Dave Bullock / eecue : Programmer | Photographer | Admin | Human

So after many years of planning the best (only suspension?) bridge in (greater)LA will be officially lit with spiffy LEDs. The official website has more info. I will be there (this Sunday) to take pictures. I found out about this on blogging.la. 

Last Sunday Peneloper and I went to the Huntington Library in Pasadena. We had a great time and I took some beautiful photos. I look forward to our next trip there. 

This is really cool... A full tour of One Wilshire from the colo cages to the roof to the coolers. I wonder if I could get a tour to take more photos. 

Bush has been doing a very naughty thing and now that he has been caught he is passing the buck and asking his cabinet to stop doing it. He has been spending our tax dollars on PR Campaigns. That means our hard earned tax dollars are going towards making Bush look better. I have an idea... instead of spending money on PR firms to spin your ideas in a positive light, why not create sensible policies?  

Last night my friend Don Smith aka Don of the Desert died in a fire at his residence in Twentynine Palms. Don was a master welder and could fabricate anything imaginable out of metal. Rest in Peace Don. 

You're technically not allowed to take photos at the Body Worlds Exhibit. The reason being is that they have a contract with Gunther that says nobody can take pictures. It is not a request from the cadavers that are on display. It is so they can make more money selling the posters. I think it is silly, but I still only took one photo of the exhibit. Btw, the California Science Center's site about the exhibit has been taken down but here is the new one for Body Worlds 2. 

I noticed there weren't pertinent groups for the following subjects: Caves and Mines, Drum'n'Bass, Urban Entropy, Search and Rescue and Metaphoto so I created them. Look for tons of photos coming soon. (This weekend I took some really cool pictures at the Huntington Library Botanical Gardens) 

So I recently signed up for flickr. I then created an export system where I can send selected images to my flickr page. Cool deal! 

I didn't get a chance to watch the daily show last night, but I found a link to the best part of it on a whole lotta nothing. It is quite hilarious. The final score: 27 freedom and 15 liberty.  

So as you can see I have created an archive by category index on the navigational section of my site. These links will allow you to browse just a category if you choose. These links also work with Technorati tags. =] 

I just bought my tickets to the Body Worlds exhibit at the California Science Center. I have been putting if off for the last few months, and in doing so I was only able to attain tickets for 1:00AM on Sunday! Oh well it will still be fun. I will take tons of photos As i just read: "The taking of photographs or filming in the exhibition is prohibited", but I will still try and sneak some anyway. 

I have updated the way that trackbacks and comments displayed on my site. My posts now support technorati tags. I am also now pinging ping-o-matic. Cool deal. 

Google has added a feature to they search algorithm that ignores links that have the rel="nofollow" tag in them. This is great because it let's google know what information is your and what information was just posted by somebody commenting. They have recommended the nofollow tag be used on all links that can be posted by untrusted users. MSN Search and Yahoo! are both supporting it. Most blogging applications have already incorporated it. I am going to add it to my system too. Here is the link to the original article on Google's blog. 

Here is a photo I took. As you can see it depicts a sprawling oil refinery and a huge amount of sky above it. I took it riding in a car on the freeway.
I Like it. 

Now attempting to ping Ping-o-mactic's Metaping.  

In 2004 Simson Garfinkel gave a talk at the USENIX LISA conference about data on old hard drives. The report he wrote was actually what made us decide to do the drive slagging site in the first place. He featured our method of data removal in his slides which can be found at the link below. If you just want to see the slides click the permalink. 

Penelope and I went to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach on MLK Jr Day. The aquarium is really beautiful and well designed. I really enjoyed myself and I took about 200 pictures, out of which 95 came out well. The tickets were a Christmas present from Penelope. What a sweetie! Here are the photos. 

I have imported all of my various mini-sites and even created some new ones. They are now part of the main eecue site, but they have distinct designs. I wonder how long it will take the search engines to find the new info on these sites:

• Metaphoto
• Driveslag
• Japan Trip
• Resume
• Snarl
• Slacker

=] 

Here are the links to my photo galleries from Japan that I took in 2003.

• Akihabara : Tokyo's Electronic Town
• blowfish dinner
• brees house
• bullet train
• club evo
• coin laundry gas station
• conveyor sushi
• earth simulator
• ebisu tower
• harijuku
• hk peak
• hong kong
• hotel sungarden dojima
• japan in transit
• kobe
• kobe2
• kyoto
• kyoto temples
• local dive bar
• more shibuya
• my new technology
• nye evo osaka
• okachimachi
• okonomiyaki
• osaka taxi
• osaka technology district
• osaka whiskey bar
• shibuya
• shinjuku
• simons pad ebisu
• streets of osaka
• tokyo with irma
• yoyogi

enjoy! 

Just got back from a snowshoeing / backpacking trip with my lovely fiance Penelope. We had a great time and got plenty of good exercise. Check out the pictures. We even brought the snow monkey. 

This is a random picture of Steve Kemst that I took after respect. As you can see we are standing outside. I posted it instantly with my new photoblogging feature that i just programmed a few nights ago. Fun stuff. 

Here is a link to the newly captioned photo album of the Akihabara District in Tokyo. I took them a couple of years ago on my trip to japan . There are 5 pages with 20 images per page.

I am currently folding the jp.eecue.com mini-site into eecue along with several other of my mini-sites. Each site will retain a unique design but will be part of the main eecue site. The articles will be integrated in to my main (b)log. Current links will still work. 

This is a test of the new photoblog feature of my website... as you can see it worked! 

So I just added a cool feature to my website. If I send a photo email from my cellphone to a certain email address with the correct username and password (just for photo blogging) it will be posted to my photo blog archive and into my main blog. The next message on here will be a test from my phone! The image is actually one my mom took and sent me. 

I have updated my website to now support iCalendar import and export. This means that you can upload a calendar that you export from nearly any organizer application and you can subscribe to a calendar with the same application. It doesn't currently support recurring events, but it will eventually. Here is a link to my calendar, and here is where you can add my calendar to your organizer program (like iCal, Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc). 

Here are some Cool Places in Southern California that I found on HowStuffWorks. I plan on checking out most of them throughout 2005... I will post pictures.: 

The other day when I posted my old pictures from One Wilshire I did a bit of research and found out some interesting facts. One Wilshire is owned and managed by the Carlyle Group, which is everyone's favorite Bush Family mega-corp which makes billions from the war on terrorism. I wonder why they would want the most expensive real estate in North America, which happens to be the name of a really cool art / architecture exhibit. Here is a excerpt from the study:

One Wilshire is the meet-me room for over 240 of big players in the telecom industry. Everyone who is anyone is located there and they all interconnect for free as they are in the same big room.

I also found some neat stuff like the Tenant Handbook and an Elevator / Card Key request form. 

A few years ago I got a tour of One Wilshire in Downtown Los Angeles where I took some cool pictures. Some of them were also at Pajo Networks which is now called Tier Zero. I host my servers with Tier Zero. Here is the gallery 

I took this a couple of years ago in front of a 7/11 on Sunset in Hollywood. He looks really excited as you can tell. I'm sure he really enjoyed big annoying tourists wanting to take a picture with him.  

So I've been working on a few thing over the last few days and I have finished them for the most part. I have changed all the code on my site to be XHTML compliant and everything should now validate... you can test for yourself with the links at the bottom of the page. I also finished importing about 20,000 images from my old junglescene photo albums. All of the archive pages should be generated in the next few hours... feel free to look through them. I have also changed the CSS code for the image pages so now you can see more than one column at a time (note that this works in everything except Mac IE). I still have about 2000 of the new images from junglescene to import and then I have to import all my old articles and journal entries. Finally I will be creating a page where I can easily edit a whole groups' captions... when that is done I will go through and label all the thousands of unlabeled photos. Joy! 

A few days after Christmas I received an email from an upset University server admin who thought my servers were attacking his servers through email. What was actually happening was that a spammer was sending email using random fake address at his server's domain name which I will call anonymous.edu. It wouldn't have been a problem if the server was correctly responding with 550 errors which mean Permanent Failure, but the servers were sending 450 which are Temporary errors, so all the servers that were trying to deliver the bounces, kept trying.
So here is the first email I received from postmaster@anonymous.edu:

	From: 	  postmaster@anonymous.edu
	Subject: 	Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
	Date: 	December 28, 2004 2:19:23 PM PST
	To: 	  [a bunch of my email address]

Network/Security Administrator,

I'm sending you this mail because one or more IP addresses in your domain
are currently attacking our electronic mail server with a denial of service
attack consisting of multiple, rapid attempts to send mail to randomly
generated, non-existent email addresses.

Please take action with regard to the below hosts immediately to stop this
worm or virus.  This attack may be reported to the U.S Federal Bureau of
Investigation for criminal prosecution.  These hosts may also have been
blacklisted from sending mail to our server.

	64.239.136.142  (www.eecue.com)

	From: 	  eecue AT eecue.com
	Subject: 	Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
	Date: 	December 28, 2004 2:32:16 PM PST
	To: 	  postmaster@anonymous.edu

Hi you will notice those emails are not actually coming from my server.

The spammers are using my domain as their From: address.

Is this email for real?

-Dave

	From: 	  postmaster@anonymous.edu
	Subject: 	Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
	Date: 	December 28, 2004 2:59:32 PM PST
	To: 	  [a bunch of my email addresses]


Excuse me if this email is a duplicate. I forgot to list the IP address
of the victim of this attack.  It is: atlantis.anonymous.net (192.168.139.69)
Also, I can be contacted at:  postmaster@anonymous.edu

I'm sending you this mail because one or more IP addresses in your domain
are currently participating in a distributed denial of service attack
consisting of multiple attempts to send mail to randomly generated,
non-existent email addresses at our site.

Please take action with regard to the below hosts immediately to stop this
worm or virus.  These hosts may also have been blacklisted from sending
mail to our server.  They can be re-enabled once the DDoS attack subsides.


	64.239.136.142  (www.eecue.com)

	From: 	  eecue AT eecue.com
	Subject: 	Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
	Date: 	December 28, 2004 3:01:28 PM PST
	To: 	  postmaster@anonymous.edu

Hello,

Please send me the full email in question including the headers
so I can track down who is sending said email.

Thanks

-Dave

	From: 	  anon_admin@anonymous.edu
	Subject: 	Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
	Date: 	January 3, 2005 12:42:57 AM PST
	To: 	  eecue AT eecue.com


It was for real, but was the result of a mis-diagnosis of the problem...

Things have returned to normal, there is no need to do anything on your
side.  Our domain was the subject of a massive spam forgery ("Joe Job")
with randomly generated reply-to fields @anonymous.edu.  This occurred for over
14,000 domains, and our mail server was sending a 450 temporary error.

Basically we told 14,000 sites to keep trying to deliver bounce messages
back to us, with no valid local recipient, at whatever rate they did queue
flushes.  Making it look very much to us like a Distributed Denial of
Service Attack.  When really this whole thing would have been only briefly
painful if we had changed the failure notice to a permanent failure,
causing those 14000 servers to trash those invalid messages.

It was not apparent to us what was happening (since we never received any
of the bounces) until someone said, "Hey you know this bounce says that you
are replying with a 450 temporary failure..." It has now been changed to a
550 (permanent failure) response.

Thanks again for looking into this!

	From: 	  eecue AT eecue.com
	Subject: 	Re: Hosts from your domain are attacking our server
	Date: 	January 3, 2005 7:17:39 PM PST
	To: 	  anon_admin@anonymous.edu


Glad you worked everything out.

I thought it was somewhat humorous, so I posted about it on my website:

http://eecue.com/

I changed the names to protect the innocent.

-Dave

....
A. David Bullock
eecue : programmer / designer / admin / human
http://eecue.com/  -
anything is possible

I want to wish everyone a safe, happy and prosperous new year. I also want everyone to take a few minutes from their day and a few dollars from their bank accounts and help out with Tsunami Relief. Click the link in the article below to find charities to donate to. Thanks!