I'm in Northampton MA right now, at Joe Edelman's place. It's nice to be out of the City. It's even nicer to see Joe excited about Groundcrew. The guy who worked on the user interfaces for Blogger and Twitter is doing the design and there are some cool opportunities. It also looks like the project has taken a clear direction on one side - while leaving open the community side for later. The main problem is the cost of text messages, which should have been free by now.

I'd like to see some logos for the following wikis: Healthywiki, Visawiki and Wikifurniture. Let me know if you think you can make something nice, or even better, you can directly upload it to the wiki. And yeah, anything is better than nothing at all.

A bit silly. I tried setting up rsnapshot to make snapshots of the entire filesystem on my server. This apparently led to a fatal exception in the Linux kernel, probably when rsyncing /dev and especially /proc. It took a bit of time before it was fixed, but everything is working fine again. I'll make sure to first try silly things such as backup / localhost on my laptop.

Sometimes wifi connections only allow connections to a limited range of ports. In Israel connections to ports over 1024 were seriously throttled. So I put the SSH server of one machine on port 22. When going through /var/log/auth last week I found many bots trying to enter with standard names. So I installed fail2ban, today I'm checking and everything is working fine. For your own safety you can set up IP addresses that can always come through. Merely putting sshd on a non-standard port seems to be a more adequate way to keep bots out.