.... 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)

I recently decided to re-rip our CD collection. My existing ogg files only represented less than half the albums we own, and I had ripped them at quality level 5 (~160 kb/s). I wanted to get the entire collection ripped, and I figured I would go for higher quality too, what with the low cost of data storage these days.

It occurred to me that there was no longer any reason to be making lossy rips at all. So, I used a gift certificate I got for christmas and picked up a 250 GB SATA drive and started ripping lossless FLAC files from our CD's. Choosing to make FLAC files was easy. The alternatives were WMA-lossless or ALAC-- both proprietary. FLAC is free, well supported (especially under Linux) and makes great sounding rips which require little work to decode.

It took several weeks of ripping to get through all 200 CD's we own. The FLAC collection takes up just over 60 GB of disk space. The nice thing about having lossless files is that I can put together a compilation and burn it back to CD without having to feel silly about making a disc that is lower quality than the original. I can also resample the FLAC files to make OGG's or MP3's or anything else for transfer to an iPod, etc. I intend to write a script or app to do that on the fly, and keep the transfer process easy.

Anyway, for now I just sicked amarok on our new flac files, and set it to random and sat back and relaxed. It's been really cool listening to some of our older CD's that had been somewhat forgotten, and they all sound great.

Posted by ra in computerish at 01:57 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

I've concluded that my favorite smtp server is postfix. I recently switched from courier-mta to postfix on my main server, and I couldn't be happier with the switch. Courier isn't actually all that bad, but it is definitely... quirky. I remember the first time I set it up it too me over a week to tweak all the 'bofh' options (i'm not making that up) and get mail flowing properly in and out. Postfix, on the other hand, is as easy as pie to configure. I had already been using postfix on my backup mail servers, so creating a config file for my main server took no longer than 15 minutes.

Posted by ra in computerish at 23:19 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

It's not as much to do with MT itself (I actually think it's nice and easy to use), as it is my dislike of six apart and how they conduct their business. The whole free, no-longer-free, free-again licensing fiasco aside; I have to say that six apart's delivery of MT sucks, at least from an administrator's point of view.

Like any other public-facing software package (read: potential compromise point/attack vector) on my server, I keep track of updates to movable type. Although some new versions are just feature-releases, there are a fair number of important security fixes that must be addressed. For most software packages on my server, I rely heavily on announce-only mailing lists to find out about security-related releases, and to a lesser extent, on RSS feeds and webpages. When I started looking for a movable type mailing list, I came up empty handed. I eventually found one hosted at sixapart.com, and I signed up. To make a long story short, the list turned out to be defunct, even though it was still active on their website and accepted new subscriptions. I emailed the list owner about the list, who happened to be one of six apart's co-founders, but never received a reply.

Posted by ra in tech at 01:30 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I hate it when I start typing a long query in the mysql client (mysql command-line interface) and then I realize that I'm not ready to run it yet or that I need to run a different query first. I either have to hit backspace 137 times, or I sometimes hit ctrl-c thinking I am using a bash shell; which of course kills mysqlclient, requiring me to reconnect.

Fortunately, I've finally found some shortcut key sequences to solve this problem, as well as some other useful tips. (these shortcuts also work in bash)

ctrl-w - 'cut' the word before cursor
ctrl-u 'cut' all input before cursor
ctrl-y 'paste' cut text

alt-f - move forward one word
alt-b - move backwards one word
ctrl-a - move cursor to the begining of the line
ctrl-b - move backwards one character
ctrl-e - move cursor to the end of the line
ctrl-f - move forward one character
ctrl-h - deletes one letter at a time (backspace)
ctrl-l - clear screen
ctrl-r - search previous queries

Posted by ra in tech at 00:16 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)