More Facebook Fake Freind Requests

They are back at it again.  Lots of spam that are actually a virus.  If you did not get the August 2011 or the 2010 Yearly invoice then you likely still got the fake Facebook messages as seen below:

If you take a close look at the picture above you will see that the link was blocked by the firewall. 

How to and why disable IPv6

In July the world quietly turned on IPv6.  We quickly started having strange network problems.  I have known for quite a while the IPV6 is a hole through your firewall.  A VERY BIG hole at that.  It is designed that way so that officials can trace you even if you are connecting through your neighbors wireless connection.  Well today a news story came out about some of the known the problems with IPv6.  It will be years before IPV6 (and windows 7 for that matter) is safe to use.  The good news is that if you stay with XP you are safe for now.....

"Experts are reporting a rise in the number of attacks that take advantage of known vulnerabilities of IPv6, a next-generation addressing scheme that is being adopted across the Internet. IPv6 replaces the Internet's main communications protocol, which is known as IPv4."  That is from http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/security/scariest-ipv6-attack-scenarios

So you ask how do your turn off IPV6?  Just go into the network properties and get the properties of your network card and disable it right?  NOPE, not a chance.  OK so you Google Microsoft (do not use Bing it never finds what you want) and find how to use regedit to turn it off at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929852  Now you can breathe a sigh of relief.  Not so quick, according to "The Dude" its still going full blast, its not even slowing down.......

Think about it, if they designed IPV6 to trace every Internet connection through multiple firewalls, are they going to make a way to turn it off?  I doubt it.  But here is a fudge fix.  remember back when you looked up the network properties of your network card and turned off IPV6?  There was an IP associated with it.  Go to your firewall and block that IP from ever accessing the Internet.  I will not guarantee that will work either but I do not know of any other method.

Time to evacuate New York City

Well, as I have said before "If you do these things the land will vomit you out!" (Leviticus 18) Irene is set to do a direct hit on NYC flooding the subways and destroying thousands of homes on Long Island.

They are already calling this "NYC's Katrina" on some web sites.

Here is a picture from www.wunderground.com showing where Irene is expected to go.

In New York City around 90% (maybe more, I do not know the exact number) of the people do not have cars, they take the subway.  The subway is mostly underground and it will fill up with flood waters and take weeks to repair.  Their electrical infrastructure in mostly underground as well.  Transformers are filled with oil, but the connections to those transformers will be covered in mud.  Mud conducts electricity (as well as dirty water) so it will be weeks before the electricity can be turned back on.  The eastern 1/2 of Long Island may be wiped clean destroying thousands of homes.  This will be the biggest disaster since Katrina.

*** UPDATE ***

NYC escaped the direct impact of Irene, but the rest of western NY got hit with flooding.

Now its Tropical Storm Lee for "back to back" natural disasters.  When is enough, enough?

Earthquake Prediction Improved

I have been working on improving my earthquake prediction device and I am adding a MMA7361 Triple Axis Accelerometer - motion detector too.

The recent changes include changing the UGN3503's to be differential inputs to the op amps.  This gives twice the output swing per change in magnetic field.  Using a digital VOM it is now .1 volts for a North to South reversal.  That translates to about 20 on the Arduino serial data stream.

This change reduces the inputs to the Arduino to N-S, E-W and U-D, or three inputs. The other three inputs will come from the MMA7361. I am still working on getting that working.

Here are pictures of the MMA7361 board being tested on a Arduino Shield.  The wiring is very simple to do.

Dealing with Fleas

Once again I am dealing with fleas.

I have two rules for fleas:
First - Act quickly
Second - Be patient

You must act fast they multiply by thousands every day.  Give the pet a flea bath ASAP.  There is a "natural" flea soap that works very well.  In fact just giving the pet a bath helps.  I discovered some flea eggs and put them in the sink.  Whenever they came in contact with water they dissolved!

So just giving your pet a bath will help.  Keep him as wet as possible for 5 minutes, the eggs dissolve slowly.  I remember giving someones pet a flea bath a year a go and the water looked bloody, I thought I had made the poor cat bleed, but it turns out that dissolving the flea eggs turns the water red, so if it turns red you have a major flea problem!

Also a wet vac of the carpet will help kill them critters.  IMO do not waste your time on smoke bombs, they are almost worthless against fleas.  Besides water, use a carpet flea spray or just rip out the carpet and put in a tile or wood floor.

If you let your pets climb on the furniture then you will need to wet vac, flea spray, or toss the furniture too.  After the wet vac and or spray, cover the furniture with something so the eggs falling off your pet will not reinfect the furniture.  Wash the furniture cover every few days to kill any new flea eggs.

Then be patient, these critters keep hatching for a month or more!

Here is a quick update, after using a flea collar and still finding a flea or two we switched to the drops that you put down the pets back.  We were hoping they would be more effective.  After a few days I had to give the dog a bath and found about 10 dead fleas in the water!  The drops seem to be less effective than the flea collar!  Next I am going to see if there are more effective flea collars out there, and we are going to use lemon juice as a spray under his legs to help get rid of fleas.  We are also going to try to give him a little garlic every day to see if that helps too.  Its been about a month and we are still fighting the battle!

3LW 8108 or SC8108 Network Cable Tester

As promised I will tell you about my experiences with the 8108 or SC8108 Network Cable Tester. I bought it on Ebay for around $50, that is a far cry from the price of some cable testers!

The first feature that the seller did not list is that the remote beeps when it is connected to the right cable. Basically you install the remote in the persons office that you want to check the cable. Then you go to the switch, see what light is out, and plug that cable into the tester. The remote will then beep to let you know you have the correct cable. You can then run two tests on the cable. The tests will tell you if the cable is wired correctly and the length of the network cable. I had several cables that were not wired correctly, but two of them, after looking at the map, were wired as crossovers. That used to be the norm when running from switch to switch.

Basically I give the 3LW 8108 or or SC8108network cable tester two thumbs up.

Was there anything I was disappointed with? Yes, for one thing if you leave the computer plugged in at the other end, then the only test that you can run is the network cable length test. That is helpful to let you know how long it is to get a good idea as to who's office it goes to. However, with some network cards, it will come back saying that there is a "short" in the cable, when there is actually nothing wrong with the cable. This problem has something to do with the network card at the far end.

The IRS borrows 40% of its income!

I got this pie chart from irs.gov:

I was looking to see if the SS taxes were still making up over 40% of government income. It turns out they are down to only 25%! But if you take out the 40% of borrowed income then the SS Taxes still make up over 40% of "actual" government income. That is to prove that almost half of their income is from people making less than $250K. In fact any income over $110K is now exempt from the SS tax! More proof they tax the poor to pay the rich....

But take this a step further, how many years can I borrow half of my income before the interest on that borrowing exceeds my income???  The same thing applies to the IRS.  This borrowing without limits is totally insane!!  They must immediately balance the budget, and that balancing must not only include paying the interest on the debt, but the debt should be paid down at about 10% per year, 5% per year as a minimum!!

Also note that "Social Programs" and "community development" make up 35% of government spending. This must immediately "Cease and Desist".  The law does not allow the feds to spend money on these!

Inbound Solar storm / CME

There has been three back to back solar storms and they are due to hit earth tomorrow, Friday August 5, 2011.  Here is the NASA charts showing the storms starting to impact us:

The Dude network monitor

Once again "the Dude" has come to my rescue. This program is great at finding network problems.  This picture shows a very unstable network.  Everything should be green (working fine) or red (turned off).  The orange indicates that they are having issues.  This is a screen capture of the network status when the cable to the main server was bad, It failed to work at 1 gig and was unreliable at 100 M/s.  The solution was to replace the old network cable with a category 5E cable.  The old cable was not connected correctly.

Since having that problem I have ordered a network cable tester on EBay that promises to be able to detect if the pairs are connected correctly. I will post more on that once the tester arrives.