So, what does the Wolfey-guy do late at night when he’s bored, can’t sleep, and is tired of reading other peoples’ blogs? He does a little bit of ego-surfing and checks his server logs.

I must say, I was surprised at how much traffic I’ve been getting. I remember looking at the logs several months after I started the Diary-X journal and being happy to see more than ten hits a day, but now (for the past three weeks, anyway) I’ve been averaging about 75 hits a day, after you subtract the ones generated by my own site maintenance and postings. Average page hits are under two, so folks aren’t digging through the archives, but they’re reading the main entries.

Greyduck gets the booby prize for biggest referrer, with over half of all the hits coming from his domain. Thanks for the link, roomie! (Sorry, but the ‘booby’ in question will have to remain metaphorical.) Conspicuously absent, however, were referrals from a site I’ve been affiliated with for quite some time – turns out, they’ve removed the link. Can’t please everybody, I suppose.

What I’m really wondering is where the heck the referral from nude celebrity blogs came from. I think somebody is very confused.

Well, I had a couple hours before the barbecue started yesterday, so I went ahead and tried the ftp install of SuSE 9.1, and I am very happy with the results.

I thought it would take alot longer, since it was the openning weekend of the process, but I was up and running in just about two hours. It only missed one package during the initial download (a console font package) which it correctly installed when I did an update later.

There will of course be the minor annoyances of renamed packages and paths, but that really only hits me in a couple of programs, as I can usually build from the source code. Aside from that, the interface is slick as always, there’s a ton of stuff already installed, and it has a solid feature set.

Two things I was disappointed to see: the “My Computer” icon on the desktop and an implementation of a WindowsXP-style “autorun selector”. Both of these things are easy to kill though, so it’s not a huge problem.

Now to shove the ATI drivers down it’s throat :)

Ok, so far, I have gone through three different hard drives before I found one that would stick, but I don’t believe that has had anything to do with Arch. Finally got it working on an 82.3 gig, split kinda half-n-half for / and /home.

Not a bad little system. The pacman package manager works as advertised. A simple ‘pacman -Sy {packagename}’ gets you the latest version, checks (and downloads) all dependencies, then installs the whole kaboodle, all from the command line. (Anyone who has ever tried to install mplayer from scratch will appreciate that!)

This is still a young distro, so there (of course) are going to be some shortfalls in the package lists, but it looks to be fairly simple to build your own packages out of tarballs. The nice thing is that the packages that are on the list are right up-to-date. (I didn’t realize that Gaim had finally gotten the ymessenger snafu figured out until I installed it last night.)

Things I still need to figure out:

Nothing too major, but it will take some playing. The big irritant is that Arch uses the DevFS filesystem, which means the nomenclature is once again, different than what I’m used to, so I can’t simple copy over the /etc/fstab file from my working system. (/dev/hda1 is now /dev/discs/disc0/disc1 for instance)

All-in-all, a distro to watch. A good middle step from the uber-user-friendliness of SuSE or Mandrake to the gotta-know-everything of Gentoo or Slackware. As they move towards the 1.0 milestone, things should get pretty sweet.

The folks over at ITWorld.com write that a Buffalo spammer gets 3.5 to 7 years not for spamming per se, but rather for identity theft when he spoofed two accounts to send out “more than 800 million spam messages”.

This one brings it home to me today, since I noticed several bounced emails in my inbox from AOL mail servers. According to the messages, I have tried to send email to a few dead AOL accounts, and they are kindly letting me know that those accounts no longer exist.

Which is right neighborly of them, but I haven’t sent anything to an AOL addy in months. Someone is apparently spoofing my comcast email address.

Since there’s been less than a dozen of these bounces, I’m more inclined to believe that this is the work of a virus on somebody’s home computer. It is probably sending an email to every address in that person’s addy book from every address in that book.

So, if anyone out there has received an odd message from me that you weren’t expecting, let me know so we can compare address books and maybe figure out who the poor slob is that got infected.

Now if I can just track down the loser who keeps sending me vitamin ads to my blog email address…

According to Symantec, there has already been a virus (W64.Rugrat.3344) released for the IA64 Windows platform – which hasn’t even seen wide release yet.

The virus is just a proof-of-concept, and it’s interesting to note that it won’t affect AMD64 Windows platforms – or any current 32-bit Windows platforms for that matter, unless you’re running 64-bit emulation. All non-Microsoft OSes are of course, immune to this virus.

Danger to the average user as of right now: NIL.