January 2009 Archives

I prefer Network Solutions' WHOIS service over others because it appears to be one of the more complete and accurate WHOIS services available.  Because I use this WHOIS search service a lot, I decided to put together a quick yet complete search plugin/provider for Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 (as shown in the screen shot to the left).

Add to your Firefox or IE7:  Click here to add my Network Solutions WHOIS search provider to your Firefox or IE7.

In fact, building your own search plugin/provider for Firefox and IE is relatively simple.  All you need is a small XML file that defines a few details about the provider, and a little JavaScript to trigger the install process.  My Network Solutions WHOIS search plugin XML can be found here; note that this XML works for IE7 and Firefox.  If you need to Base64 encode an image/x-icon for the provider XML, I suggest using this converter.  With regards to the JavaScript that triggers the search plugin installation in the browser (addEngine), take a look at this JavaScript example ...

During my travels at work, I've come across a few interesting memory management issues in Java.  My team has deployed several large web-applications in a single instance of Apache Tomcat.  The Linux box running these applications only has about 2GB of physical memory available.  Once the apps are deployed, about 1.8 GB of the memory is consumed by Java alone.  Clearly, we need to improve our memory management a bit.

However, I took a few minutes to do some digging on Java's Permanent Generation (Perm Gen) and how it relates to the Java heap.  Here are some distilled notes from my research that you may find useful when debugging memory management issues in Java ...

In 2004, I attended a young conservative speaker series in Orange County, CA.  The current Sheriff of Orange County at the time, Michael S. Carona, was a guest speaker at this event.  Long story short, I won a bottle of wine (2000 Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi) in a raffle that evening.  And, even more awesome than that, the bottle of wine I won in this raffle happened to be from Sheriff Michael S. Carona.  The bottle itself is engraved with the OC Sheriff's logo and Carona's name.

Fast forward 3 years, and I saw online that Carona (and his wife) were indicted on several counts of witness tampering, bribery, conspiracy, and mail fraud.  It's now 2009, and yesterday a jury acquitted Carona of all but one count of witness tampering.  As of now, he faces up to 10 years in prison.  Thanks to Orange County taxpayers, I now own a bottle of wine from a convicted felon!

If you've reading this, and you were trying to visit mycougarland.com (or some other site) you should know that you were re-directed here because of a technical error on the part of the owner of mycougarland.com.  As it turns out, the owner of mycougarland.com failed to properly update their DNS records when their IP address changed.  As a result, when you try to navigate to www.mycougarland.com in your browser, that domain resolves to IP address 76.21.33.115.  This IP address, 76.21.33.115, is currently my IP address as assigned to me by Comcast.  If you are the owner of these domains (mycougarland.com, etc.), please update your DNS records to point to the correct IP address.

I do not know what mycougarland.com is, nor am I affiliated with it or the owner in anyway.

I suspect this problem occurred because of dynamically assigned IP addresses from Comcast.  Most likely, the owner of mycougarland.com was self-hosting his site (like I do) using his Comcast internet connection.  At one time, Comcast assigned him IP address 76.21.33.115.  However, Comcast is known to rotate these dynamically assigned addresses every once in a while.  So, both of our IP addresses changed and I got 76.21.33.115.  However, the previous owner didn't update their DNS records to point to their new IP address; so all of the domains previously pointing to 76.21.33.115 will now redirect to kolich.com.

Just another classic case of failing to properly update DNS records.

(mark@regatta)~> nslookup mycougarland.com
Server:         208.67.222.222
Address:        208.67.222.222#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   mycougarland.com
Address: 76.21.33.115

At home, I've got a Dish Network DVR 625 connected to a Dish 500 on my roof.  Recently, my satellite setup started experiencing some strange signal quality issues: splotching, broken audio, and in some cases the unit loses the satellite signal all together.  There are no large tress or other objects that block my view of 110°W and 119°W, so I started hunting around for answers.  I ran the DVR 625's self-test feature, and luckily, it helped me pin-point the problem.  Based on the self-test results and my own investigation, I've concluded that I have a potential problem with the Dish 500's LNB (Low-Noise Block Converter) on the roof.

The LNB is a parabolic receiver (an antenna) which converts a high-frequency satellite signal to a lower one that can be eaisly sent over coaxial cable.  An LNB Drift indicates that the LNB's internal oscillator frequency is operating out of normal range, and therefore, it could not compensate for any normal fluctuations with the incoming satellite signal.  This explains my signal quality issues; the LNB hardware is failing.  On my DVR 625, the self-test reported an LNB Drift of about -6 (see screen shot).  Many online forums and other sites suggest that an LNB Drift might be caused by a failing LNB, a bad parabolic dish, or a blockage of the incoming satellite signal.  In my case, I think it's pretty clear that a failing LNB is the most likely cause.

Continue reading for the rest of the story ...