I only ever use one of these two date formats: 2007-01-13 or 13 January 2007
I always write the time like: 18:44 and all my computers, pda, phones, webpages display it that way.
My computer and pda calenders are configured to begin the week on monday.
I measure things in meters, liters and grams whenever possible.
All of my thermometers display the temperature in celcius.
I don't adhere to english standards on capitalization and period positioning "like this".

I'm sure it's no surprise why I often feel like a foreigner here in the USA.

Posted by ra in main at 19:44 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I'm interested in energy efficiency, which is why I have been gradually replacing the incandescent light bulbs in our house with compact fluorescents, or CF's. We had already been using fluorescents where possible, usually tubes or circular shapes, but now that CF's have gone mainstream, almost any incandescent bulb is a candidate for replacement. The difference in energy usage is phenomenal. I have been replacing 40W bulbs with 9W ones; 60W with 13W and 100W with 23W. I'm amazed that the light output of the new bulbs is just as good as the old ones. It really shows how much energy is wastefully and undesirably used to make heat in an incandescent bulb.

Posted by ra in other geeky stuff at 23:18 | Comments (0) | Trackback (1)

MUAHAHAHA! It couldn't come soon enough, and the last day of my verizon contract is fast approaching. But even better than that, I have stepped up the end of the agony. Exploiting the text message fee increase contract termination loophole trick, I won freedom from the contract, effective at the end of my billing cycle (about two weeks from now) which is about 2 months before the actual end of the contract.

Contrary to some reports, it took only a few minutes of chatting with the reasonably pleasant verizon rep, and I didn't need to ask for a supervisor or come up with elaborate arguments to get out of the contract. It was actually rather easy. But don't get me wrong, verizon still sucks. At least now I will no longer be a contract slave, so I'll be able to laugh at their suckage from a safe distance.

Posted by ra in gadgets and phones at 00:31 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

IP aliases are incredibly useful for testing and troubleshooting (and virtual hosting too). The other day I needed to add some IP aliases on a FreeBSD machine. I administer FreeBSD servers at work but I am much more familiar with Linux, so I had to look up the syntax.

I found out how to add an alias:
ifconfig rl0 alias 10.0.0.5 netmask 255.255.255.0
...and remove an alias:
ifconfig rl0 -alias 10.0.0.5

This contrasts with the Linux ifconfig syntax for dealing with aliases:
ifconfig eth0:0 10.0.0.5 netmask 255.255.255.0
ifconfig eth0:0 down

Or what I'm usually using-- iproute2 on Linux: (I have really come to love iproute2)
ip addr eth0 add 10.0.0.5/24
ip addr eth0 del 10.0.0.5/24

* unrelated rant #1-- Why the hell are FreeBSD ethernet devices named according to the driver that supports the card? This annoys me, and I don't see the point. I never know what the device might be called unless I happened to have just installed the nic, which is usually not the case.

** unrelated rant #2-- Why the hell is windows so lacking when it comes to ip aliasing? AFAIK, you can configure IP aliases only if the primary address is static. If it is dynamic then you are out of luck.

Posted by ra in computerish at 21:27 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

.... or do I no longer have viagra in my email? Aha, it is the lack of spam!

Drug spam, stock spam, sex spam; you name it, I don't have it. Another five days on the new filters saw the successful identification of ALL incoming spam to my account, and with zero false positives too. That puts my 10-day accuracy rate at about 99.8%. I think I can live with that.

Posted by ra in computerish at 00:34 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Don't take my word for it, see for yourself. Just another way in which the motorola v710 really sucks (and my RAZR rules ).

These were taken in the same place (obviously) at the exact same time.

Motorola RAZR V3 --vs-- Motorola v710













Thank goodness I only have to carry around the verizon turd for another couple months.

Posted by ra in gadgets and phones at 09:10 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Like anyone running an email server these days, spam has been a major problem for me over the past year. Late last year, the problem only got worse when the bastards behind all that pump-and-dump stock spam really opened their taps. Since then I had been struggling to keep the inboxes on my server from being overwhelmed with crap. Well, I've recently made significant improvements, and although it may be a little early still to proclaim outright victory, I am going to take credit for a major blow to the shit-spewers; in the context of my server, anyway.

I've relied on SpamAssassin for spam filtering ever since I first felt a need to filter spam. Over the years there has been a clear, yet unsurprising, pattern to its effectiveness. After a new release, SA is deadly effective at spam filtering, but after some time (during which the spammers presumably test their spam against the latest release and tweak it to evade the default ruleset) it begins to miss more and more spam. I have gotten used to adding my own rules and tweaking the SA scores to help prop it up a bit between releases, but that has yielded mixed results. These days there is sa-update, which can help avoid to erosion of effectiveness, but that isn't what really turned the tide for me.

Posted by ra in computerish at 02:55 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)