Ryan Morlok’s Blog

In order to keep the number of posts to this blog manageable (read: sarcasm) I’ve launched a new blog related to software development.  That should keep this free of the boring useful information that get’s between the random links I find on Digg.

We finally competed our move into our new house this weekend.  Last night was the first night Katy and I stayed there.  The closing finally went through a week ago last Friday, and that following weekend we went down to Champaign to pick up our stuff.  Thanks to friends & family in both Illinois and Minnesota, we were able to get everything moved from Champaign into our house by Sunday night.

We had to wait to finish the move with our stuff from Minnesota because Katy was sick this last week.  She’s feeling better now, though, and it’s nice to be in our own place.

Well, I’ll called it in my previous post.  AS soon as I go posting things about life before they’re finalized, something happens.  The closing of our house was delayed for (hopefully) about a week due to the bank not having it’s paperwork inline.  (We’re buying a foreclosed property and thus the seller is a bank.)  If we were the ones messing up like this, we’d be charged about $100 for every day closing was delayed, but because it’s a bank, the only thing we could do is walk away from the deal.  Oh well…

My parents safely arrived in Tanzania on Sunday.  They are there for several weeks on a Gethsemane sponsored mission trip.  You can follow the whole event on the Tanzania blog: http://tz.geth.org

I added a sidebar (after Pages and before Categories) that shows the stories/videos I’ve recently dugg on Digg.com.  I’m sure I’ll continue to post stories that I really like, but this sidebar will provide a short summary of my digg profile.

Today marks the completion of my first year of blogging.  152 posts in 365 days.  Not too bad, though granted I tend to post random short stuff, like links to interesting websites (or at least stuff I  find interesting).  All-in-all, I think I’ve done my part to give back to the great ring of procrastination — the world wide web.

Well, I’m not sure if that’s the official title, but pretty much.  Today Dusty received an offer to be a lecturer in the UIUC CS Department.  He’ll be teaching CS 230 this semester as well as something I don’t remember over the summer.  What’s scary is that he has two TAs working under him.  Congrats Dusty!

In 24-36 hours, the problems with the quotes website should be resolved.  I thought it was Comcast’s problem, but before I called them, I took a look at my Network Solutions registry and ended up finding the real problem.  The primary DNS server for the morlok.net domain was dns.morlok.net (70.89.203.89) but the 2nd and 3rd servers were set to gofast.  Those remaining entries must not have been transitioned when I setup my own DNS hosting.  Anyway, corrected the entries so that only my primary DNS server and my secondary DNS server (dns2.morlok.net — 70.89.203.90) are listed.  For whatever reason, people on Comcast must have been having problems getting to the primary DNS server, and then they would have been sent to the backup.  Or else there was some sort of situation when a Comcast DNS was caching things from when it couldn’t reach the server (perhaps due to the recent internet outage on my parent’s house) and that was causing the problem.  Anyway, after the DNS cache clears itself, the problem should be resolved.

I’ve been receiving some complaints lately that the quotes website hasn’t been working. I’m pretty sure it’s a DNS problem that’s actually coming from Comcast. Everyone who has complained has been using Comcast, and even during supposed outages, I’ve been able to get to it from my home in Illinois, from UIUC and from UMN. Brogs sent me the following information from Comcast during the last outage:

%> Dig quotes.morlok.net

;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:

;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 10793
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;quotes.morlok.net. IN ANY

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
morlok.net. 75 IN SOA ns.gofast.net. hostmaster.gofast.net. 2005122301 86400 7200 604800 900

;; Query time: 38 msec
;; SERVER: 68.87.77.130#53(68.87.77.130)
;; WHEN: Mon Jan 8 00:04:30 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 92

Comcast is trying to do the lookup with gofast, our old ISP which we no longer use. Later, within the conversation, he got the following info:

;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 20160
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;quotes.morlok.net. IN ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
quotes.morlok.net. 604800 IN A 70.89.203.89

;; Query time: 74 msec
;; SERVER: 68.87.77.130#53(68.87.77.130)
;; WHEN: Mon Jan 8 00:16:35 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 51
So the problem is intermittent. If you have problems, you can always try http://www.morlok.net/quotes but I’ve heard that can have problems with links. If anyone else experiences problems, please let me know as I’d like to get on Comcast’s case for this.

After much harrassing, Shanley has resumed his role as quotemaster.  You can check out his new quotes website at:

http://quotes.morlok.net