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It's time for another update from the wonderful world of the Kugler remodel.

We got a lot done yesterday, but of course still have quite a bit more to do in the way of tearing out. Our dumpster is probably about 2/3 full now.

All the wood paneling that was in the living room, upstairs hallway, family room, guest bedroom, and office is off the walls and out in the dumpster. It's what we found under the wood paneling that was the most interesting (or revolting, depending on one's perspective).

In one word: mold. More in some places than others. Under the windows in the living room there are panels of sheetrock with quite a bit of mold on it, and will have to come out. The wall between the family and guest bedroom downstairs had enough mold on it (on both sides) that the entire wall (save the studs) has already been torn out.

The worst mold infestiation, by far, has been the office. In general, the reason the mold has been so bad was simple physics and biology: 1) the previous owners vented their dryer into the house for 13 years, 2) wood paneling on sheet rock creates a very tight airspace; once the moisture in there, there is no airflow to remove the moisture or dry it out, and 3) mold likes paper, period. In the office, this problem was exacerbated for two reasons. First, the wood paneling was installed over wallpaper which covered the sheet rock. Second, the office shares a wall with the downstairs bathroom. It appears that one end of the wall in the bathroom was broken through from the office side (apparently for tub installation) and never repaired, so there was no effective vapor barrier between the bathroom and the office wall. Combined with the wall paper, what we had was, effectively, about as ideal a mold incubator as you could get. The wall paper in that corner of the room was so molded that it looked and felt like parchment paper. Pretty gross.

In other news, the kitchen floor is out, and it looks like a minimal amount of repair will be needed on the subfloor (pending inspection by qualified personnel, of course).

We will be doing more work on May 5th, and would welcome any help. There is plenty to do. Carpet tack strips to tear up; padding on the stairs; more moldy (or otherwise needs-to-be-replaced) sheetrock to tear out; tear out fake "bricks" in the kitchen; probably tear out the tub in the downstairs bathoom; removing linoleum in the laundry room, bathroom, and downstairs hallway and office. And just general cleanup. Bring tools, and a respirator if you have one. We'll provide particle masks if you don't.

Oh, and if anyone can recommend a good, honest, plumber, forward his or her name our way. We need one of those due to a few compromised pipes.

Last Saturday Crystal, Izzy, Rebecca, Fred and I went at the house and got quite a bit done. All the carpet and padding is out (except the padding on the stairs). The linoleum (all four layers of it, plus the rotten sub-floor) in the kitchen is almost all out. Some of the wood paneling is out, and yes, we did discover mold on the sheet rock behind the paneling. As a plus, so far all the insulation behind the paneling looks OK.

On Sunday, Izzy, Crystal and I spend some time at the house putting all that stuff in the dumpster we got Saturday evening.

A big thanks to Fred, Izzy, and Rebecca for their help.

But there is more to do. We'll be going at it again on Saturday, starting at 10:00AM. We have more paneling to remove, and some more linoleum to pull up. We'll welcome any help offered!

Mike Kruckenberg writes about a talk given at the 2007 MySQL User Conference. It seems the United States Navy is using MySQL running on four-node Linux cluster to handle operations aboard one of their aircraft carriers. Great to see Open Source getting its sea legs. Or is that improving its sea legs? Anyone know of other "nautical" Open Source applications or deployments?

As part of our previously mentioned yard cleanup, we pulled a pull-behind snow machine sled out from behind our garage and put it in our driveway. It was old and a tad rusty, and even had moss growing on it. I posted a message on our local FreeCycle group that I had a "snow machine trailer" available for pickup; first person to the house got it. I received nine replies in quick succession, plus one phone call.

These replies included questions like, "Do you have the title?" (a natural question if you're giving it away), and "Are the tires good?" I then realized what I had posted. I was thinking "snow machine trailer," as in, something you pull behind a snow machine. Others read it and thought it was a trailer on which to carry snow machines. Sigh...English is such an ambiguous language.

As part of our house gutting, we called Fairbanks' only refuse company, University Refuse (who recently bought out the local Waste Management franchise) and ordered an 8-yard dumpster. I went by the house on Friday to check it out, and discovered they had not delivered it. By then, of course, it was too late to call, and we were stuck without a dumpster.

I began calling around, mainly to see if anyone knew how to contact someone at University Refuse. Long story short, a friend of mine hooked me up with someone at our church who rents dumpsters. Big dumpsters. Forty yard dumpsters. We got one dropped off Saturday afternoon. On Sunday, we took what we had pulled out of the house so far, as well as some yard waste, and threw it in. And filled over half of it. I'm now thankful we didn't get the eight yard dumpster.

But it doesn't quite end there. I called University Refuse on Friday (and tried again on Saturday) and let them know they didn't deliver. I then called on Sunday and told them to cancel the order, and please do not deliver one now. Come Monday, then Tuesday, they never called back, never offered an apology, never said, "Please try again in the future, and we'll do better." I guess when you're the only game in town you get sloppy. Hmm...maybe I'll start a garbage business and do customer service right. Not right now...maybe in a few years.

The Firefox web browser has an extention called IETab which enables you to open a tab and browse websites via Firefox, but using the Internet Explorer rendering engine. This can help, for instance, if a site staunchly proclaims itself "IE only" and will not make changes for alternate browsers. Over at Hacking for Christ, Gervase Markham has a post entitled "IETab Considered Harmful?". He references the Slashdot article about MovieLink suggesting that users use IETab so MovieLink doesn't have to go to the "trouble" of making their web site Firefox compatible. Gerv observes:

The harm is that this 'solution' still excludes everyone on a Mac or on Linux, and its availability also makes the site far less likely to change to support Firefox properly. In other words, whereas before Mac and Linux users could add Windows Firefox users to their numbers when petitioning sites to upgrade to support web standards, the existence of IETab divides those two groups and gives those of us using non-Windows operating systems, and those who want to see sites supporting standards properly, far less clout.

Very true. The problem I have with IETab, however, is one of security. If you are using the IE rendering engine, you are opening yourself up to all the problems, standards non-compliance, and security holes you'd have if you used Internet Explorer directly. I keep telling friends, family, clients, and colleagues to use Firefox for better security. If there are sites out there encouraging users to "just install IETab to use our site," most of that security advantage will be negated.

At the conservative end, I think IETab should carry a big, fat warning along the lines of "This plugin is for development and testing only! Using it may compromise your system's security!" On the extreme end, I would have it done away with altogether. If you need multiple versions of IE for testing, on the Linux side of things, there is IEs4Linux, which allows you to install and run multiple versions of Internet Explorer on your Linux machine. I'm sure there is something similar for Windows. For Mac, you're still stuck, as IE no longer is available for Mac (at least last I checked). I suppose you could install Linux under Parallels and then install IEs4Linux.

So, yes Gerv, IETab is harmful, but not only for the reasons you bring up.

Crystal and I are almost done getting everything out of the house, and we're going to be ready to gut the house this weekend (the 21st). We'll be tearing out carpet and tearing off wood paneling. We'll even have a dumpster out front to complete the party.

So, if you like tearing things apart, drop us a line! We'd love to have help! You can e-mail us here.

I had mentioned previously that I thought our abundance of water in the furnace and laundry room was due to a pressure relief valve on our water heater giving way. Seems it was not the case. As I discovered later, even though I closed the water main as tightly as I thought I could, it was still slightly open, and water was still leaking out the pipe rupture just beyond the main valve. So, that mystery solved.

Remember the 1/2 inch or so of ice in the laundry room? Well, when we fired our heater back up, all that ice melted, and that water needed somewhere to go. And go it did, over the already soaked hall way carpet, right in to the office. Where we had books stacked. Oops. Thankfully, we didn't lose anything important.

We're pretty much convinced the previous owners had ferrets (the major cause of Crystal's and Jonathan's congestion). The down stairs--especially the family room, which got a fair share of wet carpet too--reeked today from all the moisture and whatever pet stuff was in the carpet. Great smell.

A bit of good news. One of the wood panels in the family room had pulled away from the wall due to all the moisture, and what should be found behind it? Clean, pristine, sheet rock. If this pattern holds for the other walls and rooms, it will greatly reduce our remodel cost. Woohoo!

Izzy has a good post about security, viruses, and myths. In it, he explores the "age old" question as to why there are no viruses for Macs. While, in the past, the answer may have been market share, the main reason now is the same reason there are no viruses for Linux, Solaris, or any operating system with a strong security model: You. Simply. Can't. Write. One. At least not one that will have any measureable affect.

Why? Two words: security model. In the non-Windows world, users run as normal users, and not as administrators. Any application or script compromised can only modify files owned by that user. Any attempts to modify system files or system binaries will be denied. Now, Windows Vista is supposed to solve some of this by making a user run as a normal user, and prompting for additional privileges when needed, but I've read it's so annoying, people are turning the feature off and running as administrator.

Another reason: bad software design. Example: scripts in Word documents and in Lookout, er, Outlook e-mails that run without user intervention, and e-mail themselves to everyone in your address list. Yes, KDE4 will have DBus-in-everything-even-your-toaster^®, but to my knowledge, scripts attached to e-mails will not run without user intervention. And if you run a script or binary attached to an e-mail, you had better know what it is (there are also the holes in MS products that can be used to lie about the type of a file: calling an executable file a jpeg, for instance).

Another choice that makes Linux a little bit more secure (not sure about Mac) is that any file on a web site or in an e-mail is either opened by the application that can view it (not execute it) or it must be saved and have its execute permission set. No accidentally executing a program attached to an e-mail here. Granted, you could say, "Open this EXE attachment with Wine" (a windows emulator) or, "Open this Python script attachment with the Python interpreter," but again, you must take an explicit action, and are warned that opening an attachment can compromise your system's security. [Disclaimer: I've not checked the behavior of Kommander scripts for KDE. Clicking on one may offer to open them with the Kommander script interpreter.]

But even if you open an attachment with malicious code, it is running as your user, and no files can be modified other than your own. Conclusion: the virus can't spread on the system, and it can't infect system files. The worst it can do is replicate itself (poorly) to the user's files and maybe other people in the user's address book. It can't install itself as a system service, install a key-stroke logger, or other such malicious behavior.

Note: If you have scripts in your home directory which you run as administrator, make sure they're owned by administrator and not by you. Hmm...need to check my ~/bin. But then again, if you have scripts in your home directory that you run as administrator, it probably means they are custom scripts that would be very hard to write viruses for anyway.

So, it all comes down to security and how it is enforced. If Microsoft wants a secure system, they should write an emulator for backwards compatibility, throw away Windows, and start from the ground up to design and write a secure operating system.

If you go look at your water heater, it will probably have a little valve on the side connected to a pipe that goes down to the floor. That's a pressure relief valve: if the tank ever acquires too much pressue (steam, over filling for some reason, etc) it's designed to let go and release water rather than compromising the tank. Apparently it also works if the water tank freezes up.

As I mentioned yesterday, we had an inch of water (or so) in our furnace room, and about 1/4 to 1/2 inch of water in our laundry room (and out into the hall). I couldn't figure out quite where all that water had come from. While the pipes did freeze (more later) there just wasn't enough water in them to cover that much area (I'm pretty sure). While water may have leaked from the outside (the wall was wet near the bottom, but that was probably from the puddle inside: the wall around the chimney was dry), it does appear the valve on the water heater tripped.

As to the pipes bursting, a pipe in the upstairs bathroom probably burst, a pipe above the hot water heater appears compromised, and the pipe right after our water main enters the house froze. So, an interesting situation. We'll have to see exactly how much of the floor and walls we get to rip up.

It started out that we thought we needed to rebuild the house. As other posts have shown, it might just be a remodel. When our chimney liner collapsed, causing our heater to stop, and freezing the house, I thought we may have escaped broken pipes since water leaked into the tub down stairs.

I might have been wrong. In the past couple weeks it has really warmed up. Our water is off, thankfully, but it appears pipes leaked. We went to the house tonight to get some things, and discovered water in the laundry room, and out into the down-stairs hallway, some icicles in the down stairs bathroom (not sure which pipe leaked in the up stairs bathroom), as well as about an inch of water in the furnace room.

So, what I know or think I know right now:

1. Water has leaked in from outside (the "well" around the chimney has water in it)
2. It appears that possibly the water heater leaked after it thawed out.
3. A pipe in our up stairs bathroom leaked.
4. A lot of repair is going to have to be done, and a lot of walls torn off.

Well, God is in control. "For I know whom I have believed and I am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him." Just pray for us...we need it right now.