I’m trying to get SpamAssassin, or Mail::Audit, to drop inbound email with headers but no body. There seems to have been a lot of this lately.

I also noticed last week that this can confuse Outlook Express. No, I don’t use Outlook, Express or otherwise, but I had to troublshoot a customer who was unable to download her email. Turned out that it was choking on these messages, and the only way around it was to manually delete these files from the mbox on the mail server.

Anyways, any pointers appreciated. And I’ll post updates here when I find the solution.

==============================

Looks like I can ask Mail::Audit

if scalar ( @{ $msg->body } ) == 0

I just upgraded to Pine 4.58. Yes, I still use Pine for email. It’s comfortable, and does everything I need for it to do.

The irritation I was having with the previous version (I actually don’t know what version I was running) was that email subjects with “foreign” characters would simply display as blank. I had been putting up with this for a while, but a recent thread containing the word Détente in the subject line made me go out seeking a solution.

I can’t detect any other changes of note. Yet.

I heard a rumor that Alltel upgraded their dslam, and I could get QX to reprovision my DSL to a faster link. Then I forgot to do anything about it. But yesterday, I had them on the phone at work, and asked them about it. They did their magic, and, sure enough, it’s quite a bit faster now. But it only affected down, not up, so my websites aren’t any faster for you, gentle reader. Oh well.

Lock up the china, and let the guard dogs out, the New York Times has discovered IRC and the evil that lurks therin.

Every once in a while, the fine people of the press are blind-sided by technology. They encounter some technological wonder that they were not previously aware of, and the reaction that they must have is obvious: It is evil and must be stopped.

IRC, for example, is an online chat technology, which has been in full vigor for about 20 years. But, the fine investigative reporters at the New York Times have uncovered this “little known” technology, presumably at great risk to their own life and sanity. And what they have discovered is truly alarming.

IRC is a breeding ground for evil in its worst forms: file sharing and animal pornography. (In case you missed it, I’m mocking their ignorance and luddite tendencies. I know, I was being very subtle.)

Two comments deserve making.

Anyone who thinks that the WWW is a “pleasant, well-policed suburb” is NOT PAYING ATTENTION. Even less so if they say that the Internet, as a whole, is that. I could provide some links that demonstrate otherwise, but I’ll just direct you to google.com instead. Think of something that deeply, profoundly offends you, and search for it. If you find less than 1000 entries, I’ll offer you a personal apology.

Next, IRC is not evil. IRC allows people to communicate, and many people have evil tendencies, habits, and hobbies. Anything that you can say about IRC, you can equally say about Usenet, websites, and telephones. It is a communication format. Nothing more, nothing less. Folks that say otherwise are uninformed, and trying to meet their column deadline, and snag the Slashdot traffic to their column web site.

Also, I should note that I spend hours every week helping folks install, configure, and troublshoot the Apache Web Server. I do this on IRC. You’re welcome to come join us. We’re on #apache, on irc.freenode.net. And we have no naked dogs there, at least that I know about. And, yes, we share files. Usually they are web server configuration files.

It’s very obvious to me, and has been since I originally got a Palm device, that the address/phone book application should let you hold the palm up to a touch tone phone, and make the beeps to dial for you. Now that Palm devices have really nice speakers, this is even more obvious.

Yet I can’t find any software, at any price, that does this. The apps that claim to do touchtone dialing don’t actually do this through the speaker, but seem to assume that you have a modem attached, or that it’s a Treo or similar Palm/Phone thingy.

This is aggravating. Seems like a *very* simple thing, but I don’t have the Palm software fu to do it myself.

Bah.

I’m sure that one of these days I’ll get in trouble for posting stuff about my job. I was thinking about this today at work. What would my employer think if he saw some of the stuff that I’ve posted? I expect that it would seem juvenile, and perhaps he’d be upset that I didn’t just approach him about it to start with. I guess, while I find many aspects of my employment to be annoying, overall, I’m glad to have a job, and I try to do it as best as I am able. And I try not to rock the boat in such a way as to terminate that employment.

But I figure I have to finish the story, and not leave folks hanging, right?

The Engineer Skills Test was heavily Microsoft- and Cisco-centric, and so I came away from it feeling that I was utterly without skills. The questions in other areas, I was at least able to make intelligent guesses, or make stuff up, or at least write what would be my troubleshooting steps. But a number of the Windows questions required that you know The Right Answer to some arbitrary “how many” or “what are they called” question, which could not possibly be guessed at.

The stuff in the Unix section was pretty basic for me. The stuff in security required theoretical knowledge that I just don’t have. And the networking, I was able to guess, calculate, or remember (I think) almost all of it.

So perhaps I scored as high as a 50%. It wasn’t an ego-boosting event, to say the least.

I got fed up with telnetting to mail servers to test for open relays, so I found this today. I knew that there had to be something like that out there, and had just been too lazy to go look. But the third time I had to do this by hand, it was in fact lazier to go look for the script to do it for me.

I mentioned that my online banking is less than ideal. Well, now they’ve managed to get my IRS payment plan cancelled.

I think it’s time to find a new bank. Just as soon as I figure out who to address this nasty letter to …

While I suppose that putting this here will teach certain lowlifes how to get around it, I suppose it’s worth sharing the technique, so that other people can benefit from it. Seems that the spammers are idiots, and post the same comment repeatedly. So if you get a pattern early on, you can prevent a lot of other ones later.

The following goes in $MT/lib/MT/App/Comments.pm and assumes that you have some clue about Perl. I won’t be providing tech support for this. Please contact your local Perl guru.

It should be somewhat obvious where these go. I’ve provided a few lines of context.

    if (!$q->param('text')) {
        return $app->handle_error($app->translate("Comment text is required."));
    }
    if ($q->param('text') =~ /I wish it true|see a later|cool amazing page/i) {
        return $app->handle_error($app->translate(
                        "An unexpected error has occured"));
    }   
    if ($q->param('author') =~ /hydrocodone|phentermine|gay f..king|valium/i) {
        return $app->handle_error($app->translate(
                        "An unexpected error has occured"));
    }
    if ($q->param('url') =~ /cheapdrug/i) {
        return $app->handle_error($app->translate(
                        "An unexpected error has occured"));
    }
    
    my $comment = MT::Comment->new;

And proceed with that same sort of thing. This will bit-bucket the most eggregious morons, and then you’ll still have to deal with the others manually. Or migrate to WordPress, as I’m planning to do just as soon as I get a few spare moments.

At a time when I’m about ready to go flip burgers rather than endure another week here at $job, I’ve been given two technical writing assignments in quick succession. It’s as though my employer suddenly realized the skill that caused them to hire me in the first place, and want to have me do something I’m actually good at!

It’s like a breath of fresh air. I’m actually enjoying myself.

Yeah, I’m one of those strange people that actually enjoys writing technical documentation, and writing “white paper” sort of documents aimed at non-technical people, and, I guess, just writing in general. I think I could happily spend the entire day doing nothing but that.

My only frustration at the moment, in fact, is that I’m compelled to use inferior tools for the job.

I really can’t imagine writing structured documents in Word. How do people do it? I mean, obviously, Word does a lot of things that I don’t know about. But the simple task of writing a structured document, with internal references (see section 12.4) and auto-indexing (TOC as well as a glossary/index at the end) is way beyond my ability. I would have thought that this sort of thing would be really easy. And I expect it probably is, and I just don’t know how. But what point-click-drag-and-drool method could be easier than just typing index{GUI indexing tools} at the point in the text that I want the index to point to?

The amusing thing about this kind of rant is that it elicits exactly two kinds of responses. Either people immediately see my point and agree, or they have no idea what I could possibly be referring to. The latter group tend to be the “well, of course everyone uses Word, silly” group who can’t imagine that there are other ways to do it. (And, although that sounds derogatory, I’m sure that many of these people can produce as-good or better docments using that tool.) The former group, alas, commiserate, but don’t really have a functional solution to offer. Which is very unfortunate.

The whole conversation is here.