After an initial period of hopefullness, my phone started acting worse than ever.
So this evening I went to Sprint, all ready to raise a ruckus and make a scene. I said, I’m having phone problems, and the last two people that tried to fix it made it worse. The person at the counter asked where I wanted the replacement sent to.
This was quite a surprise, and rather took the steam out of my plans to rant and demand justice.
So I guess I’ll have a new phone soon. 🙂
Apparently spamd died some time over the weekend. This morning, I had 1012 email messages, and perhaps 10 of them were ones I actually wanted to read. It’s hard for me to imagine that this is the email experience that most people have. It’s no wonder people hate email.
Having finally given up on getting a decent scanner working under Linux (yeah, I know. Blah, blah, blah. Flames will be gleefully /dev/null’ed) I got a Canon scanner, which I’m usng on my Win98 machine.
The thing that struck me as really cool about this scanner is that it has no power supply. It is entirely powered by the USB port. Not being much of a hardware person, I guess I was unaware that this was possible.
Anyways, using it for my wine labels
For the last 3 or 4 weeks, my phone has been randomly rebooting, or turning off. This has caused me to miss a number of important phone calls, and be cut off in the middle of others.
So I went to the Sprint shop yesterday (or perhaps Wednesday, I’m not sure) and complained. The lovely assistant there took my phone apart, cleaned out an enormous quantity of crud which had somehow made its way into the battery compartment, and handed it back to me. It has worked just fine since then.
In other news, Dana wondered, last night, why this blogging thing is so popular, and why anyone on earth would give a rodent’s posterior about my pocket lint.
Why indeed? And yet, here you are, reading about it.
The Internet will never cease to amaze me.
After years of resisting it (too many legit messages dropped) I have finally implemented the RBL on my mail server. It’s gotten absolutely absurd. I’m dropping almost 90% of all incoming email as spam, and there’s still a significant number of spam messages that make it trough every day.
So, that was the first thing I did. Then I added a rule to drop all incoming email from .ru and .kr domains. And finally I added the list at http://www.securitysage.com/files.html of hosts and email addresses that are known spammers.
This is all stuff that postfix will do before it even makes it to SpamAssassin. We’ll see how this affects things. I suppose I don’t have particularly high expectations. But I can already see in the logs that it is dropping some of the connections that I expect it to drop, even before it considers the message itself. So maybe it will actually make a difference.
Oh, yeah, and I discovered one of the reasons that my filters weren’t catching the FLOOD of viagra spam. Turns out that the messages contain HTML comments in the middle of words, causing SpamAssassin to not see the keywords. In fact, the majority of the message was composed of HTML comments. Stuff like vi<!–jksdfoew–>agra for example. So I added a rule to SpamAssassin to look for “viagra” with, optionally, HTML comments between any pair of letters. I haven’t seen viagra spam since then.
It amazes me that these people will go to such lengths to send me email when it is obvious by their actions that they *know* I don’t want to get it. That is, they are intentionally and aggressively violating my wishes.
Someone asked at OSCon why Open Source people are so obsessed about community. I answered with my standard answer – that it’s really that community-oriented people are attracted to Open Source – that software is really just a vehicle to get to community, and it is really much more about the community than about the software.
Andy disagreed with me, but then we got distracted, and the conversation died there. I’m really interested in continuing the conversation. So here’s my bit of it.
I joined the Apache project for the software. I stayed for the community. Likewise Perl. The software is interesting, but the people are more interesting. So now that I’m really not even writing much Perl, I’m still involved with the community, to some degree, because they are cool people.
Is there a PhotoShop Community? Well, sort of, but they don’t really have any ownership of their community. They are at the mercy of some large organization of which they are not a part. The Apache Community, on the other hand, has their hands in the thing that drew them together, and can remake it into something cool.
It’s very cool that I’ve had lunch with Larry Wall on a couple different occasions – not that he’d remember me particularly. It is very cool that I’ve chatted with Bradley Kuhn, Eric Raymond, Eric Allman, Tim O’Reilly, and a variety of other people – again, not that any of them would particularly remember me. But all of this is to say that it’s the opportunity to meet interesting people that has been one of the most valuable things about getting involved with Open Source Software. But what’s way cooler than that is the people that I’ve actually gotten to know in all of this – people that I would have *never* run into without OSS, because they live a world away. Folks like Mads Toftum, Greg Stein, Kevin Hemenway, Jesse Vincent, and the list goes on and on. There is no chance I would have ever met these folks in “the real world.”
So it appears, as I think about this, that I’ve often expressed these thoughts, but never really unpacked them completely, as Brother Bourbon would say. I’m very interested in hearing other views, or whatever.
So, why am I involved in Apache? Well, there’s a few reasons. I’m good at something (which happens to be writing about things in terms that beginners can understand) and this makes peoples’ lives easier. Doing something that potentially millions of people will benefit from is very cool, both from the perspective of helping people, but also from the sheer hubris of all of those people thinking I’m cool. And then there’s the community of people that it puts me in touch with. I care a great deal about the Apache Software Foundation and what it does, but I’m not so sure that the Apache HTTP Server is the primary part of what I care about. Presumably, if we had to, we could create that from scratch again. But the community is less replaceable. (Tirade about people destroying community ommitted for your reading pleasure.)
Thoughts?
Because I can never remember, here’s how I did it.
In the file /usr/share/zsh/4.0.4/functions/_host, I removed the line:
hosts=( “$_cache_hosts[@]” )
And added:
hosts=( `perl -pe ‘s/(.*?)[, ].*/$1 /;’ ~/.ssh/known_hosts2 ~/.ssh/known_hosts | egrep -v ‘^[0-9]’ | sort | uniq` )
This allows you to tab complete to all of the hosts in ~/.ssh/known_hosts* – ie, any host that you have ever ssh’ed to before. Ssh’ing to a new host makes it get added to that list, so that it will then be in your tab completion list automagically – nothing to update.
By default, completion is to your /etc/hosts file, which seems moderately useless to me.
Thursday night was the Perl DateTime BOF, with Dave Rolsky. It was mostly Dave telling folks about the state of the project, rather than much of a planning session. Dave gave a lot of credit to other folks for the work that has been done, but it is abundantly clear to me that Dave made this thing happen, and has done the bulk of the actual work. Sure, he has taken a lot of existing code into what he has done, but the sheer volume of code that Dave has produced is staggering. Many kudos, Dave.
Meanwhile, if I actually get this book finished any time soon, I should actually have some time to work on DateTime stuff some in the coming months. As usual, I didn’t get as much work done at the conference as I had planned, having been continually distracted by the darned conference. So, you see, gnat, it’s your own fault for putting together such a good conference!
Day 5 was a little bit of a disappointment, really. I think that I had Milton Ngan’s talk built up a little too much in my expectations, so that when he did not show a preview of Return of the King, I felt rather let down. He showed some very cool stuff about Gollum and the Ents, but nothing approaching the amazing stuff that he showed us last year. Apparently he was unable to obtain permission to show us anything of the upcoming movie. I would expec that it would be inthe best interests of the movie makers to have the geek community fired up about their movie, as long as they didn’t show any “spoilers.” Not that you can really show spoilers when the book has been out for 40 years. Sheesh.
This talk just rocked. This guy works in the office where Von Neumann used to work (I’m a little fuzzy on the details) on the MANIAC computer. He discovered boxes of notes from that era, and shared then with us. I can’t begin to tell you all about it, but his slides will be on the web RSN. These folks made decisions, out of several options, and we’re still doing everything the way that they decided was the right way. These documents included a substantial number of “let there be light” proclamations, and a great deal of source code for these initial machines.
What is sad, however, is that most of this work was for the purpose of building a bomb, and that Von Neumann died at a very young age of bone cancer from having worked on the bomb.
It’s important to note, however, that Von Neumann did not think of things in these terms, saying something like, “No, I’m not thinking about anything as unimportant as a bomb, I’m thinking of important things. I’m thinking about computers.”
I’ll link to the slides as soon as they become available.