cozart.org

So my cell phone number changed. If you need the new one, email me at slade at cozart dot org, and I will shoot it to you.

So I am working on some software that will help me keep track of the books that we have here at the house. I have been wanting to track them for a number of reasons, but mainly it just gives me a chance to get back into coding doing something that “should” be relatively easy.

I was curious, if you could track pretty much anything that amazon.com tracks, what would you be most interested in? Mainly I am looking for some random statistics that can be displayed on the main page of bookshelf. (That is the name that I have given the project.) For example, total number of pages in our library is already in the works.

Let me know what you think.

I just remembered that I came up with a “great” idea for a post tonight while Laura and I were eating supper. Ok, so maybe not really a great idea, but something to keep me in the blogging mode.

With technology like it is, there are not many people today without cellphones, save for the elderly, most infants, and just a select few individuals, nearly everyone, at least in America, has one. Or there is at least one in the immediate family. The fact that there are 1st graders with cellphones is best left for another blog, but in the meantime, the popularity of cellphones has lead to something that really annoys me: the bluetooth headset. (Before you get upset with me because you own one, please keep reading.)

There is definitely a place for headsets. Maybe a place and a circumstance. The place being while driving in a car, and the circumstance being a mother with young children. In both of these situations, attention must be given to other things that require the use of both hands, one being driving a car, and the other herding children while multitasking.

That being said, there are no other places, circumstances, exceptions, whatever to using a bluetooth headset. No exceptions.

We were having supper tonight at Henry’s, and I look over at a table of people, and a man has on a headset. Is this really the place to have one on? Are you really expecting a phone call so important that you must wear an unsightly beast of a contraption on your ear? Do you think that other patrons will automatically view you as more important because you have something sticking onto your ear that flashes a blue light every five seconds? Seriously people. Where has etiquette gone?

Maybe I am old fashioned, or slow to adopt, but surely I am not the only one that feels this way. Please tell me that these headsets grate on the nerves of someone out there. Surely someone gets the urge to rip them off of an ear and smash them under foot.

Leave it to me to make a mountain out of an ant hill….

Little did I know that before Laura and I got married, she is one of the best cooks around. Case in point: Monday night she was craving some sugar cookies. So while the storms raged around us, we proceeded to whip together the ingredients for Granny’s Cookie Jar Sugar Cookies (The grated orange peel makes them stand apart from other sugar cookies.)

After they were done, we of course enjoyed a couple, maybe a few more, then went to bed. Little did I know that the sugar cookies left something in the oven, even after we took them out:

Maybe I should shed the light on the subject…

To make a long story short, every time we goto Walmart or Target, I like to walk by the electronics department to see if they have any Wiis in stock. It has become sort of a running joke if you will. Well, on Tuesday, Laura was going to the Walmart on the north side of town, so of course, I told her to check for a Wii. When she got there, they told her that they had just got a shipment over in Ballinger (directions). My wonderful wife drove over and picked up number 7 of 10. In the rain. While pregnant. With a full bladder. Words do not do her justice.

Thanks to BK for this post:

Head on over to the Fail Blog for some workday humor.

Note: I am not responsible if you don’t find the images humorous.

Real short post with one real interesting statistic. Hopefully I will elaborate more on this later.

In the past 24 hours, 604 people have logged into a lab computer on campus. A total of 524 hours, 2 minutes and 22 seconds were spent in front of a computer screen by these individuals.

May not sound like much, until you factor in the 2 busiest labs in campus are not included in those numbers, and not all computers have been reporting for the past 24 hours.

More later…

A couple of videos for my 3 readers:

First up we have a video starring one of the infamous Dawsons! Recently tagged (incorrectly) on Facebook as “the most breathtakingly-beautiful woman on the planet” (We all know that is Laura Jane), Kristen makes her youtube debut about half-way through the video…

Next up we have Jay blatantly breaking the law by jaywalking. Typical Snyder behavior…

A quick blurb on what was almost the ultimate away message today by BK.

(Some background: Every so often, we send links back and forth about some music we think the other should listen to…)

(Oh, and another note, BK’s status is “Away” on his messenger, so I assume that he is away.)

(09:18:48 AM) Slade: some link to a song

(09:20:00 AM) billy.box: hmm

Automatically I assume that “hmm” is BK’s away message, which to me is pretty ingenius. Ultimately it leaves the other person hanging. Is Bk there? Is he thinking about what I wrote? Does he not like the song? But really, it is just an away message that leaves the recipient full of questions. How perfect would that be?

I should have known better than to assume that it was the perfect away message. It was just BK, being BK.

And if this post makes no sense to you, oh well.

(Lots of technical stuff follows, so if you don’t want to read it, I understand.)

There have been some changes going on recently to the server(s) that cozart.org and its subdomains, etc. are hosted on, and one of the main things that we have been working on is improving the way e-mail is handled/filtered. One of the most annoying things that all people can relate to is the problem of Spam, and it becomes even more annoying at the administrative level. Spammers have a tendency to try a bunch of random e-mail addresses in hopes of getting lucky, so because of that, the email server is often burdened with scanning the e-mail for the possibility of containing spam or the occasional virus, even when the e-mail address does not exist.

Enter qmail-spp and the vpopmail_check_recipient plugin. At first I was concerned that we would not be able to use it, as we have a number of mailing-lists handled by ezmlm, and this plugin rejects e-mails for valid e-mail mailing lists. Lo and behold, there was an update to vpopmail_check_recipient that would recognize mailing-list addresses, published here. Just what I needed! Or so I thought…

Come to find out, the updated script will still validate invalid users if you have a .qmail-default file in your domain home directory, but with the way our server is setup, you have to have this catchall file in order for any e-mail to be delivered. One step forward, two steps back…

Anyways, I decided to modify the script to work for our server. It validates all users within vpopmail and valid mailing-lists, while still rejecting invalid addresses. There is an IGNORE_DEFAULT variable that when set to TRUE will ignore the .qmail-default file and actually reject invalid users. You can set this value to FALSE and it will behave as the original author intended.

You can find the modified script here.

Questions/comments/modifications welcome!

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Thanks Webb!