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• Huge spike in traffic tracked by Google Analytics from Safari browsers

  - by Petra Barus

  My site urbanindo.com recently experienced huge spike in traffic tracked by Google Analytics. The huge spike sometime shows in several same pages. This is odd because I rarely experienced that much traffic before. Some pages can have hundreds of visitors at the same time. But when I read the webserver log, those pages only showed up in only one or two entries, not hundreds like the GA showed. But the only similar thing about the entries is that they are using similar browser agent. Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 5_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B206 Safari/7534.48.3 Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B206 Safari/7534.48.3 And when I opened the Google Analytics Audience Technology Browsers & OS and I plotted the chart based on the browsers, I saw that the huge spike came from Safari. This huge spikes started to happen since the beginning of this August, which happens to be when I use multiple webservers behind load balancer (although I'm pretty sure those two are not relevant). Is there something wrong with my GA configuration?

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• Extremely large spike in traffic on the 1st - 4th of every month from mobile browsers

  - by wsanville

  I've noticed that on the 1st - 4th of the recent months (since January), several sites I maintain are getting thousands of requests from mobile browsers, whereas throughout the rest of the month, the numbers are in the single or double digits. Has anybody else noticed this sort of behavior? I don't have the exact user agents logged, but my analysis software (WebTrends) reports the traffic as mostly iPhone/iPad/iPod, Android, and Blackberry.

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• Stripping a spike from rrdtool when removespike.pl doesn't find any

  - by raccettura

  I know when rrdtool graphs (using rrdtool 1.4) network traffic and the host is restarted a spike is a pretty normal thing to see. In the past I've just run that removespike.pl script that is hosted by the author and it strips the spike and I'm good to go. The last few times I've rebooted removespike.pl finds no spikes, but it's obvious that there are spikes. So my question is, how can I easily remove these spikes and get my graphs usable again? Right now it's so skewed it's meaningless.

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• Google Analytics unexplained spike

  - by Dianne

  My client's Google Analytics has had a spike everyday from May 6th (from 0 - 100.) This is in a city that he is not optimized for and does very little business in. The hits are coming in direct to the website. My client is concerned that it has something to do with competition using his site as a price shopping device. I can't view the ip to see where they are coming from and his site is not built in PHP so the work around doesn't work here. Any thoughts? Could it be a "referring site" situation and if so is there a way for me to find out what the referring site is?

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• spike in my inverse fourier transform

  - by Jon

  I am trying to compare two data sets in MATLAB. To do this I need to filter the data sets by Fourier transforming the data, filtering it and then inverse Fourier transforming it. When I inverse Fourier transform the data however I get a spike at either end of the red data set (picture shows the first spike), it should be close to zero at the start, like the blue line. I am comparing many data sets and this only happens occasionally. I have three questions about this phenomenon. First, what may be causing it, secondly, how can I remedy it, and third, will it affect the data further along the time series or just at the beginning and end of the time series as it appears to from the picture. Any help would be great thanks.

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• MPMoviePlayerController on large videos causes massive memory spike, and a level 1 memory warning

  - by Shizam

  When viewing images my application hums along nicely with low memory consumption, once I try to watch a video using MPMoviePlayerController memory usage spikes way up, dwarfing the previous memory graph and if I play the video it causes a 'memory warning. Level=1' message. The video files (mp4) aren't even that big, 40MB or so, and it doesn't matter if I play the file streamed from a URL or loaded from a local file, actually the memory spike is even worse if I try to stream it. Here is the code I use to create the player: if (_photo.videoPath != nil) { _movieViewController=[[MPMoviePlayerViewController alloc] initWithContentURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:_photo.videoPath]]; } else { _movieViewController=[[MPMoviePlayerViewController alloc] initWithContentURL:[NSURL URLWithString:_photo.videoURL]]; } [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(videoMetaListener:) name:MPMovieDurationAvailableNotification object:_movieViewController.moviePlayer]; _movieViewController.moviePlayer.scalingMode=MPMovieScalingModeAspectFit; _movieViewController.moviePlayer.shouldAutoplay = YES; _movieViewController.moviePlayer.controlStyle = MPMovieControlStyleEmbedded; Anybody else running into issues playing video? Also I checked for leaks, there are none reported.

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• code::blocks CPU spike

  - by User1

  I'm using Code::Blocks 8.02 in Ubuntu 9.10. If I leave Code::Blocks open for several hours, I notice that it's consuming a LOT of CPU. If I actually click on the application, the CPU usage immediately drops. Is anyone else having this problem? Is there a solution?

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• How to create a CPU spike with a bash command

  - by User1

  I want to create a near 100% load on a Linux machine. It's quad core system and I want all cores going full speed. Ideally, the CPU load would last a designated amount of time and then stop. I'm hoping there's some trick in bash. I'm thinking some sort of infinite loop.

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• Why is this JLabel continuously repainting?

  - by Morinar

  I've got an item that appears to continuously repaint when it exists, causing the CPU to spike whenever it is in any of my windows. It directly inherits from a JLabel, and unlike the other JLabels on the screen, it has a red background and a border. I have NO idea why it would be different enough to continuously repaint. The callstack looks like this: Thread [AWT-EventQueue-1] (Suspended (breakpoint at line 260 in sItem)) sItem.paint(Graphics) line: 260 sItem(JComponent).paintToOffscreen(Graphics, int, int, int, int, int, int) line: 5124 RepaintManager$PaintManager.paintDoubleBuffered(JComponent, Image, Graphics, int, int, int, int) line: 1475 RepaintManager$PaintManager.paint(JComponent, JComponent, Graphics, int, int, int, int) line: 1406 RepaintManager.paint(JComponent, JComponent, Graphics, int, int, int, int) line: 1220 sItem(JComponent)._paintImmediately(int, int, int, int) line: 5072 sItem(JComponent).paintImmediately(int, int, int, int) line: 4882 RepaintManager.paintDirtyRegions(Map<Component,Rectangle>) line: 803 RepaintManager.paintDirtyRegions() line: 714 RepaintManager.seqPaintDirtyRegions() line: 694 [local variables unavailable] SystemEventQueueUtilities$ComponentWorkRequest.run() line: 128 InvocationEvent.dispatch() line: 209 summitEventQueue(EventQueue).dispatchEvent(AWTEvent) line: 597 summitEventQueue(SummitHackableEventQueue).dispatchEvent(AWTEvent) line: 26 summitEventQueue.dispatchEvent(AWTEvent) line: 62 EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(int) line: 269 EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(int, Conditional, EventFilter) line: 184 EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(int, Conditional, Component) line: 174 EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(int, Conditional) line: 169 EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Conditional) line: 161 EventDispatchThread.run() line: 122 [local variables unavailable] It basically just continually hits that over and over again as fast as I can press continue. The code that is "unique" to this particular label looks approximately like this: bgColor = OurColors.clrWindowTextAlert; textColor = Color.white; setBackground(bgColor); setOpaque(true); setSize(150, getHeight()); Border border_warning = BorderFactory.createCompoundBorder( BorderFactory.createMatteBorder(1, 1, 1, 1, OurColors.clrXBoxBorder), Global.border_left_margin); setBorder(border_warning); It obviously does more, but that particular block only exists for these labels that are causing the spike/continuous repaint. Any ideas why it would keep repainting this particular label?

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• How do I determine the cause of a sustained spike in mysql queries/activity?

  - by mattmcmanus

  So this is more of a "I'm trying to learn about how this works" question rather than "there is a serious problem I can't figure out!" question. I'm setting up a VPS and have been tweaking and changing things here and there. I recently installed munin (like two days ago) and yesterday I noticed a significant increase in mysql activity. So now my curiosity is going crazy. How do I setup/access mysql's query log? I have about 5 databases on the server so I want to see which one is getting all the action. Is there anything else I can do to keep a better eye on what's going on? Here are the graphs. As you can tell, it's not that much activity at all but I'm just curious at the change. The sites that are on the server right now do not get a lot of traffic. It's running a couple drupal sites, only one of which is live. The live one hasn't had a spike in traffic and the last spike was 250 visitors so it's barely a spike at all.

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• Why do AWS spot-instance prices spike above the "on demand" pricing?

  - by Laykes

  Amazon Pricing on Spot Instance Inconsistencies This is something which will be best explained through screenshots of a historical chart of instance pricings. If you look at a lot of the instance prices for spot instances, you will notice regular patterns of spikes. See here: As you can see, the price for this compute medium instance, regularly spikes above the on demand price. A c1.medium instance (on demand), would only cost $0.186 per hour. But for a period of a few weeks, in zone B, the price would regularly spike to $1.20. This is some 6 times the actual on demand price. It's also not isolated. If you look at zone-b again for small instances, there is a similar, spike frequently. Which goes 4x the on demand pricing. Does anyone know why this happens? Here are a few suggestions Someone entered $1.2 instead of $0.12 (I would discount this since it happened 20 times over the space of 3 weeks). Amazon regularly artifically inflate their prices by bidding on their own instances to get the most bang for their buck. (I would discount this since it would be ridiculous and bad business) Some company launched 1000 servers at once, and wants to make sure that they all launch. (I would discount this since they would presumably launch them at a price which would be below the minimum on demand price. Why would you pay above on demand for a single server?). It's a bug in their reporting?

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• git doesn't show where code was removed.

  - by Andrew Myers

  So I was tasked at replacing some dummy code that our project requires for historical compatibility reasons but has mysteriously dropped out sometime since the last release. Since disappearing code makes me nervous about what else might have gone missing but un-noticed I've been digging through the logs trying to find in what commit this handful of lines was removed. I've tried a number of things including "git log -S'add-visit-resource-pcf'", git blame, and even git bisect with a script that simply checks for the existence of the line but have been unable to pinpoint exactly where these lines were removed. I find this very perplexing, particularly since the last log entry (obtained by the above command) before my re-introduction of this code was someone else adding the code as well. commit 0b0556fa87ff80d0ffcc2b451cca1581289bbc3c Author: Andrew Date: Thu May 13 10:55:32 2010 -0400 Re-introduced add-visit-resource-pcf, see PR-65034. diff --git a/spike/hst/scheduler/defpackage.lisp b/spike/hst/scheduler/defpackage.lisp index f8e692d..a6f8d38 100644 --- a/spike/hst/scheduler/defpackage.lisp +++ b/spike/hst/scheduler/defpackage.lisp @@ -115,6 +115,7 @@ #:add-to-current-resource-pcf #:add-user-package-nickname #:add-value-criteria + #:add-visit-resource-pcf #:add-window-to-gs-params #:adjust-derived-resources #:adjust-links-candidate-criteria-types commit 9fb10e25572c537076284a248be1fbf757c1a6e1 Author: Bob Date: Sun Jan 17 18:35:16 2010 -0500 update-defpackage for Spike 33.1 Delivery diff --git a/spike/hst/scheduler/defpackage.lisp b/spike/hst/scheduler/defpackage.lisp index 983666d..47f1a9a 100644 --- a/spike/hst/scheduler/defpackage.lisp +++ b/spike/hst/scheduler/defpackage.lisp @@ -118,6 +118,7 @@ #:add-user-package-nickname #:add-value-criteria #:add-vars-from-proposal + #:add-visit-resource-pcf #:add-window-to-gs-params #:adjust-derived-resources #:adjust-links-candidate-criteria-types This is for one of our package definition files, but the relevant source file reflects something similar. Does anyone know what could be going on here and how I could find the information I want? It's not really that important but this kind of things makes me a bit nervous.

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• How to prevent Google Website Optimizer from making Google Analytics spike Direct Traffic and lower Bounce Rate?

  - by Scott

  I am using Google Website Optimizer (GWO) and Google Analytics. Whenever a person (Google Website Optimizer) does a javascript redirect, Google Analytics will change the referrer. When the referrer changes, the traffic source becomes yourself and is changed to Direct Traffic. For Example: A visitor goes to google: searches for my great service. Clicks the link that goes to website page: /home/ At this point, Google Analytics tracks the referrer as Google. However, /home/ has a GWO javacript redirect to a battery of A/B tests. /home-1/ or /home-2/ or /home-3/ When the redirect from /home/ occurs to /home-1/, google analytics on the /home-1/ page now thinks the referrer is yourself and converts the referrer to Direct Traffic since the Direct Traffic bucket is the unknown. I'm really surprised that GWO and GA do this when they both come from google. Now, How does one fix this to prevent the overwrite of the referrer using GWO?

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• Why do we get a sudden spike in response times?

  - by Christian Hagelid

  We have an API that is implemented using ServiceStack which is hosted in IIS. While performing load testing of the API we discovered that the response times are good but that they deteriorate rapidly as soon as we hit about 3,500 concurrent users per server. We have two servers and when hitting them with 7,000 users the average response times sit below 500ms for all endpoints. The boxes are behind a load balancer so we get 3,500 concurrents per server. However as soon as we increase the number of total concurrent users we see a significant increase in response times. Increasing the concurrent users to 5,000 per server gives us an average response time per endpoint of around 7 seconds. The memory and CPU on the servers are quite low, both while the response times are good and when after they deteriorate. At peak with 10,000 concurrent users the CPU averages just below 50% and the RAM sits around 3-4 GB out of 16. This leaves us thinking that we are hitting some kind of limit somewhere. The below screenshot shows some key counters in perfmon during a load test with a total of 10,000 concurrent users. The highlighted counter is requests/second. To the right of the screenshot you can see the requests per second graph becoming really erratic. This is the main indicator for slow response times. As soon as we see this pattern we notice slow response times in the load test. How do we go about troubleshooting this performance issue? We are trying to identify if this is a coding issue or a configuration issue. Are there any settings in web.config or IIS that could explain this behaviour? The application pool is running .NET v4.0 and the IIS version is 7.5. The only change we have made from the default settings is to update the application pool Queue Length value from 1,000 to 5,000. We have also added the following config settings to the Aspnet.config file: <system.web> <applicationPool maxConcurrentRequestsPerCPU="5000" maxConcurrentThreadsPerCPU="0" requestQueueLimit="5000" /> </system.web> More details: The purpose of the API is to combine data from various external sources and return as JSON. It is currently using an InMemory cache implementation to cache individual external calls at the data layer. The first request to a resource will fetch all data required and any subsequent requests for the same resource will get results from the cache. We have a 'cache runner' that is implemented as a background process that updates the information in the cache at certain set intervals. We have added locking around the code that fetches data from the external resources. We have also implemented the services to fetch the data from the external sources in an asynchronous fashion so that the endpoint should only be as slow as the slowest external call (unless we have data in the cache of course). This is done using the System.Threading.Tasks.Task class. Could we be hitting a limitation in terms of number of threads available to the process?

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• How should I host a site that could potentially get a short spike in traffic of 1000%+

  - by James Simpson

  This is a purely theoretical question, but what if I had a site that would normally only get a couple thousand hits a day, but for a few days each month that could shoot to several hundred thousand or even several million hits over the period of 1-3 days. The site would be pretty bare-bones (as in, 2-3 total pages with 1-2 max MySQL queries on each page and some PHP), so bandwidth wouldn't be the issue, but sheer volume taking down the site would be the main concern. Cloud hosting seems like the best way to go, but would something like Amazon EC2, MediaTemple, or something else be the right choice in this case?

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• Solaris disk I/O spike... which monitoring tools do I need?

  - by bonez05

  Hi all, My Solaris 10 websever / database server disk io keeps spiking at intermittent times. Using iostat -xtc 5 the reads / sec will jump from 3.0 to 1450.0 and %busy will jump to 98% The apache access log doesn't indicate anything out of the ordinary. In other words, requests aren't any higher than usual. top doesn't generate anything useful. The cpu usage is fine with mysql using about 20% and nothing else to speak of really. What monitoring tool should I be using to see what process is using excessive disk I/O? or if there are any other suggestions I'm all ears. Thanks

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• Merely installing PHP5 causes my AWS Ubuntu server to die minutes later from a massive CPU spike

  - by Mark Amery

  I have an AWS server with Ubuntu 11.04 as the OS that is running an Apache2 webserver (incidentally Python-based and using Django). We recently needed to add support for php5 to let us use a third party PHP library (incidentally for serving minified versions of js and css files). However, for no reason any of us can discern, if we simply run sudo apt-get install php5 on the server, then the install appears to finish successfully but, without us taking any further action (including not yet running sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5, which I think would be the next step for us if everything worked), or actually running any PHP scripts on the server, a few minutes later the server becomes impossible to connect to, and looking at the 'Monitoring' tab for the server in the EC2 Management Console reveals that a while after the installation, CPU usage spikes to 100% and stays there permanently (until we reboot the server from the AWS Console). After rebooting, the server also reliably dies within a few (between 0 and 10) minutes. We restored the server to a pre-PHP state from an AMI Image, observed that it was stable, and then tried installing PHP5 again and observed the server die in exactly the same way, so we're pretty much certain that installing PHP5 is what causes the symptoms. What on earth could be causing this behaviour, and how can we get PHP installed on the server without it dying?

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• iPad + OpenGL ES2. Why the Puzzling Virtual Memory Spike During Device Reorientation?

  - by dugla

  I've been spending the afternoon starring at Xcode Instruments memory monitor trying to decipher the following memory issue. I have a fullscreen OpenGL ES2 app running on iPad. I am fanatical about memory issues so my retains/releases are all nicely balanced. I closely monitor memory leaks. My app is basically squeeky clean. Except occassionally when I reorient the device. Portrait to Landscape. Back and forth I rock the device stress testing my discarding and rebuilding of the OpenGL framebuffer. The ambient memory footprint of my app is about 70MB Real Mems and 180MB Virtual Mems. Real memory hardly varies at all during device rotations. However the virtual mems reading sometimes briefly spikes up to 250MB and then recedes back to 180MB. No real pattern. But clearly related discarding/rebuilding the framebuffer. I see random memory warnings in my NSlogs but the app just hums along, no worries. 1) Since iPhone OS devices don't have VM could someone explain to me what the VM reading actually means? 2) My app totally leak free and generally bulletproof dispite the VM spikes. Never crashes. Rock solid. Should I be concerned about this? 3) There is clearly something happening in OpenGL framebuffer land that is causing this but I am using the API in the proper way: paraphrasing: Discarding the framebuffer: glDeleteRenderbuffers(1, &m_colorbuffer); glDeleteFramebuffers(1, &m_framebuffer); Rebuilding the framebuffer: glGenFramebuffers(1, &m_framebuffer); glGenRenderbuffers(1, &m_colorbuffer); Is there some other memory flushing trick I have missed? Thanks for any insight. Cheers, Doug

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• MIX 2010 recap podcast

  - by Chris Williams

  from www.slickthought.net: Spaghetti Code Podcast: Recapping the MIX Conference 4/2/2010 11:06:10 AM Spaghetti Code (Jeff Brand) is joined by Mike Hodnic, Jason Bock, Adam Grocholski and Chris Williams to share their thoughts and impressions from the Microsoft MIX Conference and their thoughts on Windows Phone, Silverlight 4, and more. Direct Download - click here Subscribe - click here iTunes - click here

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• Unexplained CPU and Disk activity spikes in SQL Server 2005

  - by Philip Goh

  Before I pose my question, please allow me to describe the situation. I have a database server, with a number of tables. Two of the biggest tables contain over 800k rows each. The majority of rows are less than 10k in size, though roughly 1 in 100 rows will be 1 MB but <4 MB. So out of the 1.6 million rows, about 16000 of them will be these large rows. The reason they are this big is because we're storing zip files binary blobs in the database, but I'm digressing. We have a service that runs constantly in the background, trimming 10 rows from each of these 2 tables. In the performance monitor graph above, these are the little bumps (red for CPU, green for disk queue). Once ever minute we get a large spike of CPU activity together with a jump in disk activity, indicated by the red arrow in the screenshot. I've run the SQL Server profiler, and there is nothing that jumps out as a candidate that would explain this spike. My suspicion is that this spike occurs when one of the large rows gets deleted. I've fed the results of the profiler into the tuning wizard, and I get no optimisation recommendations (i.e. I assume this means my database is indexed correctly for my current workload). I'm not overly worried as the server is coping fine in all circumstances, even under peak load. However, I would like to know if there is anything else I can do to find out what is causing this spike? Update: After investigating this some more, the CPU and disk usage spike was down to SQL server's automatic checkpoint. The database uses the simple recovery model, and this truncates the log file at each checkpoint. We can see this demonstrated in the following graph. As described on MSDN, the checkpoints will occur when the transaction log becomes 70% full and we are using the simple recovery model. This has been enlightening and I've definitely learned something!

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• (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output)

  - by Pooky

  I have a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS an a number of servers. I have not added any cron jobs or edited my crontab on those servers, however, at around the same time for each machine, I get a 75% CPU spike and the following info in my syslog at the time of the spike: CRON[8380]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output) I have mono-complete installed and am running a service stack webserver. What is the best way for me to stop this from happening? I would like to be able to remove the CPU spike. Thanks

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• Inspiring Computer Science College Student Stories?

  - by funk-shun

  After watching "The Social Network", a movie about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, I had a productivity spike as it inspired me to learn many different languages and software. That spike has been deteriorating somewhat and I don't feel like watching the movie all over again so I was wondering if anybody had any other similar success stories/links/articles/whatever. Mainly about successes that started for people in college.

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• core.* files eating up server space (~50MB)

  - by skytreader

  I'm renting server space from someone and, upon logging in my control panel after quite sometime, noticed an abnormal spike (~50MB) in the disk usage. Upon investigating, I found a lot of core.* files scattered around my public_html directory. Each one is more than 5MB in size but no more than 6MB. The * part is all numbers (in programming regex, that should be core\.\d+). I downloaded one and checked the contents. There was a lot of balderdash characters (NUL mostly, but also a scattering of ETB, ETX, STX) but there's this block of readable text which says: This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software. If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created with the data reset to initial values. Pretty self-explanatory. A few blocks above the text are some more readable messages that look like logs but is sandwiched in between non printable characters. I've extracted some below. Scan not valid for mh mailboxes Bogus character 0x%x in news state Can't rewrite news state %.80s Error closing backup news state %.80s No state for newsgroup %.80s found Now, a few concerns: Am I under attack? The messages seem to be about my webmail but I don't use my personal webmail that much---only for a vanity email address and an inbox for an outdated comments system. However, lately, I seem to notice a spike in the spam for my vanity mail. (Note: the comments system is covered by a captcha but every now and then some get through. My vanity email has a spam filter but it isn't as good as I'd like). Next, if this is a feature, can I turn it off? Is it advisable to? I've only 150MB so you see why I'm fretting over a 50MB spike. Some final details: my only server-side scripts are in PHP. The directory which accumulated the most number of these core files is the one containing the Wordpress-managed subdomain of my site. I manage my server through CPanel. Lastly, I decided to delete this files and after some checking nothing seems amiss in my websites nor in my mail. They are indeed the ones responsible for the ~50MB spike as my disk space usage is back to expected.

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• Remotely turn on a device that is powered off?

  - by njboot

  Verbatim from the interview between Brian Williams and Edward Snowden last night: Snowden: Any intelligence service in the world that has significant funding and a real technological research team can own that phone [refering to Williams' iPhone] as soon as it connects to a network; it can be theirs. Williams: Can anyone turn it on remotely if it's off? Snowden: They can absolutely turn it on with the power turned off on the device. I concede Snowden's first point, fine. But the last? Does Snowden's last claim, that a powered off mobile device can be remotely turned, have any merit? It seems highly improbable and seemingly impossible.

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• What's going on with INETA and the Regional Speakers Bureau?

  - by Chris Williams

  For those of you that have been waiting patiently (and not so patiently) I'm happy to say that we're very near completion on some changes/enhancements/improvements that will allow us to finally go live with the INETA Regional Speakers Bureau. I know quite a few of you have already registered, which is great (though some of you may need to come back and update your info) and we've had a few folks submit requests, mostly in a test capacity, but soon we'll be up and live. Here's how it breaks down. Be sure to read this, because things have changed a bit from when we initially announced it. 1. The majority of our speaker/event funding is going into the Regional Speakers Bureau.  The National Bureau still exists, but it's a good bit smaller than it was before, and it's not an "every group" benefit anymore. We'll be using the National Bureau as more of a strategic task force, targeting high impact events and areas that need some community building love from INETA. These will be identified and handled on a case by case basis, and may include more than just user group events. 2. You're going to get more events per group, per year than you did before. Not only are we focusing more resources on this program, but we're also making a lot of efforts to use it more effectively. With the INETA Regional Speakers Bureau, you should be able to get 2-3 INETA speakers per year, on average. Not every geographical area will have exactly the same experience, but we're doing the best we can. 3. It's not a farm team program for the National Bureau. Unsurprisingly, I managed to offend a number of people when I previously made the comment that the Regional Speakers Bureau program was a farm team or stepping stone to the National Bureau. It was a poor choice of words.  Anyone can participate in the Regional Speakers Bureau, and I look forward to working with all of you. 4. There is assistance for your efforts. The exact final details are still being hammered out, but expect it to look something like this: (all distances listed are based on a round trip) Distances < 120 miles = $0 121 miles - 240 miles = $50 (effectively 1 to 2 hours, each way) 241 miles - 360 miles = $100 (effectively 2 to 3 hours, each way) 361 miles - 480 miles = $200 (effectively 3 to 4 hours, each way) For those of you who travel a lot, we're working on a solution to handle group visits when you're away from home. These will (for now) be handled on a case by case basis. 5. We're going to make it as easy as possible to work with the program. In order to do this, we need a few things from you. For speakers, that means your home address. It also means (maybe) filling out a simple 1 line expense report via the INETA website. For user groups, it means making sure your meeting address is up to date as well. 6. Distances will be automatically calculated from your home of record to the user group event and back. We realize that this is not a perfect solution to every instance, but we're not paying you to speak at an event, and you won't be taxed on this money. It's simply some assistance to make your community efforts easier. Our way of saying thanks for everything you do. 7. Sounds good so far, what's the catch? There's always a catch, right? In this case there are two of them: 1) At this time, Microsoft employees are welcome to use the website to line up speaking engagements with user groups, but are not eligible for financial assistance. 2) Anyone can register and use the website to line up speaking engagements with user groups, however you must receive and maintain a net score of 3+ positive ratings (we're implementing a thumbs up / thumbs down system) in order to receive financial assistance. These ratings are provided by the User Group leaders after the meeting has taken place. 8. Involvement by the User Group leaders is a key factor in the success of this program. Your job isn't done once you request a speaker. After you've had your meeting, it's critical that you go back to the website and take a very small survey. Doing this ensures that the speaker gets rated (and compensated if eligible) and also ensures that you can make another request, since you won't be able to make a new request if you have an old one outstanding. 9. What about Canada? We're definitely working on that. Unfortunately nothing new to report on that front, other than to say that we're trying. So... this is where things stand currently. We're working very quickly to get this in place and get speakers and groups together. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below and I'll answer them as quickly as possible. If I've forgotten anything, or if things change, I'll update it here. Thanks, Chris G. Williams INETA Board of Directors

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