As I mentioned a few days ago in twitter, the outflow pipe of our sump pump froze.

I had gone down stairs to get something from the utility room and found that the sump pump was running … and didn’t stop.  The pump sounded OK, but no water was draining from the pit.  I turned the power to the pump off and triggered the backup pump … which ran but didn’t remove any water.   This meant that the pumps themselves weren’t the problem.  I went outside and discovered that the outflow pipe was frozen solid.  Clearly not a good situation.

The problem here was the fact that we had a lot of snow, followed by a thaw, followed by a quick freeze.  This meant that the pump needed to run to get the water that was below the frost line out, but the pipe itself (which is well above the frost line) got stopped up by the frozen water.

The sump pump discharge on our house is probably not configured properly … the pipe leaves the house, goes out about 9 inches, turns 90 degrees, goes under ground, takes another 90 degree turn, goes out about 10 feet, and then has another 90 degree turn upwards to eject the water into the lawn.  I’m told that a better solution would be to have the pipe exit the house and output into a bigger pipe that lead to an underground drain tail … with an air gap, so no water remained in the output pipe to freeze.  The air gap idea seemed counter intuitive initially, because it seemed that would allow the water to freeze quicker, but it makes sense if it doesn’t allow water to stay in the pipe at all.

The current configuration works adequately when the weather is warm … but the fact that water can stay in the pipe after the pump is done pumping means that it can freeze in the pipe in the cold season.

My immediate solution was to just remove the 90 degree elbow that took the water underground and have the pump just shoot the water out over the lawn.  The next day I went to Lowes and picked up a 20 degree PVC angle pipe and some PVC cement.  I created an extension pipe that would take the water further from the house … the 20 degree angle allows the pipe to drain so no water would remain to freeze.

Of course yesterday we had that warm snap which made the pump work overtime … and Ginny was worried that the pipe was leaving the water too close to the house.  She tried to put a temporary patch in place by draining the angled pipe into some spare gutter downspout material, but that didn’t work long.  I remedied the attaching a 2 inch flexible tube that I purchased in the spring so the water went further into the lawn.

This spring we are definitely going to have the drainage situation in the back yard looked at (our back yard floods whenever we get a heavy rain).  This will involve having drain tiles installed in the back yard and attached to the city storm sewer system.  I’ll also see about getting the sump pump and some of the gutter down spouts attached to the same system.

I’ve already talked to the village engineer about it and was told that we could do this … I’m worried about the cost though … because the storm sewer is in the front of the house.  It will probably mean a lot of digging and replacing of a few sidewalk squares.  I got a few referrals for landscaping contractors who can do this kind of work, plus the company that does our lawn is apparently in the drainage business now too.  I’ll have to get a few quotes.

Ah, the joys of home ownership.

I’ve never understood the rationale behind the various web scripts that claim that they are ‘poisoning’ spammers lists.

They claim that, by putting a bunch of garbage email addresses on a web page and encouraging spammers to harvest  the page, they are poisoning a spammers email list and thus making the list useless so that they will discard the list.

Where did they ever get the idea that spammers CARE about the good & bad addresses that they harvest.  Considering how much it costs them to send spam, they wouldn’t are one lick if 90% of the addresses on their list is valid or not.  Especially since most spam sent these days is done by infected personal computers controlled by ‘bot herders‘.

I often watch the log file on my mail server … and observe the servers trying to deliver mail to mangled and non-existent addresses.  It’s clear the sending system is just blasting names at my server without any consideration if the address exists or not.  My mail server software (sendmail) had an option to throttle the connection of any system that gets more than a certian number of bad addresses.  I also have a script that monitors for that behavior and adds a firewall rule to completely block such systems.

My advice to those who create such scripts … focus your energies elsewhere … right now you’re just wasting your time.

Oh, by the way, for those of you who are trying to use “User-Agent” lists to block harvesters … don’t waste your time on that either.  Harvesters, like spammers, will never clearly identify themselves as such … and will use a completely legitimate user agent when spidering your website.  Additionally, they will absolutely ignore any robots.txt file that you have in your site.

There are, however, systems that use a somewhat similar technique to stop spammers … but are much more effective.  Instead of just trying to poison a spammers list … they use traceable email addresses.  This means that, when a harvester visits a page with this traceable email address, they log the IP the harvester is using and the email address that is harvested.  This way, when spam is sent to the address, they know when and how the address was harvested and where it was sent from.   Theoretically the spammer is reported both to the ISP that the mail was sent through AND the ISP that was used to harvest the address.  Project Honeypot is one such anti-harvester organization.

Ginny has been bugging me about the problem she’s been having posting to her blog from the iPhone and other third party tools that she uses.

The problem has been narrowed down to a bug in LIBXML2 that causes leading angle brackets “<” to be stripped off of posts when processed through the XMLRPC support in PHP.  I logged the issue in the Wordpress bug tracker, and the consensus is that the problem started manifesting after an automatic update applied by Fedora 8.

Well, to solve the problem I’ve moved Ginny’s blog to a temporary server running in a base Fedora 8 install in a VMWare instance.  Luckily Wordpress stores most of it’s content in the MySQL database (not the images, unfortunately).  A bit of NFS magic to mount the appropriate directory in the virtual system, and it’s working fine.  The server itself only has Apache, PHP, MySQL client, SSH, and a few other bits & pieces to keep it running.  No automatic updates, GUI, compilers, etc.

Once the bug is fixed (either Wordpress, using a different XML processing mechanism, or LIBXML2) I’ll move her server back to the main server.

In the mean time, her blog is going to run in the virtual machine ‘Hobbittown’ (named because it’s small).

Well, it’s been a fairly busy two weeks …

• Work on the floor is (more or less) progressing.  I got the final rank of boards cut and installed.  We still need to touch of the paint, install the base molding, quarter round, and carpet threshold.
• Tuesday we went to village hall and cast our votes for Obama in the early voting program.  Just want to get it out of the way.
• Wednesday we headed down state to visit my niece Melissia … it was a thoroughly enjoyable trip.  We went for a walk in the Stephen Forbes state park and saw “Beverly Hills Chihuahua”.  The state park was nice and pretty empty.  About the time we left the park, it started raining.  Perfect timing.  Did a bit of shopping and then saw the moving (which was enjoyed by all in the theater … all 3 of us).
• Saturday both Ginny and I had checkups at the doctor … everything is in working order.
• Started an email exchange with a woman who wants me to GIVE her a domain I own … because she’s running a business with the name.  When I indicated that I would sell it to her, she got all bent out of shape.  I wasn’t asking multiple thousands of dollars for it … I only asked $600.  Last email from her indicated she would probably sue me for trademark infringement (she doesn’t currently have a trademark on the name, but she did indicate that she filed for one).  I’ll keep an eye on the name on the US Trademark Office’s website and, if it becomes registered to her, I’ll take down my placeholder site.
• Today I want to try and get the floor finished … at least the painting done and base molding & quarter round up.  The threshold might take a bit of time.

And, tomorrow, it’s back to work.

Well, mostly back to work … I really didn’t leave.  Like a glutton for punishment, I checked email periodically and had to address a few issues.  Nothing major though.  Hopefull, when I get back, the I18N project will be done and we can get on to real development again.

Kind of a busy two weeks … Ginny and I were on vacation.  Because of the cost of our last vacation (England & Ireland), we decided to make this a “Staycation” … basically stayed home and didn’t go anywhere big.

One of the things we wanted to was finish the floor in the smallest bedroom.  This was a project we started about 6 years ago … we had these grand ideas of turning it into a reading room, with a hardwood floor, a nice comfy chair, plenty of book shelves, etc.

Well, the project started out fine … but ended up completely stalled due to problems with the flooring material we chose.

I wasn’t too keen on the idea of a complex floor installation, so we went with a “Pre-Glued” engineered wood floor product from Harris Tarket / Vanguard called “Tap Tight”.  Well, the “Tap Tight” was more like “Pound Loose”.  The pre-glued aspect was quite attractive, as we wouldn’t have to mess with gluing the boards.  Unforunately, this also meant that we had absolutely no ability to dry fit the boards when we were putting them together.  If we miscalculated, we were stuck (literally).  They wouldn’t come apart again to be reset.

Well, the floor project languished for a number of years … but we decided to get the floor finally done.  Since the floor planks we had left were so old, I was worried that they wouldn’t work anymore.  Plus, because we have to hit the boards so hard, once we got to the last row of boards, there isn’t any room to swing a hammer to get the tounge and grove to mate.

We decided to pull out the old floor and go with something else … something that wasn’t pre-glued.  We thought about what kind of floor we wanted and decided to go with a bamboo floor.  Again, it’s engineered wood, so it can be installed without nails.  A few weeks ago we went to Lowes and ordered the product.  It wasn’t too expensive.

About a week later the flooring material arrived at the store … we picked it up and brought it home.  I opened a box looking for instructions on the best way to install the floor, but found nothing.  The boxes contained just the flooring and nothing else.  There wasn’t even an indication of the manufactuerer (Except a “Made in China” stamp on the side of the box).  Both Ginny and I started searching the web to find information on installing it … and then our hearts sunk.  Every indication about this flooring product (”US Flooring”, maybe) indicated that it was shoddy material and to be avoided at all costs.  Suffice it to say that we took the flooring back to Lowes and returned it.

Not ready to admit defeat yet … we went BACK to Lowes and looked at the other flooring they had.  This time we wanted to go with a name brand.  After looking at the products, we decided to go with “Bruce” (a division of Armstrong).  That’s a brand I’ve seen before.  Ginny still didn’t want to deal with Glue, so we went with their “Fold & Lock” system.  Basically, the toung & groove are engineered in a way that they snap together.  They do not, however, snap permanently … so we’ll have the ability to dry fit.  As an added benefit, Lowes had the product in stock.  A quick search through an open box showed that the boxes included instructions too.  We also purchased MDF base molding and quarter round to cover the gaps around the perimeter of the room.

We pulled up the old floor and threw it away (thankfully the garbage service took it all away).  We started to lay the new floor.  It went pretty smooth.  As with most projects, there were a few glitches …

• The circular and saber saws I borrowed from my dad wasn’t going to cut it (pardon the pun).  They were too slow and way too big.  I went to Sears and bought a 10″ power miter saw.  After I took the saw out of the box and started to set it up, I realized that it wasn’t really going to be flexible enough to do the job.  So I returned the saw and purchased the same model that included a slider, so I could cut larger planks.
• One area of the floor needed to fit under some existing molding (around the door) … the instructions addressed this … but it said shave the lip off the leading board and use “the recommended glue” to attach the trailing board in.  Unfortunately they never mention what the recommended glue is.  We called Bruce and asked.  They told us a specific glue to use (Bruce product, of course).  We headed over to Lowes, but they didn’t carry the glue.  Across the street was Home Depot, but they didn’t carry it either.  They could order it for us … but it would take about a week to arrive.  Ginny did some calling around to various flooring stores and we found one that didn’t have it in stock, but could order it from their supplier (who was located in Elk Grove Village) and we could pick it up that day.
• Even though we measured the floor pretty carefully, we ended up being a little short on the material.  We needed one last rank of boards … 12 feet long … but only 1 1/2 inches wide.  This meant we had to buy a whole new box of planks.

After all this work … we also decided to paint the room again … the original paint job, done 6 years ago, was kind of weak … so Ginny decided to repaint with a different color.  I’m absolutely no good with painting, so I left that to Ginny.  I was in charge of the power tools, so I did all the cutting (ruh ruh ruh ruh ).  I cut the base molding and all the floor planks.  Everything does (or will) fit nicely.  Not a bad job, if I do say so myself.

As of today, we need to finish some touch up painting; install the base molding; install the quarter round; and install the carpet transition.

I’m a little worried about the transition though … its going to require that I cut the carpet so it will fit correctly … and I don’t want to botch the job.  This project has already cost more than I hoped it would … and I don’t want to add to the cost by having to replace carpet.