Some bastard's attacked my machine again. As a result my mail server's been down for about 50 hours, resulting in lots of bounced email and considerable hassle, which is just what I need right now.
The details: someone claiming to be from 209.161.238.175 started making connections to my machine's SMTP port on June 26, 1512:10. Ten times a second. ( Read more... )

Hurrah! SpaceShipOne made an apparently perfect flight to just under 100km and, more importantly, back again. A very happy looking test pilot, Mike Melvill, used the word 'mindblowing' in the nicely non-NASA impromptu press conference immediately after touchdown... there'll be a more organised press conference in about 90 minutes.
Can't wait for ( Read more... )

In case anybody who cares is unaware, on Monday Scaled Composites, a privately-funded aerospace company based in the US, is going to try to put a man into space.
Assuming everything goes well --- and given their track record, it probably well --- it will be the first time ever that a purely civilian aircraft has gone higher than 100km.
The ( Read more... )

Okay, I've completely rewritten whyTalk's front end; it now uses even more CSS, is faster to load, works on Internet Explorer, and looks better. I can have a Firefox window open and an IE window open and pass messages back and forth. IE is a little laggy on startup --- the first three or four messages come in in a bunch --- but after that's it's ( Read more... )

Okay, okay, it's an abject failure. Don't ask me why --- it all works fine from my end.
Layout is, as I expected, complete garbage on IE; IE's CSS support is pathetic. What I don't understand is why it doesn't seem to be able to talk to the whyTalk server.
*shrug*
I'll try and fix it and get back to you...

I really don't know how long this will stay up, but my latest project, a web-page based chat system, is on-line. Please play with it and let me know what you think, or even if you find it useful.
It is almost certainly going to look very bad on Internet Explorer; IE is notoriously bad at conforming to web standards. I need to sit down with a copy ( Read more... )

...a totally excellent on-line comic strip was fours years old. Kudos, Howard.
If you've never heard of it, and any of the following things interest you, check it out:

• Giant spaceships.
• Giant spaceships attacking other giant spaceships.
• Giant spaceships exploding.
• Assorted other things exploding.
• Characters.
• Character development.
• Characters ( Read more... )

I think someone's just tried to DoS me. From 0449 to at least 0502 last night, someone was connecting to my mail server about once a second, waiting for my SMTP server to respond, and then hanging up... I suppose it could have been an inept attempt to port scan my machine (www.cowlark.com, should you feel so inclined), but it seems rather strange ( Read more... )

A sad event occurred for me today. I finally finished all the episodes of Reboot.
The short post I was going to make actually turned into quite a long essay on the programme, so it's hidden here. There are spoilers, but they're safely marked. ( Read more... )

I'm now in Wondai.
Getting here involved two very long days of travel. I got on the Sunlander at 0830 the day before yesterday, and got off it at 1500 yesterday. The train trip itself was great; peaceful, comfortable, far too cold due to the Australian overenthusiasm for air conditioning, but very civilised. Met some interesting people, did a lot ( Read more... )