The fact that my "Fresh Content" section shows up as completely blank tells me it's time to be posting something. I offer this nugget to those who wish to ponder:

s#(?<!href=")(http://([^\s/]+)\S*)#[<a href="$1">$2</a>]#ig;

Could it be that the latest crop of slashdot comment display engine insanity has been affecting us all?

I see that the evening is getting a bit late, and I haven't even yet getten around to reworking my iptables scripts as I had hoped to do. Oh well. Perhaps tomorrow.

Hmmm, having not rambled in over a week, choosing which events to summarize might be a bit of a challenge.

As some astute (irc|collective) vultures may know, Bitscape has taken the plunge and (gasp) responded to a piece of credit card "pre-approved" snail mail spam. This on the heels of having to resolve a bit of a mess which came up as a result of some not-so-secret information (although the whole system should be public/private key-based, if you ask me) about Bitscape's Happy Bank Account depletion card falling into the wrong hands, and having to wrestle with the bank to straighten things out. (Although I must take partial responsibility, since I did initially pull a Neelix with the issue, working on the assumption that my luck would be as good as his. It wasn't.)

Armed with a still insecure-as-hell credit card to make online purchases, at least cash won't be sucked directly out of my account if something goes bad. With all the moron NT admins out there, some of whom Argo's log reports still haven't patched against Code Red (over a fscking MONTH of heavy press coverage, and they're still hitting default.ida every few hours. IDIOTS with a capital I. Is there anybody in there?) The more paranoia, the better.

Ahem... And here I was, pondering the reworking of Argo's iptables script.

Quite amusing at the moment. I've got a makeshift running tail of the log as a desktop background. Had it running for a couple of days. Amazing, all the crap packets that get thrown around.

There's your crap. Probably just about every vulnerability Argo might have has been leaked in that screenshot, plus those of a few other IPs. Hahaha. I should quit logging dns query crap. Although these random unprompted ICMP destination unreachables I keep getting every now and then from random locations (not in that screenshot, but just after it) are kind of odd.

Since I've been too lazy to update my links implemention for many moons, here's some entertaining reading for ya.

Oh, speaking of which... I really should either (a) buy Argo some more memory, or (b) quit running Mozilla for so damn long! Yes, Mozilla is quite stable these days, but there is a downside to that: since a very cursory non-examination indicates that not all calls to malloc() have a corresponding call to free(), after about a week of surfing, things start getting a bit.. sllloooww. Paging. Paging... Paging...

Given the prices these days, I think the thing to do would be to head over to my favorite online hardware vendor and place an order. After the non bank account depletion card comes. I was pushing it, ordering from loki. No more online transactions with the bank card. Yes, I'm paranoid. Lalala.

Oh, and today (actually yesterday) was bouncing's birthday. Happy birthday to him. Happy birthday to him.

It's late. I should sleep even though sleep sucks. Goodnight.