* DrBacchus peers suspiciously at HIGH-FREQ_
<– HIGH-FREQ_ has quit (Read error: 104 (Connection reset by peer))

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?

After being assured on the Coldsync mailing list that the lastest coldsync cvs would let me sync my Tungsten E, I just wasted an hour trying to get this working.

Still no joy.

*sigh*

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.

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.

It seems that spam volume is down. I wonder why.

I’ve spent the last hour trying to find a functional webdav client for Windows, and I guess I have determined that there isn’t one. If someone would demonstrate that I am mistaken, I’d be much obliged. I’m running Win98 (because that’s what CDs I have, that’s why. No, I won’t upgrade to WinXP. Because I’m *NOT* paying for an OS ever again, that’s why.)

I just got done with the enormously frustrating installation of DAVExplorer. It was frustrating because I had to make guesses as to the dependencies, and then, when I ended up on the Sun web site, I had to chase links to find the actual file to download. Why can’t these Java people just give me something to download and install? With all the JREs and JDKs and JSEs and who knows what else, I never know what it is that I actually have to install to get one of these darned Java apps installed and working. And when I do get it installed, they never actually work as advertised. It’s little comfort that they are platform independent when they don’t work.

OK, so I got it installed, and it turns out that it does what the name says, and NOTHING ELSE. I can see DAV repositories. I can see the files in them. I can’t actually download them, edit them, or anything else that would be actually useful. What is the point of this thing, other than to tease and annoy me?

Is there seriously *no* Windows DAV client? This seems really odd. It’s not like the protocol is that complicated.

I’ve replaced FTP with DAV on my web servers because people with *real* operating systems can get functioning DAV clients to edit the content. But it appears that Windows users are just out in the cold. Having read that Windows XP, or perhaps Windows 2000, and maybe Windows 9x with IE6 installed, could access DAV shares, I thought that they would be able to do this. But on the server I see requests for _vti_bin and other such nonsense, and then the DAV “client” says that it’s not a valid “web folder.” I venture to say that it’s not a valid DAV client. Standards are there for a reason.

OK, I’m done ranting.

I’d like to tell you a little story about my other favorite registrar. Network Solutions. Or, as we like to call them, Network Problems.

I have a customer. Let’s call him Bob. He has a domain name. Let’s call it example.com. This domain name was part of the Verisign hosted services program. (For those of you joining late, Verisign and Network Problems are the same company.) This means that the dns, email, and web site are all hosted at Verisign. And it means that if they wanted to add an email address, they pay an additional $n a month. I don’t know what that number is. It doesn’t matter.

So, Bob wanted to move his email hosting to our mail server, so that he could have 20 email accounts rather than 1. Easy, right? You just change the MX record. 5 minutes, tops.

Or, not.

I got on the Verisign management interface, and there’s no place to manage MX records. You can add and remove email accounts, but you can’t point the record elsewhere. I called Verisign Websites and tried to find out what needed to be done to fix this. They said that nothing could be changed on the domain. It is hosted by them, and, technically, they own the domain. If you don’t want it hosted with them, then go get another domain. Nyeah, nyeah. I replied that this was a really amazingly dumb policy, and that I would be transferring my domain to another registrar immediately.

Clearly, in retrospect, I should have done just that.

The manager that I got on the phone after a few minutes of hold time said that I should cancel the hosted account, which would automatically transfer the domain over to a regular NetSol registrar account, and I could manage the DNS servers there.

So, I still can’t change the MX record, and now I have to host not only the email server, but the DNS server, and the web site. All in the name of adding a few email accounts. Fine, I say, and agree to this.

A mere 5 days later, I’m able to manage the domain on the NetProb web site. I can log in (oops, they changed the username. Didn’t we mention that?) and edit the DNS records on the domain.

And, for a glorious 2 days, everything worked.

Then Bob called. We can’t see our web site. And we’re not getting mail.

I checked everything. Everything was working.

I checked the whois record. It lists no DNS servers. Not the wrong ones. Just none at all. And, of course, since Verisign/Network Solutions are flaming morons, requests for the web site go to the Verisign sitefinder “service”. (To quote someone on Slashdot, can I punch you in the face, and call that a service too?)

I went back to the web site, and added the DNS servers back on, and was promised speedy results in 48-72 hours. But, 3 days later, there were still no DNS servers listed. Repeat that process twice, and I’m starting to get rather steamed, and Bob is running out of patience.

I called NetProb, and they made the edit for me while I was on the phone. Except that it didn’t work.

I called them again this morning, and the customer service dude tried to make the edit, and told me that it wasn’t working, and that he’d escalate this to the engineering staff to find out why it was not working.

So, here we are, 2 MONTHS later, and the 5 minute task of changing an MX record has turned into a multi-thousand-dollar process (in time and frustration) that threatens to lose us a customer.

I think I’ll be transferring this domain elsewhere in the very near future.

When the alarm starts in the morning, most folks have to reach out and press the snooze button. Many people can do this without even waking up or being aware of it happening. For this effort, they are rewarded with 9 more minutes of slumber.

Not I.

I have to get out of bed, turn on the monitor, wait for it to warm up, log in (username, password), and type ‘snooze’ at the command line. For this effort, I get only 5 more minutes of napping. Most days, it’s hardly worth the effort, and I just stay out of bed. Which is, of course, the point.

This morning I woke up about 30 minutes late, to discover that crond had died at some point, for some unknown reason. The disconcerting thing was that I would still wake up at such an unpleasantly early hour, even without the alarm.

The LPLUG had an installfest today. It ran from 10 to 6, and by the time I left at 1, nobody had showed up to do an install. It was just folks who already had Linux installed, sitting around with tons of free stuff (contributed by various sponsors) and food, watching movies.

I hope that someone showed up before the end of the day. But, what with the rain, and the UK/Florida gain, I guess it was looking pretty grim. Kinda disappointing, but still it was a lot of fun, and I indoctrinated a few more people into GPG, so it wasn’t a loss.