Just the other day, Spamhaus was subject to a DDoS attack from an ISP who got upset at being blacklisted. That's par for the course, but what's interesting is that the ISP used a DNS amplification to boost their DDoS capabilities. Lately at work we've been working on shutting down our open DNS proxies. Once upon a time, on the naive Internet, they were fine. But as evidenced by this latest attack, such is not the case any longer.

Shutting down the DNS servers we knew about was easy, of course. But what about the ones we didn't know of? Well that's where a handy port scanner comes into play. There are a number of DNS scanners out there but I found them all lacking in some regard. So I whipped up my own.

Somewhere a while back I read that the difference between NAD 27 and NAD 83 was on the order of a few feet at most and thus I had ignored it. Turns out I was very misinformed. NOAA has a site where you can calculate the difference between NAD 27 and NAD 83 which I tried today and my coordinate varied by more than 50 meters. That's pretty significant. So, lesson learned.

Catalyst and Rsync don't seem to get along well. That is to say, the built-in development server doesn't notice when rsync changes source files. The upshot is Catalyst won't automatically reload the application on change, and that's just plain annoying.

The solution is to use the --inplace option to rsync. This alters how rsync propagates changes and plays nice with Catalyst.

There are two Windows applications that I use regularly via Wine. One is Winbox from Mikrotik and works great. The other is a phone/chat application which is buggier than a hive of bees. Anyhow, they seem to conflict with each other, which is a problem. Luckily Wine provides a solution: WINEPREFIX.

I'm a member of the local search and rescue patrol, and as such I use portable radios when out on missions. I wanted to get an earpiece so I could listen to radio traffic. Of course, I could have bought one but they're like $40 each and why buy when you can make a reasonable replica for a fraction of the price?