Month: February 2006

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In happier news…

Fortunately, before the spammers decided that I’d be a really good target for pharmaceutical emails, it was our Chains of Promathia night in FFXI. It started as a group of about 12 people and we’ve been meeting every Friday night for a few months now. Our numbers dwindled down, and we stabilized at 7. This, of course, meant we had to many things twice, as a lot of the fights are capped to 6 people per fight. But we all knew each other, so we weren’t cutthroat and cut anyone loose. We just had to make sure we were good enough to handle it.

And we did. Compared to what it sounds like other groups did, we had surprisingly little resistance working through the missions. Part of this was because we had some incredibly flexible job selections to work with, almost everyone in the group had at least 2, if not 3 or 4 jobs at 60+, and quite a few with multiple 75 jobs. Two weeks ago, we did the airship fight (6-4), one of the hardest fights, if not the hardest fight, and beat it on our third attempt. Then we did it again last week for the seventh member and only had one false start.

That meant that today was 7-4 and 7-5. 7-4 is just a bunch of random NMs that are uncapped (as is everything from this point, yay… no more using level 60 gear), then 7-5 is another “kill kill kill fast fast fast” fight. We died a few times, but switched a bunch of jobs around and managed to kill him… what’s that mean?

Yes, what’s that mean?

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Spam killed my Linux machine

… well, for a while, at least.

I noticed that my ssh window was stalled, so I tried pinging it. It responded just fine, and was also still routing the NATted computers. So I went downstairs to try a console.

They were locked up, or so I thought, it was just very very slow. I managed to get a top running, and to my surprise, there were about 40 spamassassin processes running, eating up all of the memory and swapping constantly, causing the machine to be very slow. Thinking that if I cut the supply of incoming mail, it might free up the machine, I killed the fetchmail process.

It took about half an hour, but it eventually settled back down to normal. I then upgraded spamassassin and procmail and pretty much everything else on the machine, hoping that it would solve the problem. I started it back up, and within seconds, the processes were back and it was locked again. I killed the process and waited another 30 minutes, tried poking around, and eventually just gave up, let the thing run and hoped it had worked it all out by the morning.

This morning, it was back to normal, I had 250 new emails (all for the same thing, obviously part of the same drop) that made it through the spam filter and who knows how many more that got caught.

God. Damned. Spam.

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Wondercon

I am typing this up (but not submitting it, ’cause there’s no internet) at the AOD booth in the press section of the exhibit hall. Across from us is Lyta from DS9. To our right are, in order from far to near, Chewbacca, the original Lois Lane, Timmy from Lassie, and Lt. Boomer.

No, not that Boomer. The original.

Yes, it’s the press section of Wondercon: where old stars go to die.

Edit: After checking IMDB, I have discovered it’s spelled “Leeta.” I fail as a nerd.