30% less viagra spam as of today?

Posted on October 12, 2007 by levelzero

According to an article I just read a Russian spammer, thought to be responsible for roughly 30% of the viagra spam worldwide was found murdered in his house this week.

Now the optimist in me wants to see this as a revenge action where he spammed the wrong person, but I bet he just failed to pay his protection money or something silly like that.

The end result should be 30% fewer viagra mails .. if only for a few days until someone else takes over the botnet this idiot was using.

EDIT: Appearently, this is a hoax. The original domain this post was on was registered just before the story appeared, has no other content and is hosted at a hosting provider (ESTDomains) which is known for hosting malicious websites in the past. Securityfocus.com notes that this might be an attempt to create a highly referenced URL (through blogs, digg, slashdot, google, etc.) that later could be used to host malicious code.

Interesting side effects of working on a saturday morning/afternoon

Posted on August 25, 2007 by levelzero

So I had to do some work this morning/afternoon … After our SAN had a failure earlier this week, we had to fix a lot of things. We hadn’t lost any data, but on quite a few shared folders, all access rights had disappeared.

The best plan we could come up with was restore all data to a secondary volume and copy over the acls through robocopy. The only problem was that our new backup policy turns out to make full backups only once a month, so we had to restore the full backup of July 31 and then restore all differential backups since then in order, which I’ve been busy with all morning.

Since I was confined behind the PC anyway, I decided to go over some of the pictures I took nearly two years ago while on holiday in Italy. I cropped, resized and uploaded about 120 more pictures from that week.

Some of the pictures I uploaded:

More pics here

Lightbox?

Posted on August 23, 2007 by levelzero

I am trying to figure out the “lightbox” plugin I installed today. It should give me nifty features on linking images …

For example this one:

Bulldozers + fiber optics = LOSS

Posted on August 23, 2007 by levelzero

Around 1:30 PM today, we got a few notices popping up in management apps that some network links had disappeared.
Luckily, all links were set up in a redundant fashion, so the actual production environment didn’t really notice a thing.

After some tracing and checking, we were fairly certain that /somewhere/, /someone/ had cut through a fiber optic cable.
Right at that moment, I glance out the window and see a bulldozer driving by. Even though my first thought was “no way”, it turned out to be true.

They had actually cut through the line right outside my window. About 2 hours after the first phonecall to our provider, the people coming to fix it arrived.
At approximately 8:30 PM, all the 24 lines were nicely reattached again.

The best laid plans …

Posted on August 23, 2007 by levelzero

Well, you know.

Again I failed in keeping up this blog I guess I can blame being very busy, but that’s not really the case. I just “forget” sometimes that I have this thing.

And I can’t really promise I’ll do much better either, since I just know that I’ll forget again in a while.

Over the past few months, I’ve been busy with MCSA and doing SQL 2005 as well. Keeps me off the street.

If I happen to get out despite all that, it’s very likely I’ll be dragging along my new digital camera. I bought myself a very nice Pentax K10D and I love it

I put some pics online, both from the initial “playing” I did with it and a daytrip to the beach in Scheveningen when I brought the camera along …

Some sample pics
Scheveningen

Insane weather

Posted on January 19, 2007 by levelzero

After a work meeting last night, I found out that because of the storm all trains had been cancelled (this due to trees falling across the tracks etc.)

This had the unfortunate result for me that I was stuck in Breda with no way to go home. Luckily, I was able to arrange a bed to sleep at work (one of the advantages of working in a hospital, I guess .. always beds available).

So this morning I had the shortest commute to work so far .. I got up out of bed and was at work