While I couldn’t make it (I was at home with Nykolai) I’ve been told that the Bar Social event at Q Bar on Friday was a great success. We’re looking forward to doing more of them as they seem to be a great way of meeting new people and inviting them to our events.
In an attempt to reduce the number of viruses and SPAM emails that we’re getting hit by, I’ve modified our mail system so it will refuse to talk to any machine that fails a Reverse DNS lookup. The majority of mail servers are set up so that a Reverse DNS on their IP address will map to a real name. If this fails, it’s usually a sign that the sending machine is an infected workstation.
By blocking these machines outright, we do not have to receive their infected/junk emails. This should hopefully save us quite a bit of incoming bandwidth, thus reducing our monthly hosting charges. It should also help reduce the amount of SPAM we receive.
I’ve also modified the “Shields” system so that it only blocks sites that have sent 3 or more viruses in the past day or two. It was blocking sites if they’d sent 3 or more viruses in a week. This was much too long and resulted in the blocking of some valid sites that accidentally let a few through.
At last, Nykolai and his mom have returned from five weeks vacation in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I met them at the airport after they’d been travelling for over 23 hours, including a one hour delay getting into Auckland which meant that they wound up missing their Sydney -> Melbourne flight.
After having a “family lunch” in at Pause in Balaclava, we dropped Rocio at her apartment and headed back to my place. Despite being quite tired, Nykolai and I headed to the park to fly our aircraft, including a new one that he had been given in Argentina. We had to try a different part of the park because the kids from the local school were using the oval. During the flights, the air-powered aircraft wound up doing a gorgeous flight which almost ended in disaster when it landed on the road. Ooops. Fortunately, the cars managed to dodge it so it wasn’t damaged.
I managed to keep Nykolai up until the evening but he passed out before 7pm. No surprises given the jetlag and long travel times. Great to have him back again – I missed him while he was over there.
