Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - November 2004

A hard man is good to beat

October, 2004

The leaves on the trees grow yellow, and there's a chill in the air in the evening. In London, the fog swirls mysteriously around 221b Baker Street and if you listen carefully, the strains of a violin are heard. You hear the clip-clip of a hansom cab as it looms out of the fog towards you, and ... I've been playing too many adventure games.

New and updated Galleries

Galleries added this month.

The Library

Stories added this month.

Listen with Diana the Valkyrie

Nothing new

The Movie Theatre

Movies added this month.

Newsthumbs

With the new Newsthumbs system, there aren't any sudden changes to the current server. I just keep adding new stuff to the later dates, and remove old stuff from the earlier dates, which "magically" appears on the Older Server.

I'm seeing 200,000 pictures per day on most days now.

The Server Farm

October 7, my five half-megabit DSL lines all got upgraded to one megabit. I had six half-meg lines giving me about 300kbytes/second download, plus the 2 megabit Megastream that gives me about 200 kb/second, so my total download capacity was 500mbytes/second. Now my total is 800mbytes/second.

I use this for backing up the main servers, based in Watford. So I can now do the backups at a speed of about 3 gb per hour, 70 gb/day. The Newsthumbs load is about 20 to 25 gb per day, and that's why I needed the expansion of capacity. The Newsthumbs inflow continues to grow, and I have to have spare download capacity to cover surges.

I've defined a third nameserver for all the sites I look after now; this means that if the nameserver isn't contactable at one of my sites, browsers can still get the name-to-ip-address translation (it's called DNS) from the other site. If both my sites are down, then because they're a few dozen miles apart, that can only be a really *major* catastrophe, or an very unfortunate happenstance.

In the second half of October, I went through a *major* exercise to rescue the Herbiceps membership database from the tangle it had gotten into. iBill had been cancelling members but without removing their access from the site, and when the data went to iPay, iPay started off by billing a couple of hundred cancelled members. I had to do a rapid job to identify exactly what they'd done, so that I could do refunds. That's pretty much done and dusted now, and I'm doing the billing and membership administration for HerBiceps (as well as a couple of dozen other sites in this area), so I'm hoping that things should run smoothly now. I've been doing this for my site for several years, so I do know how to do it.

And just as that was in progress, and I was having to deal with a flood of emails to sort out people's problems and concerns over that change, Fistman got hit by something nasty. I doubt if we'll ever know the full story, but I think something got installed on his computer, which then piggy-backed on an upload he did, so that there was an "iframe" on the Herbiceps web site. The "iframe" took you to another site, downloaded and installed something on your computer, and that made all hell break loose.

Specifically? Well, I don't really know. all of what it did, but when I ran Kaspersky antivirus on that computer, it found several different things, and when I ran AdAware, it found loads more. My feeling is, that I want to wipe the hard disk clean, and do a Windows reload from scratch.

But I've been kind of toying with the idea of going Linux. Currently, I'm running over 100 servers with Linux, but the workstations, the boxes I sit in front of, are a mixture. There's two main workstations. One is just running several dozen terminals, logged in to various servers, and Linux does that extremely well. The other workstation is used for text editing, email, working on the membership database, and that sort of thing, and that's been running Windows 98.

What I've done, is I've left the Windows computer that had all the junk installed on it, switched off. And I'm now starting to use a Linux machine as my main workstation. For editing, I've found the gedit is as good as Wordpad, for programming Nedit is better than Programmers Notepad. For word processing, I'm using Abiword and Open Office, which has the *huge* advantage that it won't run Word macros, so I don't have to worry about malicious macros. I'm replacing Excel with Open Office and Gnumeric. CuteFTP is replaced by Konqueror (which is also a good replace ment for Windows Explorer), Paintshop with Gimp. The browser is Mozilla instead of Internet Explorer. I'm still using Pine as my mail client. I found that I didn't need to replace Winnzip or Winrar, there was something already there; I just click on zip or rar files and they open up.

At first, I used the default file navigator, called Nautilus. But I'm very used to Windows Explorer, and I missed some of the features it has. And then I realised, I'm probably not the only one, and with Linux, when someone has an itch, they scratch it. So I did a google search for a Linux version of Windows Explorer, and after a few seconds, I found Konqueror, which turns out to be shipped with Linux, I already had it. And it does look and feel very like Windows Explorer. Plus, it also does ftp, and it opens zip and rar files as if they were just directories.

I'm still in a half-and-half situation, and I'm still deciding which word processor or editor to use for what. But it's looking as if the main long-term effect of this thing from the Herbiceps site, will be to move my main working computer from Windows to Linux - I'd been meaning to do it, but this gave me the reason to do it now, rather than "one day"..

Another side-effect of this - I've been having problems with my big CD jukebox. It holds up to 400 CDs on a carousel, and plays them one by one. It means I can annoy the neighbours 24/7.

But recently, it's been giving problems. The tracks skip and miss. If it were a gramophone, I'd say it needs a new needle. But this is a CD player. I tried taking it apart and blowing compressed air into the player part, but that didn't help. I'll try one of those CD cleaning CDs, but I'm not optimistic. Also, while I had it apart, I looked at this mechanical contraption, and marvelled that it worked at all. In my experience, mechanical things break after a while.

But do I actually need it? I have several hundred CDs, and what I don't want, is to have to keep looking for the one I want, and putting it in a player. It occurs to me that I'm doing this all wrong.

Another thing that happened recently - one of the CDs I use for installing Linux got so badly scratched, that I had to make a new one. No big deal, it just took a few minutes to make the CD. But it got me thinking, what if one of my music CDs gets this? I'd have to buy a new one; cost and hassle.

So I've started converting these CDs to "ogg" files (which are like MP3 but without the implied odium). I can convert each CD to about 60 mb, which means 2000 CDs would fit on a drive that costs $60. I'll have that drive on my certral network file server, and I'll be able to play any CD on any computer in any room I'm in.

Understanding the internet

The Herbiceps thing reinforces the lesson that you have to have a good, current antivirus on your computer. Also, something to deal with Adware and popupware.

Cameras

I sent one of my digital cameras to Storm, who is now making good use of it for her new web site

Spams of the Month

I don't make these up, although the comments on the spams are mine, of course. These are actual spams sent to me, which just strike me as funny. I don't include their contact details - go find your own spammers!

By the way, if you're using StoneColdMail (which is free to web site members) then you won't see most of these spams, they'll be delivered into your "Spam" folder.

'THE ANTIDOTE'

Kills ALL known deadly Viruses & Bacteria in the body that keep diseases,
namely: Influenza, SARS, Cancer, HIV etc.

But will it stop spam?

this is something you've not seen

My pills is an advanced fat-banding addendum which
withdraws grease from a food we consume! Explicated with
the strong fat-holding fast fiber, the mixture
of all-natural multipliers...

Uh ... in English please?

Sponsorships

We've sponsored lots of the women; Nicole Bass, Andrulla Blanchette, Sheila Burgess, Christine Envall, Marilyn Perret, Peggy Schoolcraft, Larisa Hakobyan, Steph Parks.

We're also sponsoring individual events such as the Femsport Valkyrie Festival, and the New York Muscle Club, and funding athletes to go to events with grant dollars.

We're also doing free hosting and free bandwidth for many of our sponsored women. Bandwidth can mount up to a large bill when you're running a popular web site.

And we've sponsored Heather Foster, Kara Bohigian, Priscilla Ribic, KerryAnn Allen, Linda Cusmano and Jodi Miller. Also Anita Ramsey and Rhonda Dethlefs.

DtV Family web sites

Storm now has a web site

The Clubhouse

In the Chatroom

Chatter of the month

Madman, the posting paragon, heads the list this month. But the TKO Kid is hard on his heels

On the Message Boards

I've put up a new style of board; it includes threading, the possibility of moderation, and lots more. You can see what Tom Nine's Tussling Tenement looks like, we gave it a new coat of paint, and it looks great. Mixed wrestling sessions is a popular topic!

This month we had 4005 posts to the boards.

Back Page

Wow, what a month. The Herbiceps conversion was a lot of work, but I think it was worth it. The big surprise to me, was just how poorly the big billing companies tend their databases. I'm hoping for a nice quiet November ...

I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.

At the end of October 2004, there were about 730,000 pictures (47 gigabytes), 154 gigabytes of video, 8800 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 202 gigabytes. The Current Newsthumbs has 5 million pictures; there's about 100 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs. How many web sites do you know that have 100 million pictures?

To the Magic Carpet