All posts by rbowen

O come Emanuel

O come, desire of nations, bind in one the hearts of all mankind;
Bid thou our sad divisions cease, and be thyself our Prince of Peace.
Rejoice, rejoice, Emanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Even so, come quickly Lord Jesus.

Spam no longer disguising itself

It seems that spammers, in an attempt to get through mail filters, have given up even pretending that they are sending legitimate mail. Some of the subject lines I recieved today were:

Re: DZFWKYK, there came flying

and

Re: MXG, schizophrenic but also

The goal appears to be to make the subject lines difficult to write a general-purpose regular expression for. And that seems to be the only goal. Because what sane person would open an email message with a title like that?

By the way, this seems to work in most cases:

/Re: [A-Z]{2,}, [a-z]+ [a-z]+ [a-z]+/

And, if folks send legitimate email with a all-caps first word, well, they’ll get a friendly reject message and can resend.

So the entire postfix rule would look like:

/^Subject: .*R[eE]: [A-Z]{2,}, [a-z]+ [a-z]+ [a-z]+/ REJECT Your message has been rejected because it looks like the latest rash of spam. If this was legitimate email, please resend with less spam-like qualities. Thanks.

Or, if you don’t care about false positives, and/or don’t want to alert the spammers that you’re smarter than they are, just DISCARD instead of REJECT.

Have I mentioned lately how much I despise spammers?

Dayton ATs

Nathan told me that I should get Dayton tires, so I did. Now I don’t feel like I’m going to slide off the road into a ditch every time I go around a corner. I figure, by the time I get my Jeep paid off, I’ll have replaced all the bits.

Geocaching in the snow

Today, in direct violation of common sense, I decided to go geocaching.

Actually, I decided several days ago, but any sane person would have changed their mind, based on the weather, which was snowy and very cold. Particularly since I had decidfed to go out to Red River and do several of the caches out there.

In particular, I wanted to do “Kentucky 4×4 Adventure”. This is a cache in the national park that only one person has found in the year and a half it’s been up there. The instructions say that you’re likely to need a 4WD vehicle to get anywhere near the cache.

On the way out there, a few miles down I75, I nearly died. Crossing the bridge, a semi pulled up next to me, and I saw what I thought was his turn signals blinking to turn into my lane. Turns out it was actually his hazards, but being next to him I could not see that. I tried to slow down, and at that moment hit a patch of snow and ice and started to lose control. I regained control reasonably fast, but in the process I spun most of the way around, and missed being clipped by the back end of the semi by *maybe* 12 inches. Also, the dozens of cars and trucks behind me came real close to ploughing into me. There were 3 other accidents on that bridge too.

So … I almost saw good sense then and turned around, but, alas, I was not to be deterred.

When I arrived in the general vicinity of the cache, several miles up highway 11, I started looking for the road that I had planned to turn up – Sinking Fork Road. Turns out that just because it says “Road” on the map does not necessarily mean that normal people would bestow that moniker upon it. Other words come to mind, such as “rut” and “cow path”. This turns out to be the first time that I actually needed to put the Jeep into 4L.

Another “road” that I turned down started out OK, but about 100 yards off of the real road, there were two parallel planks across a river. I don’t *think* so.

The closest I actually got at any one time was 2.45 miles. If it had been 30 degrees warmer, and 3 hours earlier in the day, I would have parked and hiked to it, but given that it was 4:30 and 30 degrees by this time, I decided that I’ll have to come back another day.

On the technology front, this was the first time to use GPSDrive, and it was very cool. The only problem was that as I was approaching the cache, I think I must have blown a fuse, because my laptop lost power, and started running on battery. And because my laptop does very strange things when it’s on battery (like going to sleep, and then losing the mouse and/or keyboard when it wakes up) I turned it off. Need to find out what fuse it was and replace that. Having a larger view of where I am and where I’m going makes it much easier to make intelligent choices about where to turn. However, the jumping around from one scale to another turns out to be somewhat disorienting.

Letter from the student loan company

I was just whining the other day about how, every time there is some unexpected income, an unexpected expense springs up to absorb it. And that perhaps I should try really hard to think of it the other way around.

Well, today when I got home, I received an envelope from my student loan company, ACS.

Letters from the student loan office are *never* good news.

So, with much trepidation, I opened it up and read:

The enclosed check is a reimbursement for overpayment of your student loan.

So, not only did the enclosed check represent a nice little amount (about 1.5 payments, actually) this means that my student loan is paid off entirely. And this was completely unexpected. So I’ll have an extra $X every month that I was not planning on.

Pretty nifty.

GPSDrive

While at ApacheCon, legobuff showed me GPSDrive. It was very cool. But then his battery died, and I didn’t get to play with it much.

Last night, I got it working, and wow it is cool.

Tips for folks searching for stuff, as I did last night, finding very little.

* With the Magellan SporTrak Pro (or other Magellan devices, I expect) you have to turn on NMEA and set the baud rate to 4800, otherwise it won’t see your GPS.

* Installing the RPMs on RedHat 8 proved to be dependency hell, and I gave up on it. Installing PCRE from source proved to be the fastest way to get ./configure to run correctly, and then installing gpsdrive from source. I’ll omit my package management rant here, since I’m short on time.

* Very important! West longitude is negative. If you don’t use negative numbers, your waypoints end up somewhere in Uzbekistan or something.

The general idea here is that gpsdrive receives gps signals from your gpsr on the serial port, and then superimposes your position on top of maps downloaded from mapquest or Expedia. The Expedia maps seem to be more up-to-date.

The cool thing here is that it’s not downloading vector maps, just gif images, so they are very small, and whatever scale you want. It automatically chooses the best map that you have for the location you’re in, zooming in and out depending on how detailed a map you have for that position. If you’re online, you just click download, and it downloads the map for your current position.

Really, the only downside here is the increased tendency to run into things because you have a laptop sitting on the seat next to you, so a co-pilot is recommended. 😉

So, now I need to hack up some Perl scripts to convert my Geocaching.com GPX files into waypoint files for GPSdrive. The syntax is very simple, so I should be able to do that pretty quick. Unless someone has already done it.

So, thanks, Legobuff!

Tungsten E, part deux

i’ve used the Tungsten E since Tuesday, and here are my remarks thus far, for those looking for a Palm device, perhaps to work in conjunction with Linux, or who are upgrading from an older device.

* Apparently there are no Tungsten E drivers that work with Coldsync unless you are running a 2.6 Kernel. I found two references to this on Google, but now can’t find them. So you can take this as authoritative or not, as you like. However, despite that, I think that I’ll stick with this device, and just tough it out using Windows to sync/install until I upgrade the OS on my laptop.

* A significant number of applications no longer work under OS5. Now, in my case, this is not particularly surprising, because many of the apps I use were downloaded 5 years ago, and I’ve not upgraded because 1) they worked and 2) the upgrades were non-free.

* Which leads to another point. The idea of paying for software, I’m finding, is very odd to me. I expect to be able to go to Freshmeat or Sourceforge and download something that works for me. And, since I am generally not merely a freeloader, and contribute back to a decent number of the projects from which I benefit, I think that this is perfectly legit. But, in the Palm world, most of the useful stuff is not free. The prices are very very reasonable, but I’m so used to free software that paying for software seems … I dunno … somehow *wrong*.

* The calendar that comes with Palm OS5 is not as good as the one that came with the original Visor. Yes, it has some neat points, like the ‘Agenda’ view, which is very useful. But it lacks other things, like ToDo items in the day view, a number of the calendar views that I used fairly frequently, and the entire concept of “floating events”, which is exceedingly useful.

* Someone offered to sell me a Tungsten C for a very good price. Seems I’m going to decline. The C has built-in 802.11, which seems very neat at first glance, but I’m just not sure I’d use it often enough to justify the extra cost. Additionally, it has a keyboard rather than graffiti, and I don’t think I’d like that a whole lot.

* Speaking of graffiti, the new Palms now have “Graffiti 2”, which is a new and distinctly *not* improved version of Graffiti. A number of letters are harder to write, and almost all non alphanumeric things are much harder to write. One example would be the bullet point, which I use frequently. Used to be slash-dot. Now it is stroke-dot-stroke-stroke-stroke. Oy. The guy that stiffed Palm on the patent for this needs to be strung up by his toes.

OK, that’s about it. And I need to write about something else before I start working, so I should finish this one.

Palm Tungsten E

Yesterday morning in the dark I dropped my Visor Prism, which I’ve been using for at least 5 years, and I think longer. The screen broke just enough to lose a line of pixels. However, this grew to 4 lines by lunch time.

On the way back from the LPLUG meeting, I stopped and picked up a Palm Tungsten E.

Observations thus far.

The speed increase from the Visor is like upgrading from a 486 DX to a 1.8GHz Pentium. Or something like that. Yow!

The colors, and the screen clarity, are simply amazing. Photos look better than on my laptop.

Unfortunately, a number of the applications that I use frequently, don’t run under OS5. I’ve been running the same apps for 4 or 5 years, so there was no need to upgrade. Now, things that were free are no longer free, and so I can’t simply transfer data over from the old device, and in many cases I’ll have to spend $20 or $30 to retain the same functionality.

And, finally, it appears that Coldsync can’t sync to it. Yet. Presumably, it will with a 2.6 kernel.

I have not yet decided if I’m going to put up with these annoyances, and sync on Windows for a while, or if I will try to get something different. The OS5 thing can’t be got around without getting something old and/or refurbished. The Coldsync thing can be got around by getting a different device, but I’d have to do some research to find out which one. And since I’m expecting to upgrade to 2.6 as soon as there’s a solid distro with the new kernel, I can probably put up with it until then. I think. We’ll see. I have 14 days to return it.