John Dilbeck Musings

Nancy Williams, a resident of Graham County, North Carolina, announces the publication of her new book, A Matter of Destiny. If you are interested in a fast-paced story that combines UFOs, aliens, government conspiracies, and political intrigue, this book may be right for you.

Her background in the US Air Force and knowledge of ham radios, combined with an actual incident that occurred in Brookhaven, NY in 1992, make the fictional story more realistic and exciting.

The sequel, Agenda 21 Conspiracy, will feature a plot set in Andrews, Murphy, and the Nantahala Gorge in western North Carolina.

A Matter of Destiny is available in Murphy, NC, at the Curiosity Bookstore in Shoppes of Murphy on Valley River Avenue; in Fontana Village at Ditmore Drugs; in Robbinsville at The Graham Star; in Hayesville at Lloyd Bookstore; and in Waynesville at Osundu’s.

You can order the book from her website at www.NLWilliamsWriter.com.

To order offline, mail a check for $15.95 ($12.95 and $3.00 shipping) to: N. L. Williams, P. O. Box 1477, Robbinsville, NC 28771.

Nancy Williams will be making a number of personal appearances over the coming months. Don’t miss the chance to get an autographed copy.

I got side-tracked in May. For several months, I’ve been fighting one or more hackers who have been breaking into my brother’s site at GeorgiaDragRacing.com and installing software that attacked other computers and ran an Internet Relay Chat — both of which are not allowed by our hosting company who have been working with us to put a stop to this.

On May 5, 2004, I received a notice from our SysAdmin that the hackers had installed software once again and he had detected and deleted it. He told me that he’d been patient for a long time, but this was the final notice. One more break-in and our account would be cancelled and we’d have to find another company to host the site. There are over 2,500 pages on that site!

Since I didn’t know how they were breaking in and I’d done everthing I knew, it was time for drastic action. After a long talk with David, my brother, we decided to completely rebuild the site and remove all the scripts that we were using to power the photo album, bookstore, forum, and news updating. It was going to be a big job, but it would be less work than moving everything — including thousands of photos — to another site.

So, I looked for alternate ways to do what we’d been doing with PERL and PHP scripts. We decided to create a blog at blogger.com for the news updates, which can now be found at gdrn.blogspot.com. The photos will be hosted at ImageStation.com until we find another site that is easier to use. The bookstore was completely rebuilt using javascript and direct links to Amazon.com and the forum was deleted in favor of the mailing list hosted by Yahoo groups.

So, I had to completely redesign everything and rebuild all the pages of the site. It took about three weeks of working around the clock to get it finished, but now we’re moving on using the new tools. Most of the functionality was saved, but it was a huge job and it pulled me away from the other tasks I had scheduled for this month.

There are probably quite a few broken links on the site and I’ll have to find and squash those bugs as they come up.

So, why am I telling you about this?

When building a business on the Internet, you may not always have total control over what happens. We had to make a decision and I had to do a lot of work to do our best to keep the site open. Now, we’re running no custom scripts and nobody but me knows the password to the site. Hopefully, that will foil the hackers.

In this case, the bad guys won the battle, but I still intend to win the war.