But the good news? There’s no new infection. No script hijacking. No iframe injection. See my previous post for more details.

Fuck you ixwebhosting. That’s all I’ve got to say.

I don’t see any other explanation except that IXwebhosting’s servers are compromised, and their weak security was in turn compromising my site. I’ve had no problems with HostGator, and I love it.

I lined up at the marker that said “25 minutes,” so I figured the people around me would be trying to move at a decent pace.  Now I know to move up a bit in the pack.  I might not finish in 20 minutes (although by next year I hopefully will be better than that), but at least I can get out at a decent pace and get a more accurate time.

Nonetheless, it was a fun time.  I took a week or two off afterwards – finishing up a ton of work for my classes at Rutgers – but now I’m back in the groove.

The other day, I did some speedwork at the lake.  I want to get a feel for the faster pace that I want to run for the 800m, so I ran 4 x 200m at around 35 seconds.  The first one was quicker (~31 seconds), and the next three were all around 35-36 seconds.  I was happy with the workout, and I finished up pretty tired.

Today, I went out for a 5 mile easy run.  I didn’t time myself, but it was around an 8:30 pace overall.  I think I started out around 8:00 minute pace and slackened off closer to 9:00 by the end.  I want to get back in the habit of one longer run a week – 5 to 7 miles.  I’m not going to run any crazy long runs (8+ miles) like I did over the summer until next summer rolls around, though.

I ultimately chose ixwebhosting.  Two years later, I’m not sure why.  I’m pretty sure I read reviews and determined that they would be a reliable host.  That estimate turned out to be… dead wrong.

In the first year, I experienced a lot of issues with ixwebhosting.  Despite a “99.9%” uptime guarantee, there were times when a problem with the sql server rendered my sites (all database driven) completely inaccessible.  In my second year, these issues seem to have been worked out, but that first year left a real sour taste in my mouth.

Then, over the past year, I’ve been battling various infections to my website.  At first, they were iframe injections that would periodically crop up.  For a time, I wasn’t maintaining any of these sites (although they were still getting a trickle of traffic), and the iframe injection got me blacklisted from Google.  Eugh.

After I sorted that out, I got hit with something like a gumblar infection.  The research I did suggested that this was a local issue – that my computer was compromised and that some kind of trojan was sending my ftp information to a remote server, which then injected script elements into my website.  I cleaned everything up, cleared my ftp information out of filezilla, and then used the web-based control panel with ixwebhosting to change my ftp password.  Still, these script elements kept coming up.  I also put a fresh install of Windows 7 (which I love, btw) onto my desktop.  If there was some kind of local infection, this would have wiped it out – and it didn’t stop the problem.

By this time, I was convinced that something was wrong at ixwebhosting.  They told me that my computer was compromised and that this led to the injections, but it just doesn’t add up.  I tried several different virus/malware scans, and nothing was found.  I changed my ftp password (and never used it in my ftp client).  I even put a fresh install of Windows on the machine.  There’s no way it’s a problem on my side.

This month, my hosting account with ixwebhosting ran out, and I dumped ‘em.  I switched to HostGator and paid for 6-months up front.  So far, I’ve got no complaints.  But it’s only been a week, so I’m not quite ready to pass judgement on them just yet.

As for IXwebhosting?  I’m ready to pass judgement on them.  They suck.  Stay away.  I signed up for two years when I bought my hosting from them, and within a few months I regretted it.  If I hadn’t been locked in for two years, I would have dumped them long ago and switched to a new host.

Today was one of those days. I went out for a 5k run. It started off ok – I did the first mile in 7:30. I was kind of fatigued by the end, though, and it showed. The next two miles were both around 9:00 minutes each. /sigh

Oh well. It looks like next Saturday isn’t going to be a great race, but I’m going to go anyway. Bad timing with the flu and a couple weeks of lost motivation really take their toll. I’ll schedule another 5k in the spring and, hopefully, make a much better go of it.

The system monitor was showing a weird amount of RAM, but it definitely wasn’t the max (512mb).  When I opened up the bottom of the laptop (where I figured the memory modules should go), I only saw a slot for one memory module.

Weird. I thought in the manual, it said that you could install two memory modules (up to 256mb) for a total of 512mb. So where is this extra memory module?

After digging through the documentation some more, I figured it out. There are two locations for you to install RAM, one on top of the motherboard and one underneath.

The easy to reach place is on the bottom of the computer. Look for the circle labeled “M,” and remove that screw. You can now slide the cover out of the way, and you should see a spot for one RAM chip as well as the built-in modem. When you look in the documentation for how to install a memory upgrade, this is where it sends you.

The other place is more of a pain in the butt to get to. But, it’s certainly do-able once you see the proper instructions.

First, you’ll need to remove the keyboard. You can find the official Dell documentation here.

Next, you need to remove the EMI shield. When you look under the keyboard, the EMI shield is the piece of sheet metal covering the left half of the opening.  Follow the instructions found here in the Dell documentation.

Now you should see another slot for a memory module, the fan (with the processor underneath) and some other random stuff. Install your memory module and carefully put the machine back together.

I’m not 100% sure, since I got this machine after it had been used (and presumably upgraded), but I think the spot underneath the EMI shield is where the original RAM is installed. I found a 64mb board there. The other place was probably empty when the laptop shipped, and that was intended for regular memory upgrades. That would explain why it was so much easier to get too…

Anyhow, now my Dell Inspiron 2600 is running a bit smoother with 512mb of ram (instead of the previous 320mb). When the computer is at rest, Ubuntu is chewing through about 150mb of RAM, leaving 350mb available for applications. For a machine this old, that’ll just have to do.

In the future, I may disassemble the computer again and take some pictures for a more formal write up. In the meantime, use the official Dell documentation. In this case, it’s your friend. The important thing is to note that there are two locations for the memory to go. Although this is stated in the documentation, it’s not very well highlighted and I skipped over that bit of information the first couple of times I read the section on adding new memory.

Now I just need to get a USB wireless dongle working, and this will be all set for use in my classroom. Woot!

I love collecting old computers for use in my classroom. I just found a handful of unused (but not so old) computers in a computer lab at school. They were Dell Optiplex 270’s – Pentium 4, 2.8 ghz, and 1gb of RAM.

Can you believe that the tech coordinator was thinking of tossing them now that we got new computers (which aren’t much better)? To follow up on that post, I built myself a new machine (Core 2 Duo, 2.8 ghz, 4gb RAM, 1gb Video Card) at the end of the summer for $500 (+$100 for a 19″ widescreen LCD monitor). /frown

But hey. Her loss, my gain. I now have four shiny Dell’s in the back of my room. If I can re-arrange things and get the furniture situated, I’ll have 12-14 decent computers connected to the internet in my own classroom. That’s a regular Social Studies classroom.

Back to the topic at hand, though. My mom wanted to help me in my crusade to collect as many old-but-useful computers as possible, so she spread the word at church. One of her friends had some old laptops she wanted to get rid of, and I became the owner of three new-old Dell laptops. Two of them seemed salveagable, but the third was a bit too old even for my taste.

I got one of them working quickly without any trouble. I installed xubuntu and took it into school. I still need to install the extra RAM that I purchased and get the USB wireless adapater working, but until then it’s sitting on the counter, plugged into the network with an ethernet cable and working fine. One of my students in particular loves to work at that laptop, and I can’t figure out why – because it’s the oldest and (relatively speaking) slowest of all the machines in my room.

Installing Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 2600

The other useable machine, though, is a Dell Inspiron 2600. It seems that the graphics card in this particular Dell Inspiron is trouble, and it’s (not so) tough to get a Ubuntu install to work. I tried the latest install CD, and I got a blank screen. Umm… uh oh. What do I do?

After some research, I figured out my best bet was to install Ubuntu 8.04 (instead of the latest, 9.10) on the machine. I got a bunch of information from the Ubuntu forums, and some really helpful insights from this post on apfrod.

I burned a new image of the 8.04 Hardy Heron alternate install to a DVD and popped it into the Dell. It booted into the installation, but there were freaky lines across the screen. I ignored them for the moment, and the installation went otherwise smoothly.

When I was done, the computer booted to a blank gray screen. Eugh. I turned the computer on, saw some text and the grub loader, saw a splash screen, and them BLAM. Gray screen. Hmm…

So, I followed the suggestion I found on apfrod and specified a display driver in the xorg.conf file.

To do that, I first booted to the command prompt. To do this, I hit “Escape” while the computer was booting. That let me choose to boot into recovery mode. From there, I told it I wanted to go to the shell prompt.

At this point, I navigated to the /etc/X11 directory. You should be able to do this by typing

cd /etc/X11

I edited the xorg config file by typing

nano xorg.conf

Following the instructions in the apfrod post I changed the following section:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

to

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Option "UseFBDev" "true"
Driver "i810"
EndSection

I rebooted the computer and low and behold… it worked! The gui loaded up perfectly, and I started downloading/installing updates.

Woot! Another working computer for my classroom.

Initially, I had problems with iframes popping up on my pages. I cleared the themes and deleted the iframes, and periodically they would re-appear. This was annoying, and it was also damaging to my sites (although not a huge concern, since I didn’t update them regularly anymore and I wasn’t really expecting to earn much profit/traffic from them). Then, I noticed that script tags were appearing in the pages, and the whole situation got even more aggravating.

I would remove all of the script tags and clean up the entire server (replacing three wordpress installations and cleaning up three wordpress templates). A few days later, the script tags would be back.

What the heck? I eventually found some reading on the topic – start with this post about Gumblar and then look around Unmasked Parasites. I repeatedly scanned my computer with different virus programs, but I was unable to find any kind of parasite that would transmit my ftp information to a remote server.

Nonetheless, I decided that something like this had to be the problem. I again cleaned up the server, replacing all three wordpress installations and cleaning up the templates. I then cleared all of the passwords out of my FTP client (Filezilla). Finally, I went to my hosting account through my web browser and changed my FTP password to something new and never used it in Filezilla.

So far, so good. It’s been a week or so, and the virus hasn’t cropped back up. Oh, I hope it stays away…

I wanted to make a website for the yearbook club and post some of these photos in galleries. It’s a great way to promote the yearbook and the kids like seeing themselves online. There were some legal issues that I’m working out with the administration, but there were also some technical issues.

Although I obviously can create and host my own website, I don’t have access to web space with php hosting for the yearbook club. I didn’t want to mix school stuff with my own stuff, so I didn’t want to host it here. The simplest solution for me (which I also use for class blogs) was a free blog hosted on Wordpress.com.

That is, until I realized that I couldn’t easily embed slideshows from other websites (i.e. Picasa). Doh! The embed and iframe tags that are usually used to include slide shows gets wiped out by Wordpress’ security.

I figured out a work around, though. http://www.slideshare.net/ allows you to create and host unlimited slideshows for free. They also offer an option to embed the slideshow into a Wordpress blog, and its compatible with a free Wordpress.com blog. This solved my technical problems and I don’t have to worry about storage space.

Shortly, I’m going to write up an article about this for Associated Content. I’ll link to it when it’s published. In the meantime, here’s a sample gallery. The pictures are just of my backyard. I’m still working on the legal issues, so I haven’t actually hosted any slideshows of students yet.

Here was the plan:

Warm-up.  Easy 800m run, some dynamic warm-up/stretches, and some strides.

Medium intensity 400m run to finish warm-up (~90 seconds).

2 x High Intensity 400m run, with 10-15 minutes recovery (~75-80 seconds).

The last time I did a 400m workout, I followed the same pattern and my two workout quarters were in the 70’s – a time that I was more than satisfied with. Today, I warmed up and felt fine. The warm-up 400m went well, and I came in at 92 seconds.

The workout 400s were a bit slow, though.  The first one was 82 seconds, which wouldn’t have upset me if the next one was an improvement. But, the last 400 was slower – around 85 seconds.  In both of the workout quarters, I felt like I came out too slow because my legs felt dead. I picked up the pace over the last 200m, but it was too little too late.

I also tried to run through the end of the last 400m, extending it to 600m or 800m. Hah!  That wasn’t going to happen. I made it about 50m past the mark, and I couldn’t maintain the pace.

Just like yesterday, I’m going to chalk this workout up to recovery from the flu and time off. I’ll run a couple steady state runs this week, and hopefully next weekend I’ll be back on track. I only have three weeks left until my 5k race, so I’m running out of time on that. I do, however, have plenty of time before I need to run my 400m and 800m races in June.

Two weeks ago, my luck ran out. I was getting ready to enjoy a nice four day weekend – in other words I was going to get a lot of work done. But Friday I came down with a nasty cough, a horrible headache, and eventually a steady fever. This seemed like a good time to take a few days off.

On Sunday, most of my symptoms were improving, except the cough. I thought I’d go out for an easy jog to stretch out my legs after a few days of sitting around the house. It felt good to get out and stretch, but my legs were so dead I made it about a mile before I stopped and walked home.

Over the next two weeks, I didn’t go out and run.  The first week, my cough was still so bad I didn’t want to run hard. The second week, I intended to go out and get a couple easy workouts in, but I was too busy catching up on work that I missed while sick.

But, finally, I got out yesterday morning for a workout. I went to the park and warmed up. At first, I planned on some speedwork, but after my warmup I didn’t feel quite up to it. Instead, I thought I’d do some 800-meter cruise intervals – a medium intensity stamina workout.

I warmed up with a half mile jog (~4 minutes). My goal was to run six 800 meters at a pace of around 3:20 to 3:30 (around my goal 5k time) with a short walking recovery (2-3 minutes) between each rep.

The first one was good, coming in at 3:27. The second one, my legs felt decidedly fatigued, and I struggled through at 3:40. By the third lap, my legs were really dead and I just barely came in under 4 minutes. At that point, I decided it was time to call it an early day, stretch out, and head home.

It definitely felt good to get out and run, but my legs are definitely worn out from sitting around for a week or two without any exercise. Hopefully a few days of training will whip that fatigue out of them, because my 5k is coming up in just a few weeks – December 12.

I plan on going over to the park later today for a workout, so we’ll see how that goes.