The world is a safer place, now that the TSA has stolen my micro screwdriver set in the name of National Security. Makes me all jittery to think of the huge risk it post on the dozens of other flights on which I’ve carried it.
</sarcasm>
Tag Archives: general
Breakfast, 26th
Of all the places I’ve had to travel “on business” I think that Portland is probably the top of my list of places I’d want to come on vacation. Or even move to.
Of course, I expect that I’d want to do a little more research before I call Two Men And A Truck. I don’t actually know anythina about the area much past that you get scolded if you try to pump your own gas here, and that it’s impossible to get out of sight of a coffee shop anywhere downtown.
I’m at the Days Inn City Center, perhaps 8 or 10 blocks from the conference. I’ve actually stayed here before. Twice. In the DataBeam days, when on a customer visit. Maybe I’ll drop in on the customer.
TheReg discusses Wikis
While I certainly don’t agree with all of their comments, I find myself leaning rather strongly towards the general ideas espoused – namely, that wikis are written by people that like wikis and appeal to people that like wikis (this being a rather small subset of the general population), and that their utopian view that “good stuff will spontaneously “emerge”” is unrealistic at best.
Please understand that I’m not trashing WIkipedia specifically, since I really have almost no experience using it. I do, however, tend to feel this way towards online documentation that is developed in a Wikified media. I particularly liked this:
There’s nothing wrong with Wikipedia that isn’t summed up by the fiddlers’ problematic war cry of “if you don’t like it, fix it!” It’s really rather like being urged to liven up a boring stranger’s very poorly-attended party by showing up. Of course it would make it more interesting. But why should anyone bother? There may be a good reason no one shows up in the first place.
Sure, the Register is opinionated and crass, but they’re also amusing, and, frequently, spot-on.
Just for the record …
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.
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.
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.
Creative Nomad
As part of my Audible.com membership, I was sent a Creative Nomad NuVo. It arrived today. The documentation is less than stellar. It took me about an hour to get it “working” in the sense of playing an MP3 file. I still don’t have it working in the sense of being able to hook it up with my Audible.com account. It seems that if I install support for the Nomad, I must uninstall support for my Palm device. And, being Windows, every time I boot up, it tries to install support for the newly detected Nomad device. This gets old real fast.
It’s very cute, I’m sure, but until it actually does something useful, it serves little purpose, except as a conversation starter.
Thumbing my nose at the content spammers
Having migrated to WordPress, I’m amused to see that the comment spammers are still trying to post comments to mt-comments.cgi in an attempt to advertise their own particular medication or pronographic web site. Even more interesting is how persistent they are about it. When I block them at the firewall, I then see not just one or two attempts, but *hundreds* of attempts to get to my website from that IP address.
Apparently the spam-fest that I had to manually delete, the morning of my migration to WordPress, was just the first in a new tactic of posting hundreds rather than just two or three comments.
I urge everyone using inferior blog software to implement measures to cut down on comment spam so that these folks will not have any more reason to continue it.