All posts by rbowen

Talon winery

Yesterday I went out to Talon Winery, which is out on Tates Creek Road, at 37d54.438,-84d27.139

This is the first winery in Fayette County. They’ve been there for 4 years, but are just now announcing their presence to the public, and should have some releases available in retail outlets soon, although I’m not sure where.

They’ve got 5 wines so far, and they are about 50% from Kentucky-grown grapes, with the eventual goal of being 100% Kentucky-grown, mostly estate-grown. They have enormous tracts of land, and although only a little of it is planted right now, they hope to expand over time. They’ve got *very* cool equipment, including the automatic bottle filler/corker/labeller machine, which appears to be the only one of its kind in the state.

The wine-maker there is, to a small extent, a student of Chris Nelson, of Chrisman Mill, but he has intentionally avoided learning about Chris’ actual wine-making style, so that he can develop his own. Which is very good, I must say.

They have a Cabernet, Chacellor, and a Chardonnay, a blush and a sweet-ish niagra-based wine. The niagra, which I was sure I’d hate, was actually pretty good, I must grudgingly admit. And the blush might just grow on me, with lovely peach overtones. The Cab is big, jammy, and yummy, with a wonderful caramel/smoke/earthy backbone and enough tannin to squirrel away for a year or five. And the Chardonnay is … well, it’s a Chardonnay, but it’s not over-oaked. And they make a point of aging only in Kentucky White Oak, which is probably unique in the world, outside of a Bourbon distillery.

The winemaker there (Bah, I didn’t get his name) is very knowledgeable, and knows exactly what he likes. He’s clearly willing to experiment to accomplish it, and based on some of the stories he told, he also knows how to deal with the unexpected things that fate and the harvest throw his way.

I encourage you to go out there (see map linked above) and see their spread. Even if you are completely uninterested in the product, the place is beautiful, and a great place to go for a summer picnic.

Oh, and their grand opening will be on the 14th of August, with live music and food.

Move to FireFox?

As Tim recommended I encouraged my parents to ditch IE and move to Firefox. However, I have to say, this business of Mozilla having a dozen names is much more problematic than the average slash-head may be willing to admit.

To most of the world – at least, those that were using the web prior to a year or so ago – there are two possible browsers. IE, and Netscape. Then, Netscape ceased to exist. Then it changed its name to Mozilla, Firebird, or Thunderbird, or Firefox, or something, and it’s just too darned hard to keep up with. You go to netscape.com these days, and you can’t find the browser any more. So most folks are just going to conclude that there is no alternate browser any more. And if you’re not a tech-head, then you’re not likely to look any further unless you do happen to have a tech-head son who will do that work for you.

Additionally, now that Netscape is gone from the desktop, all the icons on HTML files suddenly changed to a peculiar globe-looking thing with a fox on it. This is perplexing, and breaks the means of visual recognition of things. It would be nice if Firefox (or whatever it’s called these days) could put a N-looking icon in with the other ones so that there’s at least *some* visual continuity between the two apps. Why do they have to make things so darned hard?

I think that the move went ok, but I’m not sure, since they didn’t have much time to experiment with it. I expect tha tthere will be some other problems that crop up as we go along. We’ll see. It would be nice if moving from Netscape to Firefox was a little more seamless. Particularly for people who don’t *want* to know all the details.

Blocking more spammers

This won’t work for everyone, but perhaps it will give you an easy place to start.

I’ve noticed lately that I’m getting HUNDREDS of messages to bogus email addresses in the space of a few minutes, or perhaps hours, from a particular address or block of addresses. I suppose the theory is that if they send to <dictionary>@rcbowen.com it will eventually hit a valid address.

The goal here is to identify a host that is sending these kinds of messages, and just block them at the firewall. I want to make sure that they are not one of my secondary MX’es, which, by no fault of their own, are just relaying messages to me. And I want to make sure that I don’t block someone who innocently mistypes an address. So there are some checks for that. Specifically, I have a list of addresses that are valid MXes. And I only inflict punishment if they send more than 5 messages.

The /usr/bin/BLOCK script is a shell script that adds them to my firewall deny list. Since that’s typically a one-liner, it’s left as an exercise to the sysadmin.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my @exceptions = qw(mx.hostname.com mx2.otherhost.net trusted.host.org);
my %spammers = ();

while (<>) {
    next unless /User unknown in local/;
    my $skip = 0;
    s/.*?RCPT from (.*?):.*$/$1/;
    foreach my $x (@exceptions) {
        $skip++ if m/$x/;
    }
    next if $skip;

    # So, we should now have someone that's not an MX, who just sent
    # us email to a bogus address. What should we do about it?
    my $spammer = $_;
    $spammer =~ s/^([^[]*)[//;
    my $host = $1;
    $spammer =~ s/][^]]*$//;
    $spammers{$spammer}++;


    if ($spammers{$spammer} > 5) {
        # This person is almost certainly a spammer.
        warn "$host (at $spammer) appears to be a spammer. Adding them to the firewall";
        # Except, if they are passing bogus stuff in the address,
        # somehow. Not that I think they could ...
        if ($spammer =~ /[^.d]/) {
            warn "Hmm. Troubling. Strange stuff in the address. Better skip this one";
            next;
        }
        `/usr/bin/BLOCK_no_log $spammer`;
        # And now we don't need to keep that data around any more
        delete $spammers{$spammer};
    }
}

To use this, just pipe syslog through it, thus:

tail -f /var/log/maillog | ./nukespammers.pl

Censorship and journalism

In a not so recent posting, I made some remarks about an organization, and I unwisely used the name of that organization, as well as the name of the individual that runs the organization. I have deleted those names, while leaving my remarks.

It always feels wrong to go back and edit a posting. Feels like censorship. On the other hand, my remarks could justifiably be considered slander, so it was probably the right thing to do.

I’m also torn as to whether I should apologize. While the guy is nice enough himself, and I regret offending him, the remarks I made remain my opinion, and what’s a blog for if not for expressing my opinion? It’s a strange feeling. I wish to stand by what I said, but I don’t want to be mean to a nice guy.

So, you-who-I-shall-not-name, I’m sorry for having offended you. And I would welcome an open discussion over dinner some evening. But I should note that you offended me almost from our first discussion of your cause. I find your cause to be deeply objectionable, and to ignore the role that immigrants have played, and currently play, in the history and health of our great nation. Indeed, our nation is great specifically because of these people.

Increasing confusion and anger about our government

Just three random links which illustrate some of the bizarre things going on in our nation under the name of National Security.

An article about a student photography project. (It’s long. Read the whole thing anyway.)

Passenger arrested for carrying a DVD of anti-american material, or, as they call it, suspicious materials.

And an article about how post-outage reports are a threat to national security.

I’m increasingly baffled by the notion that we’re more secure if we’re kept in ignorance. This “closed source” approach to governance is completely opposite to the way that our government was created to work. Something about a government of the people, by the people, and *ahem* for the people.

I’ve complained about this before – the absurd notion that government must be conducted in secrecy. How, I ask, can one have a government of the people if the people are routinely kept in the dark?

I am getting really fed up with the press telling us to be extra vigilant on one day or another, due to unspecified threats that they can’t tell us about. I am confident that we would be more vigilent, and less terrorized, if we were simply made aware of what threats were being made, and what was being done to counteract them. But, instead, the Feds Who Watch Over Us tell us that there were threats, and that we should be afraid, but not what those threats were. The consequence is that people either panic, or complete disregard anything that these folks say. Personally, I think that they are self-serving morons fabricating threats as a means to preserve their job securrity. I have absolutely no confidence that they know anything at all.

Really, who is served by keeping these things secret? Presumably the terrorists who made the threats already know about them, so it’s not like we’d be revealing important information. So, by keeping the citizenry in the dark, who benefits? The fear-mongers do, of course. Both those who are the “real” terrorist as well as our own government. Our government does the terrorists’ job – ie, they terrorize us – and they create multiple departments with virtualy unlimited power, based solely on our ignorance.

So, I suppose this is one of the reasons that I’m not looking forward to flying out to Portland. I suppose I can just put my head down and endure it, try to be cheerful when I’m treated like a criminal, when my electronics are mishandled and treated like contraband, or, perhaps, explosives, and try to say “yes” with a straight face when they ask politely if they may paw through my personal effects.

Maybe it’s only a matter of time before I get tagged as an anti-government fanatic. It’s a label that I’ll wear proudly, in the fine company of George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine. I just have to wonder if our government of the people does indeed represent the people in a meaningful way. Because, if it does, then I’m woefully out of touch with how the majority looks at things.

And, so, we’re coming up on another election. Is there any chance that voting for one or the other candidate will, in any way, change this political climate, and the downward spiral towards a police state? No, of course not. And I really don’t know what can break us out of this nasty state of affairs, particularly if those of us who think that it’s even a problem are in the minority. I’d say write to your congresscritter, but I’m no longer convinced that they are literate.

Drive-by deafening

After being subjected to another drive-by deafening, I find myself wondering what these kids are going to do when they hit 40 and realize that their various tatoos and piercings and partial deafness aren’t really so cool after all.

Strange content filters

Apparently the word “bacchus” is sufficient to trigger the content filters at the place where I’m on assignment right now, as I can’t get to my own web site from there. And, it appears that the word “bourbon” is likewise verbotten, since I can’t get to BrBourbon’s site either.

Getting ready for OSCon

Apparently OSCon is just a few days away. Sheesh. This year is going by mighty fast. And I *still* don’t have confirmation on my travel plans, although I’ve sent a number of irate email messages to the purported travel agent. I’ll be even more irate if I show up to the airport and don’t actually have a reservation to fly.

I don’t really have the building enthusiasm for OSCon as I have in years past. I’m not entirely sure why this is. I suppose it’s somehow related to my disconnection from the community for the last year, with work conditions and general busier-than-heck-ness conspiring to make me less involved. It seems that by this time last year I was all but packed and ready to go.

Perhaps I’ll meet interesting people and get fired up about some project or other while I’m out there. And, due to the savings that one gets from staying over the weekend, I’m actually not leaving until Sunday morning. Perhaps that could translate into more fun. Dunno. I just know that I’m greatly unenthused about the whole thing.