Sleeeeeeep

This weekend was sponsored by the word "sleep". I slept. Alot. And it was nice.

Didn't really do anything that interesting, 'cept play with computer stuff all weekend. I played around with setting up cron jobs on my MacOS X server here. Because of it's UNIX underpinnings, you can schedule tasks to happen at specified intervals. It's sorta like that scheduling crap in Win98. Well, OS X comes with a few cron jobs already setup. They are small UNIX shell scripts that compile the current stats on the machine's drives, network, and other system info and send it in an email to the root user. I decided that this was a really cool feature, but I never check the root email account on that server. So, I changed it to not happen so frequently (why parse web server log files EVERY day on a server that doesn't even RUN a web server?) and to email me at an address that I check every day. Very cool. So now, every week, my server will email me a complete report of my server at home telling me how things are going. The best part about this is that the possibilities are only limited by my imagination. I could have it email me if it detects that someone has logged in as the root user...or (like the RU sysadmins used to do) email (or text page) me when the server has strange things happening. Very cool. I love cron.

Speaking of email. I've been receiving a TON of spam lately. I don't know what company got a hold of my email address, but I've gotten more spam mail in the last week than I've every gotten. everything from refinancing my mortage (which is non-existant) to viagra. One such spam message was sent to my regular email account and also to my phone, which receives text messages through email. This clued me into the fact that there must be a some web bot that has recently scanned my website and found both of those email addresses on my contact me page. So, I went in and changed my email address to be jeffATjeffpollardDOTnet to stop these pesky bots from picking up my address. If there's one thing that really gets my goat, it's spam. To me, there's nothing worse than opening up my email client of choice and getting 5 or 6 junk email messages. I've always been very careful about who I give my email address out to. And if I do give out my personal address, I always make it customized to that site, so that if I ever receive spam mail with THAT address, I'll know who sold me out. For example, if I gave my email address to CDnow.com, I'd give them "[email protected]". It seems like a pretty clever thing to do, but it hasn't helped me with this latest onslaught of spam.

I found a really cool site this weekend: JimTools.com. This site has all kinds of cool little scripts to help web geeks like me. Up until today, I didn't have any META keywords specified in my pages, which makes me almost invisible through the search engines. This site will be very helpful when it comes time to market CustomTacos.com harder.

Speaking of which, I found out that UBB is buying WWWthreads!! For those of you who don't know what this means: Those two companies sell competing discussion forum systems. WWWthreads is a much better system, in my opinion, and is the one that I will be using for CustomTacos.com. UBB announced that the changeover will take place on Thursday and that new pricing would be announced then. To me, this means that the price of the software is about to increase. So, I went ahead and purchased the system so that I would be "grandfathered in".

Ok, now that I've totally bored all of you non-computer people. I'm going to finish burning some backup CDs and then head to bed.

Posted by Jeff at October 14, 2001 11:48 PM