...…

Well it looks as though the storms of Trackback and Comment spam that I mentioned last week have just about tailed off now. About 6200-6300 posts were reported as junk by akismet and the "other" spam…

This has been a slow posting week. Much slower than I had hoped across all the sites. The main reason is a stomach bug of sorts (flu?) Anyway, I managed to get a little work done yesterday and felt c…

This is interesting.... there's been a lot of frustration among some (myself included) with the current state of Googles site indexing. For a good while I've been able to consistently find ANY post o…

As I've already commented today.... there has been a massive trackback spam swarm going on the last 24 hours. I've now racked up 1300 or so in the Akismet filter on this site and another 150 or so on…

All of the the swarms of trackback spam seemed to last an hour give or take a few minutes, so it does look kind of like "rent-a-bot" activity, lots of different IP addresses, trackback spam sites see…

I seem to be getting the second flood of trackback spam attempts on the day. LOT's of ip addresses, from all corners of the globe - most seem to be casino-related trackback spam. I guess botnets are …

But perhaps you are not as powerful as the emporer has foreseen.... I just skimmed the stats and saw an abornmal spike in traffic over the last hour, so being curious.... I checked the server logs an…

If you know me.... you know I have a HARD time putting down a problem that's unsolved. Even if it's a problem that really doesn't have a solution (in my control at least)... I have a tendency to look…

This weekend has been a bit of an introspective for me on why google is still the primary search engine I use. I know, I've been a big "fan(?)" of google for quite some time, I've obviously incorpora…

I was just skimming a couple articles after noticing two sites that I had reported to google as having WRONG cache information had disappeared. It looks as though there is a certain amount of flux go…

I really like a lot of features about Wordpress. One is the ability to start a draft post and hang on to it indefinitely. If you haven't noticed, I've spent a good part of the afternoon cleaning out …

For around 3-4 months now I've had a REALLY annoying problem with the wordpress install on this site. Trackbacks suddenly stopped working. Somewhere around my 800th post or so while the WMF vulnerabi…

So, I spent the better part of the evening doing Wordpress updates to get 5 blogs up to v. 2.0.2 and now..... clamav has multiple vulnerabilities ............... oi.... now it's time to rebuild clama…

I had undertaken an update earlier this evening to a "sister site" here.... the onlineradiotv.com site had started out as a wordpress 2.0 site and I thought it would likely be the easiest to upgrade …

I remember a time when I enjoyed April Fools - when I was real little I'd try the outlandish "there's a tiger in the front yard" kind of stuff, later, perhaps more subtle.... but I've NEVER been a fa…

I feel like I've done this article so many times in the past.... there are so many things I'm hoping to post and time seems to evaporate before my very eyes. This afternoon I hope to be posting a few…

Well, it's annoying to me when my own computer has issues that I can't seem to track down and off and on for the last year I've had annoying seemingly random shut downs (I mean it's as if someone pul…

It seems I posted the 1000th article yesterday with the note on the recent IE vulnerability. (I wonder how many articles out of the 1000 were about IE vulnerabilities???) Anyway, nice round numbers l…

I've had a flood of spammy pings on one specific post. I've disabled ping backs on that post and will continue to disable pingbacks when I see spammish "abuse" of the concept. I'd certainly rather no…

I think it's time to pass along a long story of what's gone on over the last week or so here and some of the reasons there hasn't been anything posted. Generally, I would say that work has been busy,…

The last few days has been a situation of "too many things to do and not enough time". I've got a growing list of items that I am interested to post in coming days, but things have been busy enough t…

I've got a lot of posts related to shortwave radio and radio broadcasts online (and tv broadcasts online.) Which got me to thinking how I wanted to organize the information. There's a part of me that…

When I first checked this morning the site wasn't responding. According to the logs I got hammered last night from avantgo (2 requests a second?). (So a couple hundred requests over a couple minutes?…

I've just been back at appointments what - 2 days? And already I've got a ton of issues to detail. I usually don't get into details of everything I run into because many times it's rather tedious iss…

Sometime over the last 2 or 3 days trackback pings stopped working for me. I didn't notice until today. I think the hexblog may have been the first one to choke the queue, but I've spent the evening …

Well last week was technically my "vacation" from computer work.... it didn't quite turn out that way, but I did enjoy what I got to do, although I would much rather the WMF exploit had not come abou…

I've been tinkering with placement of Google Search boxes on the site. These days, with a google search box in Firefox, I don't think about the convenience factor of putting it in the page too much, …

I hope that you all enjoy a very Happy New Year. I probably should have had this post go out at 00:00 GMT, but... I thought I'd post it using the server local time....

For those that read this I'd like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I have several posts scheduled to come out each day through the 1st of the New Year, but will likely not be a…

I'll likely be adding a few more categories to better be able to organize my posts. When I started out with this format, I thought nested categories were a good idea. After seeing them in practice, I…

As I'm sure you've noticed, I use Google adsense on these pages. Now obviously I can't give statistics on how it does, but frankly what I've seen in the short time I've used it beats any other affili…

The last month has been quite busy as is evidenced by so few postings here.... Of course, the majority of what I do is on-site computer service and sometimes that explodes to fill most every moment o…

It looks like the site disappeared for a brief time. It looks like my service provider did some maintenance which left mysql looking for a file in a place it doesn't exist. I've done a script which h…

This afternoon I'll try to start catching up on some of the tech news I've neglected this week. Frankly it seems fairly insignificant contrasted with the disaster along the Gulf Coast. There have bee…

Really, the news over the last few days has been overwhelming. We've had some effects here in North Carolina with stations running out of gas rumours of all the stations closing at 6PM and prices cli…

It looks as though there are quite a few things that I have skimmed over the last two days and haven't posted on. I've been preoccupied with a couple of projects and frankly following news regarding …

The other day I did a post about Sunbelt mentioning another big identity theft ring. That post that I referred to has been pulled from their site. I'm not quite sure what to make of this but will kee…

I haven't done much the past couple Saturday's update-wise, but there are a few items I expect to give a few updates on this afternoon.

I haven't covered anything this morning mainly because I've been fighting with a Windows XP install. I'll give details on it later. I think I'm finally in the last stages of that and will try to do s…

I've got a slew of posts coming up trying to round up some of the things that came across this weekend.

I'm catching up a bit on some of the news from over the weekend.

Please see my post at North Carolina Genealogy.net

There is one domain that I host which are on a server that has had some major "issues", backups are in the process of being reloaded and the current estimate is that they will be back up in about two…

I just thought I'd do a quick post to mention that I've added a new category called "featured books" and it's a place where, well..... I'll ummmm feature books. I don't know I might feature other thi…

OK - someone has a sense of humor. In the hour after the browser statistics article where I said that on this site, Internet Explorer was being used by less than 50% of the viewers I saw an interesti…

In the last week or two, I've been playing around with a slightly different stat package for the individual sites, North Carolina Genealogy, South Carolina Genealogy and this site. Since it's a new s…

Of course, there was a time when delivery of many things relied heavily on the US Postal Service and the blame of a delay could be passed along. I saw an article lately about people using technology …

I've got all traces of the old cms system off of the server now. (Well there might be a README here or there, but all php scripts from the old CMS are now gone.) At this point I can disclose a bit ab…

I don't know how many know, but one of my sidelines (hobbies) over the years has been Genealogy. Sometimes I've had more time for it than others. The last couple of years it hasn't been something I'v…

I've copied over several of the older posts from the ezcontents layout of the site. I think I'll skip moving the "virus of the moment, watch out for...." posts. The ones that I've chosen are a bit mo…

Well, after spending a couple days looking at Wordpress, I've now promoted it to be the main site layout. This software offers several improvements over what I've been using and if you are interested…

This is an interesting moment... since last night I've been tinkering with wordpress. I've got it installed in a test directory. This afternoon I spent some time moving old posts over to wordpress fr…

Of course, it appears that wordpress comes with support to generate rss feeds for the articles and comments listed here. I was curious to find a way to include a syndicated news feed in the site and …