Delaware is known as:
"Small Wonder"
"The First State"
and most importantly, "The Home of Tax-Free Shopping"

For my wife, Kathleen, and I Delaware is the vortex of our universe. We have never planned on living in Delaware, but yet opportunities arise that keep us in "The First State." Looks like I'll be a Delaware resident for at least a few more years or possibly until the end of my time...

The vortex first captured us when Kathleen was finishing medical school in Philadelphia. We were currently living in Chestnut Hill, approximately 50 yards from Wissahickon Valley Park, a great place to live in Philadelphia if you enjoy the outdoors. We really liked living in Chestnut Hill, but we both knew that we wouldn't be staying forever. After medical school, all med school graduates are subjected to match day. Match day is the day when every medical school graduate in the United States gets assigned to where they will be doing their residency program. Nobody knows for certain where they will be doing their residency until match day arrives... it's a very nerve wrenching experience knot knowing where you will be spending the next 3-5 years of your life.

The match is not random, but mathematically determined. Potential residents (med students) interview at various residency programs, once the interview period is over, both the potential residents and residency program submit lists containing their choices for placement. Kathleen's list was this: Baltimore, MD (U of Maryland); Portland, ME (Maine Med Center); Wilmington, DE (A.I. duPont Children's); Minneapolis; Alberque; and a few others. Her first choice was Baltimore, so we were expecting to be placed there. When the match lists were calculated by the computer matching system, Wilmington, DE came out on top as the best match. The Delaware vortex strengthens.

Now it is three years later. Kathleen's residency program ends in a month. She has been to many job interviews, most of the interviews were in the greater Philadelphia area (we love Philly), some were on the west coast in Oregon, a couple in Jersey, and a few in Delaware. Wouldn't you know it, the best job offers came from Delaware. Being level-headed folks, Kathleen and I decided that one of the Delaware positions was our best option. The vortex kicks it up a notch.

Tomorrow I start a new consulting position with a local company. For the three years I have been in Delaware I haven't worked for a local company. All of my clients have been located in the Philly area. I guess Delaware really wants to keep us here... at least it's not Jersey!

If you haven't noticed, every time you visit this site you get a different background image. The image is chosen randomly from a pool of images I have uploaded to the server. A couple days ago I was uploading more images and I took another look at some of the existing background images. I felt that it was a shame that these photos are hidden behind the rest of the crap on this site, so I created a photo gallery of these images. The images that I have been using are primarily winter photos taken in Philadelphia by my friend Greg Klein. The new photo gallery link can can be found in the top navigation bar of this site, I'll be adding more photos soon. Check out Greg's photos here.

I remember a time when the internet wasn't over populated with evil bastards, things were much cooler back then. If you create or use software on the internet today you have to make sure everything is locked down like Fort Knox, otherwise some mf'er is gonna take advantage of any security hole.

Some bright person back in blogging's infancy came up with the idea of trackbacks. Trackbacks are a great way of posting comments on other people's blogs from a remote location. Trackbacks were intended to be used as tool to unite like minded bloggers together by posting relevant snippets of their blog in another blogger's comments... but that rarely happens. Blog spam has been made easy through the use of trackbacks... evil bastards send stupid irreverent posts to blogs using trackbacks. In fact, trackbacks are so easy to use blog spammers have written scripts (read robots) to sniff out trackback URL's and will pummel the URL with bogus posts.

The blog software I've been using, bBlog includes a trackback feature. The bBlog feature works well, but it doesn't have the proper anti-blog-spam security features implemented out the the box. I've been getting hit by these new wave trackback spammers. Here is the course of action I took to rid myself of them:

1. I turned on "moderate all comments" in the bBlog control panel. This did not work, as bBlog doesn't flag trackbacks as onhold like it does regular comments... f'n genius.
2. I updated the trackback script to automatically flag all trackbacks to be on hold until approved. This worked, but I still had to go into the blog backend and delete all of the trackback spam.
3. Finally I implemented a blacklist for the trackback spamming bastards. When trackback spam gets through all I have to do is click a button and the spammer's address gets added to my blacklist and will stop any future spam from getting through... so far the blacklist seems to work well.

Why bBlog didn't have this functionality implemented by default with is beyond me. Other than this little trackback security hole bBlog has been solid, but not solid enough to make my list of Open Source super software. One piece of Spam fighting software that does make the super software list is SpamAssassin, another fine Apache project. I use SpamAssassin with Procmail and Sendmail on my servers and it does a fine job of flagging bogus emails. To help out SpamAssassin I also use the SBL/XBL spam blacklists from Spamhaus. These lists are amazing. The blacklists work with your mail delivery agent and will turn away any messages that are sent from an address or open relay on the blacklist. I am always amazed when I look at my mail server log and see all of the messages bounced back by the blacklist... I gotta give a big shout out to Spamhaus!

I've been doing freelance web & software development for over 6 years. When I first went out on my own I vowed to exclusively use open source software and development tools. There are a few reasons I went the open source route.

• Open source software seems to evolve quickly. If there isn't a software package that meets your needs, chances are that somebody is already working on a solution.
• Open source technology is inexpensive, it's usually free. When you work for yourself, you need to save as much money as you can!
• Consider the alternatives. Micro$oft? I avoid the big "M" like the plague. My least favorite piece of software is MS Word (especially Word on my Mac). IIS also is a big piece of sh*t.

There are loads of software packages I use on a daily basis and love. Here are a few shout-outs to some of the better packages I use.

• Linux OS - I love linux. I've used Redhat, Debian, Cobalt (a highly modified Redhat), and Fedora. My current favorite is Fedora, I run both Fedora core 3 & 4 servers. Core 5 was released not too long ago, I haven't tried it yet, but I'm sure it rocks. http://fedora.redhat.com
• Apache Web Server - the most used web server on the internet. There is a reason why it's so popular, it kicks ass! http://www.apache.org
• PHP Scripting Language - I use both PHP 4 and PHP 5 on my servers. PHP will do anything you want it to. PHP is the best server-side language I have found. In my opinion it is way better than ASP and JSP. http://www.php.net
• Perl - Perl still rules. If you don't know Perl, you don't know sh*t!
• Emacs Editor - I learned how to use Emacs back in 1994. Back then is was awesome on Unix, it is still awesome. http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
• Very Secure FTP - VSFTP is the best FTP server I have used. It's a bit misnamed, as it doesn't have SSL support for secure connections (SFTP). The secure description comes from it's simplicity, it's so simple it would almost be impossible to create a security hole. http://vsftpd.beasts.org
• FCKEditor - this is an amazing software package, written almost entirely in JavaScript! FCKEditor is a WYSIWYG text editor for the web. The editor comes with a handy file browser and generates incredibly clean code! I've modified the file browser to work nicely with my home-grown CMS. The only downside is the it does not work with Safari... but they are working on it! http://www.fckeditor.net
• Open WebMail - a full featured web mail software package written entirely in Perl. Current versions of Open Webmail include a built in calendar and web disk for storing files on the server... very handy. http://www.openwebmail.org
• MySQL - the only database to use with PHP, it also plays nicely with Perl. It wicked fast! MySQL version 5 now has stored procedure functionality. No longer do you need to use Oracle or another bloated DB server to get stored procedure functionality. http://www.mysql.com
• phpMyAdmin - a very nice PHP interface of administering your MySQL server. I don't know how I would survive without it! http://www.phpmyadmin.net

I would recommend any of the software packages above. They are all stable, very reliable, and best of all they're FREE! I highly recommend sliding the developers a few $$$ if you use and like the software, software developers need to eat too...

Fishbone's Angelo Moore.
Trivia: Can anybody tell me the name
of the instrument Angelo is playing?

I remember the golden age of the internet. It was 1993 and I was a freshman computer science major in college programming Pascal and C until the wee hours in the morning. Pascal and C are now totally defunct programming languages, but they sure were useful in learning programming algorithms that I still use on a daily basis. That same year I was introduced to a program in the Unix lab called Lynx. Lynx was (and still is) really cool, it allowed me to look up all of the lyrics to my favorite songs and see where and when my favorite bands were playing. At the time I had no idea I was looking at the internet when looking up the lyrics to Fishbone's "Bonin' in the Boneyard."

I know that Al Gore created the internet sometime in 1999, but I swear I was using it years before that. Fortunately NCSA created the Mosaic web browser a few months after I discovered the internet allowing me to experience the internet with both text and pictures. Once I saw a web page with images and text, I knew I had to create one. Sometime during the Fall of 1994 I posted my first personal web page, I guess that's when this madness started for me.

The internet has come a long way since 1993, but every once in a while I am reminded of those early days with the Lynx web browser. When I do a text edit on a "classic" HTML only site I am reminded of more simple times. These days it seems that every website I build incorporates some sort of backend or content management system (CMS) which allows non-programmers to update their sites. This is a good thing, without CMS systems many blogs would not exist, and how could you live without reading your favorite blogs? I think I'll install Lynx on my Mac and go surf some blogs in text-only mode, maybe while surfing I'll look-up some song lyrics. What exactly does Michael Stipe sing in REM's "Its the End of the World As We Know It"?

A last look at old and rusty.

A web developer's personal website is a lot like the mechanic's car, old, rickety, and neglected. If my website was made out of steel it would have turned into a pile of rust long ago. Without further ado, here is new offering at Les-Leach.com, I hope you find it to your liking.

The person responsible for the design of this new site is a good friend of mine, Greg Klein. Greg was one of the first people I made friends with when I relocated from Maine to Philly in 1999. I met him during my bicycle commute home through Wissahickon Park. At the time I was living in the Roxbourgh section of Philadelphia, which allowed me to sample some trail to and from work. We were both riding single-speed mountain bikes and I made some stupid remark to him along the lines of "one speed, the only way!" or the classic "one f'n gear!" I'm lucky he was friendly and didn't beat me senseless for being so annoying.

Greg is one hell of a graphic designer. I recently put up a new website for Greg at GregoryK.net. Head on over there and give his portfolio a look, I think you will find his work quite impressive. the back-end to his site is also pretty impressive, I created a custom CMS which allows him to change practically everything found on his site. I'll get into the details of that system at some other time.

When deciding on the format this site, I knew I didn't want a site that contained only work samples like the old crusty one. I wanted a site that would constantly change, that's why I decided on the blog format. I will post samples of my work here, but I also plan to share a little more. Stay tuned; you may pick up a trick or two.