Any of you monkeys want a banana?

It's not that I haven't wanted to post any entries the last month...I think of things daily that I want to comment on. It might be a memory of my father, or something one of my kids said, or how interesting that tree is on Tone Road.

My only excuse is I've been busy with other stuff. Most of my web time is being taken by building the photo album. It's coming along nicely, but there are so many features I need to add. Currently I'm working on adding mid-size pics (640X480) for faster loading so you'll know if you want the full sized picture. I really liked that feature of Gallery and want to use that scheme. Hope I'm not violating any copyrights (haha).

Nathan and Alex are now engaged to be married, sometime in the next two years. I like Alex; she's quiet, and doesn't seem to put up a front. She's attending college and working. It's tough to make it when you do that, so she still lives at home. They've discussed their plans a little, and it looks like Rose is going to have at least one of her children married in the Catholic Church.:-)

In my search for an answer to my question 'What the hell am I going to do about a photo album?', I found a program called JAlbum. I don't use it as it was originally intended (it will create a complete photo album) because my photo album is based on PHP and MYSQL, but the image generation it includes is quite handy. I drop pictures in a directory that are prepared for the web and let JAlbum create the thumbs and midsize pics. It's a Java-based application, so you need a recent version of Java installed, but there is a version of the d/l that includes Java if you need it. If something better comes along I'll change, but for now, JAlbum works pretty well.

I found this linux-based firewall/web-cache/proxy server thing called IP COP. It's a ISO image, 25-30 MB. Burn it to a cd, and you can boot and install it in about 20 minutes. It's way-cool. It was installed on a P-166 with 64 MB of memory and an 8 GB hard drive, sitting in the corner doing nothing but gathering dust. If you try IP COP on a dial-up, you might want to use an external modem, or one that you can set the IRQ, address, and com port, because the internal modem I first tried wouldn't work. The support boards for IP COP are pretty good though, and within a few hours the answer to the problem was posted:'Some plug and play modems install with Com 5 or higher, and IP COP can't handle that without changes'. An external modem worked fine, and now the dhcp server, proxy server, web cache (Squid), and firewall work without a problem. It has a setting for 'transparent proxy', so you don't need to make any changes to the clients on your network. They just use it. It's better than I expected. Now if only my ISP would fix the friggin connection problems.

IPCOP includes SNORT as the IDS (intrusion detection system). The logs not only tell me when attempts were made, they tell me what kind of attempts, and where they originated from. There is a lot of shit going on out in the wild, and you'll be part of it whether you want to or not if you don't take precautions. All I can say is, if you don't run a firewall, you're asking to be hijacked.....