as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Aquarion: Karen wants a meet, and damnit I do too. This sounds rather cool. Lots of UK people should go, it’d be class.

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A while ago, I noted that spammers seemed to have a new trick; since some of them were unconcerned about getting replies to their spam email, just about advertising their product, they’d fake the mail so that it came from an address somewhere else, and that person would get all the bounce messages from dud email addresses and anti-spam complaints from postmasters. This happened to me; because anything at all @kryogenix.org goes to me, with a couple of exceptions, someone spammed from “black” and “mack” at my domain and I got 1100 bounces in under an hour. So, I just blackholed those named addresses, so that my MTA didn’t accept mail for them — add the line “black: :blackhole:” in /etc/aliases, if you’re using Exim as I am on my mailserver.

Now, though, the spammers have come up with an even cleverer trick. The email address seems to be part randomly generated with each mail, so I’m getting bounces returned to “mackqd” and “mackfr” at kryogenix. I can’t blackhole all potential addresses. What I’m looking for here is advice on how to deal with this problem.

Caveat: I do not want to have to specify every potential email address at kryogenix that can receive mail and deny all others, if I can avoid it. However, I don’t mind if I allow certain named addresses plus sil-ANYTHING — I like signing up for a service at FooBar.com with the address sil-foobar so I can tell who has been selling their subscription list to spammers.

While I have been writing this, another 30 mails have come in. Help? Please?

I am boycotting the MSN search. Maciej outlines some good reasons why you might think about boycotting it too.

Have started a diet. Be interesting to see if it lasts. No damned “no-protein” stupid diet either, which is better than a fair few people. Things I have discovered so far:

• When you get peckish at 10pm, a piece of fruit works just as well as a cheese sandwich. I was actually genuinely amazed by this. Really. This might explain why I need to be on this diet.
• All this SlimFast crap is actually relatively tasty.
• Not eating when you are not hungry is pretty easy, too, as long as you’re not just on auto-pilot.
• It’s probably not the best idea to have a burger with slices of Camembert on it when you go round to Bill and Ginny’s house for a barbecue at the weekend.
• Burgers with Camembert are really, really nice. I recommend them wholeheartedly.
• It is surprisingly easy, also, to have dietary-friendly things when you’re out with people without looking like an arse. Ate the chicken at the barbecue without eating the skin, with no fuss. (Ignore the burger weakness.) Out on Saturday at Wicksteed Park, so I ordered a Diet Pepsi instead of an ordinary Pepsi, and it wasn’t too bad and no-one batted an eyelid. This is a good thing.
• Beer contains a lot of calories. This is a problem, because I drink a reasonable amount when I’m with friends and I don’t intend to stop. That’ll just have to be my downfall, perhaps.
• A Slimfast “meal replacement” doesn’t replace a meal; it replaces about three-quarters of a meal. So I get hungry afterwards. Time to break out that fruit I mentioned.
• When these diet things say “eat fruit as a snack” they mean “eat fruit except bananas”. Apparently a banana is the fructory equivalent of a Mars bar, or possibly a large lard sandwich. What kind of sick God made the nicest fruit no good for you, eh? That’s just bloody cruel.

But, so far, as you may have gathered, it’s not that difficult to do this. So I will be thin and hunky.

Except not hunky.

And it will probably take until Christmas. Assuming I stick with it.

More news (from your svelte new host) as it happens…

J. Grant, author of the magnificent Flem!, a webcomic (probably not one for reading at work, heh) rants about society.

Fact is, I’m sick of this fucking society. … I’m fatigued and angry at an administration that thinks it’s okay to lower taxes while blowing billions on the new “Homeland Security” acts, all while our economy in in the shithole and our deficit is at such a level that the human mind cannot fully comprehend the amount. Vapor-minded dipshits want to pass laws that spend even more money defending the cash that music companies make while in my home state, unemployed mothers get to pick up recyclables so that they can feed their kids. … I am witnessinng the beginning of the final decline of America, a country I still fucking love, and it fills me with a cold, icy disgust that this is the only way my daughter will ever know.

I feel your pain, brother. And your sense of helplessness.

He goes on to say, “New Orleans is looking better with each passing second of my life. It’s the one place I’ve been where politics are something that you only think about fleetingly, and life is still about living it, instead of whittling it away with the pocketknife of corporate slavery”. Ignoring, for the moment, the compelling excellence of the phrase “pocketknife of corporate slavery”, I’ve often thought that, were I to go and live in the States, I’d want to go to New Orleans. Of course, I’m not going to go and live in the States; the reason I’ve toyed with the idea of not living here is that I don’t like how uncaring and repressive it feels (whether you agree with it being so is beside the point here), and the States, I think, would feel a lot worse to me. Looks it from this side of the water, anyhow. And I’m not seeing anywhere I could go and get away from that feeling, while still being able to do what I do now; desert islands don’t have repressive governments, but they also don’t have any kind of internet infrastructure for me to work on and get paid for, either.

Maybe I should go and live on Sealand.

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Promotion and Relegation (in RSS) describes how Sarabian divides up the newsfeeds he reads into categories of interest — those at the top get religiously read, those at the bottom get scanned quickly. Apart from inviting the “which division am I in?” question from half the people on his list (don’t tell me, I don’t want to know), this sort of organisation fills me with envy. I wish I could do something like this; very neat. Presumably this is made available through SharpReader, which is his aggregator of choice (iirc). I don’t like desktop applications for reading because I can’t share their data files between work and home, meaning that I read stuff twice. Web-based aggregators: there don’t seem to be many, or many good ones at all (correct me if I’m wrong here, please), so I wrote my own. However, this is a really boring project, so I haven’t got the inclination to hack newsfeed categorisation into it. I am still thinking about a newspaper-style UI for RSS reading, and I’ve got a couple of ideas, but it’s a big project and every time I think about it I feel guilty about all the other big projects I haven’t done yet.

The Editing Room – The Matrix Reloaded: The Abridged Script (via Simon). Classic.

KEANU REEVES

Why am I here?

THE EXPLAINER

Many years ago, shortly before the
success of Speed, you sold your soul
to the devil in exchange for a
promise of notoriety that your
piss-poor acting skills do not
deserve. This series is the
actualization of this promise.

None

WebUnit (via Simon, indirectly), a Python thing for testing web applications. I really need something like this. Going into the toolbox, hopefully, and then I can start doing the write-your-tests-first method of coding.

Sarabian gets asked questions and Aquarion answers them. I have no intention whatsoever of answering randomly chosen questions, in case people ask hard ones. :)

Sarabian is also going to be supporting Reading next year:

In two years time Beckham could go for nothing, and United could spend any more money on other players. But that leaves a bad taste in my month, because it is all about money.

Can I suggest curling? Or Extreme Ironing? Or women’s football? If “it’s all about money” is any kind of negative motivator, football is not the game for you. In an age when footballers behave like rock stars (and rock stars don’t — when did someone last smash up a hotel?) and clubs float on the stock exchange, the stakeholders are driving the business and the fans lost the war, Premiership football is not the game if you don’t like money. Although I can see supporting your local club.

Tim Bray starts a new series of articles On Search, discussing full-text searching. I shall be very interested in this.

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GoboLinux is "a Linux distribution based on an alternative directory hierarchy" specifically, binaries are now in /System/Links/Executables instead of /usr/bin, that sort of thing. A kind of MacOSX-y sort of thing. I like this idea; ROX-Linux (an operating system centered arond the desktop, enduser and ROX-Filer file manager), a project I’m peripherally involved in (and would like to help more) is redefining the filesystem hierarchy as well.

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Been too busy to read much stuff recently, but these all caught a brief eye:

• Under the Iron: interviews with luminaries like Jeremy “antipixel” Hedley, Daniel “waferbaby” Bogan, Mark “diveinto” Pilgrim, and others (you know the names) (via every damn person on the web).
• Phil Ringnalda: “I want everyone to have an equal experience, sure, but I want it to be everyone having my experience, not me going to back to having everyone else’s experience.”
• Aquarion explains how writing and a net connection don’t mix
• Sam Ruby boobytraps a thief
• I showed the CSS Zen Garden to the new guy at work, who said “wow, shit, that’s really cool”. I wish I had some design skills, but, like Mark Pilgrim, “I’m a technical designer – I understand the specs and the implementations, but I can’t create beauty – except occasionally, by accident.”
• I had this idea that your weblog should suggest categories for you to put a new post in using a classifier like the Python one.
• And finally: writing a weblogging system (sigh). Don’t ask.

None

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I’m currently looking at Python templating systems, for various reasons. During my search, I came across the following exchange in a perl.com article called Choosing a Templating System, between fans of allowing your real language (in this case, Perl) to be inlined in the templates, and fans of having no “real” language in the templates and instead allowing a “mini-language” or just variable substitution:

IN-LINE: Mini-languages are stupid. I already know Perl and it’s easy enough. Why would you want to use something different?

MINI-LANG: Because my HTML coder doesn’t know Perl, and this is easier for him.

IN-LINE: Maybe he should learn some Perl. He’d get paid more.

MINI-LANG: Whatever. You just want to use in-line Perl so you can handle change requests by putting little hacks in the template instead of changing your modules. That’s sloppy coding.

IN-LINE: That’s efficient coding. I can knock out data editing screens in half the time it takes you, and then I can go back through, putting all the in-line code into modules and just have the templates call them.

MINI-LANG: You could, but you won’t.

IN-LINE: Is it chilly up there in that ivory tower?

MINI-LANG: Go write some VBScript, weenie.

I think that that covers the differences rather neatly. And I still can’t decide.

None

Reverend is a really simple-to-use plugin Bayesian classifier; just feed it some strings and tell them what class each string is in, and then it will guess (in a Bayesian sense) which class newly presented strings should be in. That’s really clever.

And importing it as from reverend.thomas import Bayes is just neat :-)

So I have a (very brief) article in ContentPeople issue 3, entitled What the hell is Python? It was quite fun writing it, although it’s difficult to describe what I like about it so much…

Update: it ended up being linked from the front page of linux.com. Blimey.

None

Twenty Questions, “the neural net on the internet”, is actually really good at playing Twenty Questions, although some of the questions are a bit difficult to answer (Can you use headphones at school? I suppose so…)

Matrix XP: a trailer for a film that doesn’t exist. A Matrix spoof, in fact, with a pretty amusing jab at Windows XP in there. However, the important thing about this is that it actually looks pretty real. I’ve thought in the past that making movies was OK on a non-professional basis if you were doing thoughtful, character interaction sorts of things, but something CGI-driven like this was only available to “real” directors, with multi-million budgets. But not so. While the quality of the effects is hardly up to The Matrix itself, it’s something that I wouldn’t feel incredibly aggrieved by if I’d seen it in a “real” film. Obviously, you have the same problems with film as you do with music — how much of whether a film is “good” relies on its marketing budget? It doesn’t say how long it took them to create the trailer, but more than one thing is referred to as taking “months” to do, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it were over a year. Nevertheless, I can imagine a film make by the Ricke Brothers and starring some reasonable actors being eminently watchable; I’m not talking about Jack Nicholson here, either, more the cream of the crop from your local drama groups. I wonder what their budget was for this? It’s a really nice job they’ve done to produce this; where can I get more of this sort of thing?

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