Jon’s Corner of the Whirled

It looks like I’m not the only one that has run into this issue. I’ve had to stop running Yahoo Messenger 8.0. It has a bug in that it steals focus from all applications running, including its own windows. If you minimize it when you are signed in, it pops right back up. Even if you aren’t signed in, the window keeps popping up in front when you switch to another application. I have noticed that when you aren’t signed in, you can minimize the window and it doesn’t appear anymore.

I’ve turned on and off (it was already off) the “keep yahoo in front of other applications” option. It doesn’t help. The odd thing about it is that it seems to be some interaction with another application. It seems to happen less often if I launch YM before other applications, although it has started happening after it has been running for a bit. I tried to submit a defect report through the menu option, but the main window kept stealing the focus from the defect report window. I had to keep clicking in the defect window between each letter I typed (including spaces). It took me over 10 minutes to type a couple of sentences. In the link I mentioned above, someone has been seeing this issue since September, and I couldn’t find anything on the Yahoo site about it. Are you listening Yahoo???! You are losing users over this issue.

Updates:
Yahoo Messenger 8.1 fixes that annoying bug
Yahoo Messenger 8.1 doesn’t fix that annoying bug

With the recent chill in the air — it was 25 degrees Farenheit, I wondered why we get goose-bumps. At the marvelous Wikipedia, I found an answer. It is a vestigial response. Come to think of it, “Vestigial Response” would make a good band name.

The webserver that hosted this site was also recently hosting (albeit temporarily) the Lupper worm. That has been rectified, but it wasn’t simple. There was an installation of awstats on the old server setup that I had mostly forgotten about. While I believe the firewall I had setup on the box prevented any of the backdoors the worm opened from being useful, I couldn’t be certain. I decided to rebuild the box. I chose to use a new gentoo install. After some initial pains with booting the LiveCD (because my CD-ROM doesn’t support DMA), I was off to the races. Slowly. I started on Wednesday of last week, and just managed to turn on the blog again last night.

During the process, I managed to lose all the content to the blog. Luck was on my side, and I managed to recovery it. Wordpress uses MySQL as its backend database. Before I wiped the main drive of the server, I had exported the contents of the database and stored them on a separate drive. After getting gentoo up and running, I “emerge”d apache, MySQL, Wordpress and other stuff I needed. (The virtual hosting in gentoo is well done, btw.)

I was in the process of restoring my database and made a one character error. Instead of using ”< " to redirect the text file to the mysql command I used ">“ and redirected the output of the mysql command over my text file. One slip of the finger and two years worth of postings were gone. Ouch. I wasn’t pleased.

I managed to figure out that I could dump the unused blocks on the drive using debugfs. I let that go for a while and ended up with an 800MB+ file. A few greps later, and I confirmed my hope: the data was still on the drive. A little more investigation and I found the data was relatively contiguous in the dump file, AND because I hadn’t compressed the mysql dump, I could actually piece it back together. I threw together a couple of C programs. The first chopped out the stuff before my data and the second chopped out the stuff after my data. I ended up with a few megabytes of mostly text data that needed to be cleaned up, and as you can see, it worked.

What have I learned?:

1. Understand your system
2. Keep up to date on releases if you are going to have a public website
3. Make sure backup files are read-only
4. Don’t make major changes to your setup while tired, or if you do, triple check before hitting “return”

I’m confident managing this system will be much easier now that I am using gentoo. The old server had been running RedHat 8 with lots of stuff hand upgraded by me. Now it is running a 2.6.x kernel, and a sane packaging management solution. Kudos to gentoo. Hooray for being able to go to bed at a sane time again.

It looks like Microsoft and Yahoo have come to an agreement to make the two IM clients work together. I can say, it certainly is annoying having to have so many clients installed on a given machine.

I find the Yahoo client to have the best ease of use and features of the clients I use. I especially like the integration of the launchcast radio into the client. It is much more convenient than having a separate browser window open. I personally use or have used recently ICQ, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo, and Jabber (via Exodus) in different locations.

I had to remove some of the pictures from the gallery because some mal-adjusted asshole posted links to a few of Morgan’s pictures on a little-boy fetish website. This is quite disturbing to both myself and Lisa. If this continues, I’ll be forced to password protect all of our images.

I’m not a violent person by nature, but the notion of someone using Morgan’s pictures that way makes me want to be.