July 2009

Last month I mentioned a new knowledge computational search engine called www.wolframalpha.com. A recent article by the website www.wired.com covers several more specialty search websites. You can read the full article at http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines. Interesting stuff.

For the first time in history, the FTC shut down a ‘Black Hat’ Internet Service Provider out of San Jose, California. This company actively recruited the worst of ‘net scum, including hackers, phishers, virus writers, and hosted pornography featuring violence, bestiality and incest. Their clients had ties to organized crime in Russia and Belize. A federal judge in San Jose signed the order shutting them down June 4 th. Cool.

On a more pleasant note, we have the new mail server up and running and so far the clients who are on it really like the new features. I’m still testing it and if all goes well, will start migrating clients over to it in July. It has much better spam filtering than anything we currently have in house, with fewer false positives. There are also features in for calendar synchronization (as in Outlook) as well as a host of additional features I’m scratching my head over.

What’s also interesting is that I installed this package in a virtual machine. Some of you may recall me talking a few months ago about computers these days having gotten so powerful, they can emulate another computer in software. These emulations are called ‘virtual machines’, or VMs, and there are significant advantages to using them. The new mail server is a VM. This now makes 2 computers that I have as virtual machines. My goal is to convert all but one or two of my physical computers to VMs, and then have a second VM host act as a backup to the first. That way if there is a hardware failure, the second system takes over with up-to-date copies of what was on the other machine. All I have to say is--we sure aren’t in Kansas any more…

This Friday, July 3 rd, we will be on a call-back basis only as well as July 4 th. Normal business hours will resume on Sunday the 5 th.

As for gardening, we’ve pretty much been overrun by rabbits and ants. The latter I can control but the rabbits have been problematic. I have had to resort to taking them out with a pellet rifle, but given my aim, they’re being very kind. They act scared and run away until I get tired of the game, then they return. I’ve even gotten an Elmer Fudd hat to wear for the activity. “Shhhhh…be vewy vewy quiet..we’re hunting wabbits!”

Best wishes!

Sincerely,

Ben Conner