It's Eric Woodward (dotcom)

Today, in the “I never thought of it like that” file:

Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don’t really understand… All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.

But apparently, others have thought of that, and its implications:

So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown… Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.

…

THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING

…

klingons: okay we don’t get it

vulcan science academy: get what

klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way

klingons: why do you let them run your federation

vulcan science academy: look

vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up

vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.

vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.

vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.

klingons: … can we be a part of your federation

…

you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.

…

There is no phrase in Vulcan for “the particular moment when you understand that the true way to serenity is to embrace chaos as much as logic.”

Vulcans that work for Starfleet though, have a particular look that passes between them when sharing war stories featuring human shenanigans that might mean the same thing.

From http://beka-tiddalik.tumblr.com/post/150425828285/roachpatrol-deadcatwithaflamethrower / HT jwz.org

<rant>I loathe the way Tumblr shows replies. It’s like the worst aspects of a single-page mailing list dump, but for the “social media age” (so, an excess of needless indenting that screws up both the text and the embedded images).</rant>

About a year ago, I started receiving some fairly odd email messages: some originating from my own domain (itsericwoodward.com), and many originating from my own email address!

Most of these emails were obvious spam (or were themselves the product of spam, such as failure messages from external domains where the spam had been sent), and I started panicking: had I been hacked?

As I dug into the issue, I discovered that no, I hadn’t been hacked, but that my domain was just blindly accepting requests to send email. That’s when I first learned about SPF (Sender Policy Framework), “an open standard specifying a technical method to prevent sender address forgery.” Basically, to use SPF, I (as the domain owner) simply had to add a single TXT record to my domain information that indicated what servers could actually send email from my domain, and all others would be rejected. So, after fiddling around with the format for a while, I found my hosts’s recommended record (name changed to protect the innocent):

v=spf1 a mx include:mail.example.com ~all

Needless to say, I added it to my domain record, and bam – overnight, nearly all of the spam stopped flowing.

So, I went about my merry way, figuring I had solved the issue. I even added this record to the other domains that I own, since it had worked so well with the first one.

But it turns out that I was wrong.

Although I stopped receiving messages the messages from myself, every now and then I’d get a failure notice about an email coming from one of my domains being unsendable. When I’d get these, I’d think, “huh, I thought I fixed that,” and then I’d forget about it and move on to something else.

Then, just the other day, I received an email from me, to (another) me, telling me that I had a voicemail from an international number (it even helpfully suggested that “You might want to check it when you get a chance.”). And I thought, “wait a minute, didn’t I already fix this?”.

So, this time, rather than forgetting about it, I actually took a moment to look at the header, and that’s when I saw this (again, name changed):

softfail (mail.example.com: domain of transitioning xxxxxx@example.com
  does not designate 192.0.2.1 as permitted sender)

So, I went back to the SPF site again, and that’s when I learned that the server could not only reply with “pass” and “fail”, but a whole cornucopia of messages:

Received-SPF: softfail (mybox.example.org: domain of transitioning
   myname@example.com does not designate 192.0.2.1 as permitted sender)

Received-SPF: neutral (mybox.example.org: 192.0.2.1 is neither permitted
   nor denied by domain of myname@example.com)

Received-SPF: none (mybox.example.org: domain of myname@example.com does
   not designate permitted sender hosts)

Received-SPF: permerror -extension:foo (mybox.example.org: domain of
   myname@example.com uses mechanism not recognized by this client)

Received-SPF: temperror (mybox.example.org: error in processing during
   lookup of myname@example.com: DNS timeout)

The next obvious question is “why?” (well, that and “what the hell does transitioning mean?”).

It turns out that my host either misinterpreted the SPF spec, or tried to protect their users from themselves. Apparently, the presence of the tilde (“~”) in a record indicates that the domain is in transition to SPF - it’s designed for large email providers and corporations to let them start transitioning to SPF without forcing hard failures on every email that originates from an unlisted server (the idea is that the email owner would collect these softfails, verify the IPs are valid, and then add them to the SPF record). Oops.

Fortunately, I now knew what to do to fix the problem: replace the tilde with a dash (“-”):

v=spf1 a mx include:mail.example.com -all

A few hours later, problem solved, and no more spam from my domain (so far).

Based on my reading, I’m not the only one that made this mistake, and since SPF has been around for a few years (and is implemented, in some for or another, on most corporate domains), I can only imagine how many other domains using an incomplete / incorrect implementation of it (based on the number of F*-buddy requests and Canadian pharmaceutical offers I still get, I’d imagine that number to be fairly high).

So, if you own one or more domains, please do everyone a favor and implement SPF for your email. And if you aren’t using a ton of different mail servers (wherein you might not be able to list them all in your TXT record), skip the tilde and go straight for the dash.

The internet will thank you for it.

My father, Dennis Jon Woodward, passed away May 23, 2016.

I debated whether to even write about this here, but as the months have gone on, I can’t help but notice the effect his passing has had on my thoughts. Initially, I was overwhelmed with sadness, my mind unable to grasp the concept of him not existing anymore. As the time has gone on, it’s become more about specific thoughts or experiences triggering specific memories, followed by a wave of sadness at never being able to have those experiences with him again. Even now, as I write this nearly 3 months on, I find myself tearing up at the thought of never seeing him again. I know these things take time, and I’m sure that someday, once I’m “used” to not being with him anymore, my memories of him will bring joy. But not yet.

The downside of being a nauralist / materialist is that I don’t believe in any magical place where I’ll get to see him again, nor do I believe that he can come visit me as a ghost or spirit. I mean, it’d be nice if either of these true, but I can’t believe in them because there’s no evidence for them. And since he’s the one who started me on my love of science (and, tangentially, my road to naturalism), I have to stay true to that, no matter what my wishes are. But it’s hard.

Writing the obituary has been, for me, part of the grieving process - trying to consolidate the major events / moments / details of his life down to a few short sentences. But it’s also been difficult to complete; almost as if, by not publishing it, I was somehow hanging on to him. I dreaded writing it (to say nothing of trying to find the right picture), but I did, and as of yesterday, it was published in the paper. But nothing changed. He’s still gone.

This is the other reason I debated writing about this here - not just because it’s difficult, but because I feel like I don’t have anything useful to say. Maybe later, but not now.

Dennis Jon Woodward, formerly of Concord, passed away unexpectedly but peacefully in his home Monday, May 23, 2016, at the age of 64. He was born January 16, 1952, in Syracuse, N.Y., the son of the late Leonard and Vera Woodward, and was raised in upstate New York. He retired from Pass & Seymour / Legrande in Concord in 2012 after 40 years with the company.

He is survived by his wife, Sherry Woodward, of Ellenboro; sisters, Eileen Joy and Brenda Myslevecek, of Redfield, N.Y.; brother, Donald Woodward and wife, Pat, of Augusta, Ga.; son Eric Woodward and wife, Stacie, of Concord; son, Jeffrey Woodward and wife, Candace, also of Concord; daughter Sarah Horton and husband, Jason, of Mount Pleasant; stepson, Keith McDaniel and wife, Lisa, of Ellenboro; stepson Kirk McDaniel, of Concord; and 13 grandchildren. A private family service was held at his home. In lieu of flowers, the family is asking that donations be made to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

Posted at: http://www.independenttribune.com/obituaries/woodward-dennis/article_015cf7ba-3000-5081-8719-9b5536174451.html

So, after a few years of on-again, off-again blogging (in both original and micro flavors), coupled with staring at (and maintaining) a half-completed projects site, I got tired of having a split web personality and decided to squish it all together. This site is the result of that unholy union.

I plan on doing a write-up later explaining the gory details of how (and why) I built it the way I did¹, but let me at least give you the quick, jargon-laden version: the site is built with Node (specifically an as-of-yet-unreleased custom library & CLI wrapped around HarpJS), which creates static pages out of Markdown and EJS (templated to conform to IndieWeb / microformats2 specifications), which is then compressed via various Gulp plugins, and is ultimately served up through nginx running on a DigitalOcean droplet. And, lest I forget, lots and lots of emojis.

It’s all still very much a work-in-progress, but I’m pleased as punch with the results so far, and look forward to finishing both it and my 237 other projects (just probably not this week, month, or year).

In the meantime, feel free to take a look around and check it out, and if you have any questions (or want to heap praise on me), hit me up on social media or via email.

1 - Especially since I've been publishing here for [over a month](/updates/2016/5/8/update.html) and am just now getting around to writing my "introductory" post.