As I am sure we have all seen, an amazing phenomenon happens when a police car pulls onto a road, it acts like something you would expect to see at a Nascar race, a pace car. People suddenly feel the need to go no faster than the police car. I am sure their thinking is that if they don’t go any faster than the policeman, they must be ok. Of course, they should have been following the speed limit anyway, but that is beside the point. What I find both humorous and annoying is that most people flat out refuse to pass a police officer. I have seen police cars going 3-5 mi/hr under the speed limit and people won’t pass them. In all reality, police cars seem to act as much as pace cars as anything else.

(Pardon the bad grammer, but hey, it’s what I wrote)

A quick note: If you use amavisd-new and mailgraph for graphing your postfix mail stats, make sure you don’t make the same mistake I did. I kept wondering why I was having so many outgoing email and then I noticed the “–ignore-localhost” option for mailgraph. My amavisd-new is setup to do a bunch of logging to the maillog, and so mailgraph kept marking each internally route email (postfix->amavis->postfix) as 3 or more emails instead of 1. As you can see in the image below, it really messed up my graphs. Now with using the “–ignore-localhost” option, my graphs make a ton more sense.

You can see that I made the change on Monday afternoon.

Well we had a very busy weekend:

Softball game Friday at 7:10pm (win)
Softball game Saturday at 11:00am (win)
Softball game Saturday at 2:45 (loss)
Softball game Saturday at 4:00 (loss & finish in 3rd place for the tourney)
Beth watched a couple of our friend’s kids for a few hours on Saturday during games
Cards at friend’s house at 7:30pm until 11:30pm
Church Sunday morning at 9:00am
Softball BBQ at 1:30pm - 4:30pm (Beth had to make some potato salad after church)
< Discovered Bocce Ball and thought it was a blast >
AWANA director’s meeting at 7:00pm - 9:00pm (We got house clean and Beth made dessert)

Yup, it was a busy weekend. Praise the Lord that everything worked out well and we didn’t drive our kids completely nuts.

ESPN.com has an interesting article on “Page 2″. The article is titled “Greed vs Charity”. The title is very descriptive of the content of the article, and I found one paragraph to be particularly funny. The author is talking about how much money people spend on playing golf vs playing basketball:

OK, so you play a lot, and now you’re a great golfer. Go tell your friends about your 2 handicap. You should really be proud. And one more thing before you go: You know the guy who just hit three in the water on 15? The guy whose throat is sore from yelling “Fore!” all day? That guy is tied with you on the PGA Tour’s career earnings list. We know … it’s OK to cry.

As I read that I thought, “that is too true!”. Give the rest of the article a read here.

Recently I have been doing a bunch of reading about AJAX and php. A couple of very interesting blogs are: There and Back Again and Ajaxian Blog. Both are good sources of current events in the AJAX and php community. Even if you aren’t into php the Ajaxian Blog is a good read because they cover AJAX items from a wide variety of languages.

If you know much about computer security then you have certianly heard the phrase, “security through obscurity”. Basically it means having a non-secure computer function be secure because nobody knows about it to exploit it. Well today a co-worker came up with a security phrase that was new to me, “security through stupidity!”

We have written a custom web application for a client. The application uses frames to give the client a simple UI. Under part of the problem the client will upload/modify files on the server using ftp in one of the frames. Unfortunately Windows XP, we kept getting the standard 404 error. After a call to Microsoft, and a week later, the solution finally presented itself. By turning off the “Show friendly HTTP error messages” option under Internet Explorer, it allows the FTP session to work properly. The ability to upload/modify files is only supposed to be used by the admins, but the company was small enough to not require the extra permissions control. Now however, with this setting in IE under XP, we now have both “security through obscurity” and “security through stupidity” (Microsoft’s that is).

This story certainly isn’t as funny when told the second time, but it was very funny to me!

Note: After doing a google search I have discovered that many others have been using the phrase “security through stupidity”, so this was just the first time that I had heard it.