Search Results: "spa"

23 January 2006

Joerg Wendland: Comments and trackback

As an experiment I enabled comments and trackback for blog items. Comments will be not visible immediately, though. I will moderate them to ensure that spammers won't get a chance. This post is also available in German.

MJ Ray: Spammers Hall of Shame - Wouter Verhelst's retaliation plan

Wouter Verhelst has posted a retaliation idea on his site:

start adding their "private" email addresses to some database and, rather than throwing away mails which are so obviously spam, start forwarding them to random addresses from that pool
I think it would need doing very carefully, so that you don't put too much cost on your ISP - ultimately, you pay for your ISP's costs - or get yourself booted for sending tons of spam. If you do it, check your AUP, watch your network stats and good luck!

Wouter Verhelst: Retaliating to spam.

How do you fight spam? Not through regulation. Spammers will find loopholes and exploit them. You can plug the loophole, but then they'll find another one. And some spammers will just not care, try to avoid the cops. Sure, eventually they'll get caught, but for every spammer caught there's ten more waiting. Not through technology; that's an arms race. Improve your filters, and the spammers will just modify their mails to slip through again. I don't think it is possible to fight spammers. But you can take revenge... Let's look at a typical nigerian scam:
From: foo@bar.baz
To: wouter@grep.be
Subject: PLEASE HELP
Date: some_date_in_the_future
Hi,
My name is <the name of a relative of someone rich who died>.
I have <some problem involving an amount of money that I cannot get
at>.
Could you please <do something which will cost you a lot of money>?
Thanks.
PS: please, reply on my private email address <scammer@scam.com>.
The important phrase is the last one: if you could please be so kind as to reply to their "private" email address. Obviously that email address is a throwaway one; but one would expect that they must read it and hope someone replies to it before the amount of spam on that address gets too high to reasonably be able to read it. Which is the catch. I wonder how those spammers would react if I would start adding their "private" email addresses to some database and, rather than throwing away mails which are so obviously spam, start forwarding them to random addresses from that pool...

Andreas Rottmann: Status of Scheme48 hacking

Over the last months, I’ve started several hacks on Scheme48. My interest in Scheme48 was initially sparked by Jivera, who started to bring a Pika-style C API to Scheme48. The features/projects I’ve been working on: Most of the above is still not polished and not ready for release or even sending patches upstream. I have, however, submitted some very simple patches to the Scheme48 mailing list, and got no response from the maintainers. Should working with them not work out, I might have to create my own fork of Scheme48. In fact I have forked already, but if I can’t get (parts) of my stuff into mainline Scheme48, I might start to actively push my fork as “extended Scheme48″ or with a new name.

Andreas Rottmann: Yet another logging package

I couldn’t resist the temptation, and started to write yet another Scheme logging library; this has been on my TODO-list for quite some time now, but now it became more urgent, since we need a logging facility for conjure. I hope jao will be pleased to see that my branch of conjure already makes use of the new logging module :-) . Of course, I didn’t in fact start from scratch, but had a look at the various logging libraries available; the Scheme ones being: I also had a look at log4r and the Python logging package; both seem worthy taking as a starting point. What I’ve come up with so far has a pretty similiar model to these systems; you send a log entry that should be logged to a logger, which has zero or more handlers that are responsible for actually doing anything with the log entry, such as writing it to a port. All loggers, besides the root logger have a parent, (also a logger) which log entries are sent to, in addition to being processed by the handlers attached to the logger; the propagation to the parent can also be turned off. The logger hierarchy is established by a hierarchical namespace: The logger with the name '(conjure cc) is a child of the logger named '(conjure). This may all sound overly complicated, but getting started is very straightforward:

;; ,open spells.logging
(define log-info (make-log ‘(test) ‘info))
(configure-logger ‘())
(log-info “hello world!”)

make-log creates a logging procedure. Logging procedures take a single argument to be logged; the argument may be an arbitrary object; it is up to the handlers on how to go about formatting this object. The argument passed to the logging procedure is wrapped in a log entry, which additionally contains the log level. The name of the logger that is to be used is '(test), and 'info is the log level. If the logger '(test) doesn’t already exist, it is created on the fly with no handlers and the root logger as a parent; it can be configured later. This separation of logger creation and configuration is important: In a real application, the logging can be configured from the command line or a configuration file; you don’t want to (hard-)code it into the same module that uses the logger. (configure-logger '()) configures the root logger (which has the empty list as name) with a default configuration. configure-logger also has an optional argument in which you can provide a custom configuration, but I won’t go into this now, since this part of interface is most likely to change. The default configuration amounts to logging everything on (current-output-port). Finally, we log a simple string through the logging procedure log-info. The output looks like this:

(test: [info] hello world!)
Well, enough of this for now; if you got curious you can take peek at the code.

22 January 2006

Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo: El presidente de la transparencia...

pacta en la m s absoluta clandestinidad. Tal es la obscuridad y el secretismo, que ni su socio en la Generalidad catalana (ERC) sabe a n lo que se ha pactado con CiU, el partido que all est en la oposici n. Tras la bajada de pantalones que supuso el traslado de los archivos de Salamanca y que se realiz con total nocturnidad, ahora pactamos un estauto para la Comunidad Aut noma de Catalu a inconstitucional y de espaldas al resto de Espa a. Eso s , que sepa el presidente que una vez m s, como en los ltimos 25 a os, cada vez que se le concede algo a los nacionalistas, estos ya no est n de acuerdo y no les parece suficiente. Como perla, las palabras de Arturo Mas:
"Es un salto adelante, que no renunciamos a completar en a os futuros"
Lamentable.

Eric Dorland: my Dorland genes are reasserting themselves



Your Inner European is Dutch!









Open minded and tolerant.

You're up for just about anything.



Who's Your Inner European?


Funny thing is I look like that some mornings.

Eric Dorland: two wishes, and a wish come true

I wish there was a better way to handle conffile renames than the method outlined at dpkg.org. Be nice if there was a way to pressed the checksum, so the conffile handler could just be used naturally, instead of bypassing it with a bit of a hack. Makes me a bit uncomfortable to just accept the users changes without prompting him on upgrade (as would happen with this recipe). If anyone has a better idea, it would really help me with #345112. Reading Jacobo's post makes me wish I had proposed a DebConf talk, BoF, whatnot on Trademarks and Free Software, and maybe promote some better discussion than the last time this was on the mailing lists. [info]ndusart is coming for the weekend! Haven't seen her in two months, so I'm understandably, ridiculously excited. Better lend [info]mricon my earplugs.

Eric Dorland: I *knew* this quiz was out to get me...

Your Social Dysfunction:
Paranoid


You show pervasive and unwarranted suspiciousness, and mistrust of others. You are overly sensitive and prone to jealousy.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Please note that we aren't, nor do we claim to be, psychologists. This quiz is for fun and entertainment only. Try not to freak out about your results.

Eric Dorland: Montr al Debian soir e

Since [info]sfllaw hasn't blogged about it, we're having a little get together on Saturday at Hurley's at 5:00. In the spirit of "the more, the merrier" (hope that's ok with you Simon), if you're a wannabe Debian developer come buy us drinks. I promise to sign the key of anyone who buys me a pint (how's that for a web-of-trust?).

Eric Dorland: rusty spoons

I love [info]ndusart, but I think she's more messed up than me sometimes.

Eric Dorland: nihon e ikimasen ( )

Well I just got a rejection letter from the JET Programme, so no Japan for me this year. I wish the rejection letter gave some clue as to why I was not a suitable candidate. I can try again next year, maybe get a TESL certificate to improve my odds. At least [info]mricon won't have to look for a new roommate come August.

Eric Dorland: It has begun...

I was feeling a bit left out of the whole blogging craze, not having a blog myself. I never felt I had to many interesting things to say, but I'd often wanted to respond to someone else blog posting with one of my own (as seems fashionable these days). And my roommate, [info]mricon, seems to have a nice blog, so my competitive spirit has been awakened. I'm hoping this won't be the first and last post.

Uwe Hermann: For those who care about SN9C10x based webcams

Webcam
Sonic-snap screenshot
Sonic-snap-gui screenshot
Note: Yeah, I'm abusing the latest Debian flamewar meme for some attention mongering. Sue me. A few days ago, I have tested my cheap, crappy webcam I bought more than a year ago for the first time. Using the latest SN9C10x driver (which is already included in recent 2.6.1x kernels) worked fine, i.e., the USB webcam was recognized. I tried running sonic-snap (site is currently down, try the Google Cache) in order to get snapshot images and/or videos off the webcam, which initially didn't work. But I soon found out what the cause of the problem was and created a trivial patch which fixed the problem for me. Then, after I made myself look like an idiot by reporting a bug against a non-existing sonic-snap Debian package, I finally sent the patch to the upstream author. I'll probably ITP the package, though, as I might be using the webcam more often... I also tested the webcam with Gnomemeeting for some videoconferencing fun, which didn't work at first either. After some stupid guessing and googling, I finally found out that you need to apt-get install libpt-plugins-v4l2, which is not installed by default (why?). Other than that (and apart from the really, really crappy image quality of the webcam), it worked really nice... Here's the exact lsusb output for Google to parse, other people might be searching for this info:

Bus 003 Device 003: ID 0c45:602a Microdia Meade ETX-105EC Camera

21 January 2006

Steve McIntyre: I Hate Computers, part N in an ongoing series

I had a gas engineer out to visit me yesterday, to repair the boiler for my central heating. That's probably going to be expensive enough. However, in addition he touched together a couple of wires and caused the RCD for the house to trip. Instant power cut... The machines that matter most are on a UPS, so weren't affected. Unfortunately, it looks like the shock of the sudden power failure may have caused two hard disks in two separate machines to die. I've replaced one in my mips machine mallet - that was easy enough as I had a useable spare sat around, and the disk just had chroots on it for sbuild. The more awkward one is sledge, my amd64 workstation. There wasn't anything actually important on the disk, but it's still a pain re-installing it and restoring the backups. So much for spending time doing some debian-cd hacking this weekend. :-(

Bartosz Fenski aka fEnIo: time to move?

Your Inner European is Irish!
Sprited and boisterous!
You drink everyone under the table.
Who's Your Inner European?

Bartosz Fenski aka fEnIo: preparing to upload new fuse

I'm working on new fuse (filesystem in userspace) packages and I really wonder if I should simplify their postinstallation procedure as it was mentioned in #337572. That would make my life much easier, cause there's quite many bugreports against undefined behaviour of post-debconf tasks, which are pretty hard to track for me. In fact I suppose that most users simply accept default answers so asking them about anything seems to be overhead.
Let's assume I will remove these superflous questions... now the problem is that if someone answered for them in some previous installation then I could leave unneded group and some config files on their systems. On the other head removing this group could even lead to nonworking system because of one of these bugs: #307624, 307627, 306281.
I'm quite confused what to do now. Both solutions have some advantages and disadvantages. First one at least could lead to less bugs in the future. Hints welcome.

Brett Parker: Things that I don't expect when the flat doorbell rings...

One of these just happened... quite *why* two people in suits were looking for spanish speaking people I really don't know. I think I shall boggle about this for a bit.

20 January 2006

Sean Harshbarger: 20 Jan 2006

So long time I know. For those of you out there who celebrate, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I have been busy last month and a half with work. As many know, I work for UPS and mid-Nov. to Dec. get pretty hairy at that place. Back in school this quarter full time. I am determined to get this over with and get into the field most here in cyberspace know I want to be in. Looks like my days of hacking are going to have to wait tho. This week alone I have spent 6 hours a day in the books, 8 hours at work and the remainder in bed or wasting on tv/ps2. Back to college life again. Least I am not eating ramen again. Sunday I will be in Wellington Ohio for a 20 team paintball tournament. I am hoping to get pictures and video of the event and hope to post those somewhere are the net for all to see. It looks as if our local team has a good chance to win $1000 as long as I carry the team ;) At any rate, will be fun and those who know me know paintball is the only stress relief I have left. GO STEELERS!!!

Martin F. Krafft: alias grep=vim ... ?

I love: regular expressions and vim I hate: regular expressions of sed and grep I adore: vim's enhanced regular expressions I want: to be able to use vim from the command line to do advanced searches across sets of files, like:
# find "foo" followed by whitespace and "bar", even across lines
$ vim $SOMETHING 'g/foo\_s*bar/'
# words ending in "bar"
$ vim $SOMETHING 'g/bar\>/'
# words starting with "foo"
$ vim $SOMETHING 'g/\<foo/'
... and more. What does $SOMETHING have to be set to? Update: Neil Moore suggests the following shell function:
vgrep ()  
  local S="$1"; shift
  vim -es +"argdo g/$S" +':q!' "$@"
 
This works. I shall be posting any improvements I make over the next couple of weeks in another blog post. If there are any. But I suppose options like -i and -v might be good to have.

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