Peter's Blog

New Blog

I've moved my blog here. It is now hosted by Site5 and it runs on Drupal.

Parasites

Some parasite posted a comment to an entry in this blog that was just a list of links to other websites, probably to boost google rankings. I'm fuming at these parasites. I've deleted the comment. It was only up for a day so hopefully the googlebot didn't spot it.

Python Desktop Server (or the version I am still using) seems to have a problem generating the archive calendar, some days do not get hyperlinks to archived entries. This makes it awkward to find them, I have to guess dates in the hyperlinks.

Also, if I have an archive page open and I type in a new posting, PyDS creates the new posting with the archived page date rather than today. It just happened, you may see two similar posts.

del.icio.us

Latest discovery is this awkwardly named site. It's a stream of interesting links recently submitted by people. I find it interesting to scan through when I run out of RSS feeds. In fact it can generate an RSS feed but that would probably swamp my aggregator.

Gmail seepage

Google know how to make me happy. They've given me 6 gmail invites. I'll be giving them to friends/family. I won't sell them on ebay, not even to recoup my £1.30 investment.

I got a spam message today so I marked it as such and looked in the spam folder to find there were already 3 spams in there: there was no other indication that they were there. They were legitimate spams though, asking me if I wanted to advertise my web site to 28 million people by sending spam. Does the 28 million people include the ones with spam filters? If so I'd want a discount.

The gmail invite scheme is a great ploy. Slow adoption of the new system, spreading in a way that makes people feel privileged, starting with techy types who can invite and help their non-techy friends.

Update:

• I gave myself a gmail invite to use for work and managed to grab the coveted address that has my own name (guess what it is, cursed spambot). My name is not uncommon (I appear on the third page of a google search which finds my Firl entry) so this is a win.

• I've given one other invite away and yet I still have 6 invites.

• I logged into my new account and that has 6 invites.

• I think the spam I received is spam I forwarded to myself from my home server.

So are google going crazy with invites today, is it a weird cookie bug, or am I just lucky?

Update^2:

• It was a cookie bug. I had two different accounts open in two firefox tabs and the first account got transformed into the second account. The new account did have 6 invites already. It seems you can only look at one account at a time

Living with Spamassassin

Spamassassin at work is detecting spam nicely, no false positives so far although some false negatives are getting through. I don't have a big enough spam or ham corpus to get the bayesian spam filter running but when I do this could make a difference.

I have created three IMAP folders for spam:

I then have a cron job running each night to run sa-learn --spam on the 'categorically' folder and sa-learn --ham on my inbox. It runs on the 'cur' subfolder but not the 'new' subfolder so it should not pick up spam that arrives when I am not around to approve it.

The Definitely spams are not added to the bayesian filter. I think this is best, it avoids reinforcing prejudices which is not a good thing.

The spam I receive has already been through the companys surfcontrol spam filter. Draw your own conclusions.

Something I must do sometime is extract 250M of old emails from my outlook archive and put them on the IMAP server. I could do this by hooking Outlook up to the IMAP server and just moving the messages but I have a gut feeling that this will take hours and involve a lot of pain.

At home I must figure out a way to get my old email out of the clutches of Intellimail so that I can uninstall it.

BackupBuddyVFS to the rescue

Last time I looked at the Palm T2 the battery was flat so I put it on charge. Turned it on this morning to find out time of an appointment and the thing was totally reset, back to initial settings.

It was my first opportunity to try out BackupBuddyVFS Restore and it has worked perfectly. Thumbs up for that. It may be that the auto-backups at 5pm everyday are what flattened the battery but it has made up for it.

The digitiser on my palm is definitely flaky. The initial calibrate thing asks me to tap on the centre of three crosses and I have to do this many times before it will accept the calibration. It is very fussy about precisely where I tap on the screen. For examplem if I want to click on a button, sometimes I have to tap just above the button to get a hit.

No email after syslog-ng death

Back to work after weeks holiday and only 4 emails? The culprit was syslog-ng which died the day after I left work (software efficiency) so email systems refused to work. Did

/etc/init.d/syslog-ng restart

and email started to flow. Well, trickle is a better word: spamassassin is not exactly lightning fast.

Gmail seems more and more attractive. Web based email is useful, I never bothered with it before because my email provider's server is sluggish. Cannot say that about google.

One4All with Sky Plus

I got the key magic codes to program up the play, pause, fast forward, rewind and record buttons of my One4All four (URC 7740). By default these buttons are programmed up for things like 'Box Office', 'Services' etc. Any Sky Plus user will tell you that Play, Pause and Fast Forward are far more useful. There aren't enough buttons on the remote for it to do everything. I might be able to program up a different device code (e.g. use DVD for sky plus and program the buttons differently) but I can't be bothered. Now I won't have to keep the real Sky Plus remote with me just to record programs.

The instructions to reprogram the buttons are:

1. Press the relevant device key

2. Press and hold the MAGIC key until the red light flashes twice.

3. Press 9 9 4. The red-light flashes twice

4. Press the MAGIC key once.

5. Enter the 5-digit function code (provided by customer service, where applicable).

6. Press the key, to which the function will be e.g. A.V. key, the red-light flashes twice.

The useful extra codes for device 1170 (Sky Plus) are:

00243 Pause
00707 Play
00528 Record
00339 Search Forward
00683 Search Reverse
00526 Sky

GMail

Decided my email setup was still not complex enough so I bought a trendy Gmail invite on ebay for £1.30 (a bargain for a new toy) and set up my server to forward all mail to it. This way I can try gmail out while still archiving messages safely at home. I did this by putting the following in the exim .forward file:

unseen deliver <blah>@gmail.com

This forwards everything but keeps handling the messages on the server.

GMail so far seems neat. Observations:

• Runs quite fast, subjectively faster than Thunderbird, dovecot etc.

• Cannot compose html email

• I sent an email to a friend who replied. I replied to the reply and Gmail bounced with this cryptic error:

  Technical details of failure:
  PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 13): 550 Relay not permitted - (ACL violation)
  

  Like a lot of email server error messages, this is a little lacking in detail. Which server was trying to relay and why?

• Gives very nice threaded presentation of messages. Would be great if I could reply to replies.

Freeview

Installed a freeview box at mum's house. It was a Goodmans's thing, £55. This gives about 32 digital tv stations and a load of digital radio stations. Some observations:

• Installed very easily once I remembered to plug the aerial in.

• Came with a SCART cable so TV did not need tuning to the box.

• Was going in minutes

• Extra TV stations like ITV2, Sky news, etc. Not an amazing choice but ok for £55 downpayment and no monthly fees.

• Some stations like UK Gold, E4 and Discovery are in the program guide but you have to pay a monthly subscription.

• Picture was noticibly better quality: much crisper, better contrast, compared to old analogue signal.

• Picture is either 16:9 in 4:3 letterbox or 16:9 full screen. Hence on her 4:3 tv she has to use letterbox.

• Box locked up once while I was showing it to her: had to power cycle. Tried updating firmware but it already had the latest version. Taught mum how to power cycle, just in case.

Procmail works but no email

After 5 days away I checked my email and was shocked to find absolutely none. Very odd. After a mild panic I worked out that procmail had diligently filtered my email into the correct mail folders but Thunderbird was only set up to poll the inbox folder. To get Thunderbird to check subdirectories for new email you have to set the properties for each folder and enable 'check this folder for new messages'. Hopefully in a new version they will add a default action to check all folders.

Spamassassin seems to be doing a good job with the spam filtering. Out of 8 spams, no false positives, 7 had been tagged by pyzor, the remaining spam had lots of silly defects:

4.2 MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS   Spam tool pattern in MIME boundary
3.1 MSGID_SPAM_CAPS        Spam tool Message-Id: (caps variant)
0.1 MIME_HTML_ONLY         BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
0.7 MIME_HTML_NO_CHARSET   RAW: Message text in HTML without charset
1.2 MISSING_MIMEOLE        Message has X-MSMail-Priority, but no X-MimeOLE
0.0 FORGED_AOL_TAGS        AOL mailers can't send HTML in this format
3.9 RCVD_DOUBLE_IP_SPAM    Bulk email fingerprint (double IP) found
1.7 HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG  HTML-only message, but there is no HTML tag
4.3 FORGED_MUA_AOL_FROM    Forged mail pretending to be from AOL (by From)
1.8 FORGED_AOL_HTML        AOL can't send HTML message only
1.1 MIME_HTML_ONLY_MULTI   Multipart message only has text/html MIME parts
0.1 MISSING_OUTLOOK_NAME   Message looks like Outlook, but isn't

Do the spammers do anything as simple as test their spam against spamassassin? Hope not.

State of Play

Sky Plus box seems to be fine after hard disk upgrade. I've been away and we've only watched one episode of 'Family Affairs' but that had no problems at all. During the 30x fast forward the box used to stutter a bit, the poorer the recording the worse the stutter, sometimes pausing for a few seconds. Now the stutter is gone. The recording capacity has doubled, 2 films and 5x30 minute soaps use 15% of the disk space.

I bought a 512M Dimm for PC and plugged it in. No way will the PC recognise it as 512M, insists it is 256M. I tried:

• Flashing BIOS

• Swapping slots

• Putting in a company of 256 and 128M DIMMs

• Swearing at it

• Changing FSB from 133MHz to 100Mhz

• Trying a real video card with it's own memory instead of the on-board one that uses system ram.

No joy. For now I am living with 512M (real 256 + 1/2 512). I blame VIA for their naff chipsets, I kick myself for buying another one.

Sky Plus Fix

The playback of recordings on my Sky Plus box was seriously degrading: almost every recording had glitches where playback suddenly jumps back a few seconds and compression artifacts are all over the picture. At it's worst the sound goes or makes lots of noise. This was worse during a particularly dramatic episode of Family Affairs, spoiling my wife's veiwing pleasure.

So I've put the 80G hard disk from my old PC into it. For the record this is a Western Digital WD800BB-75DKA0. I took the following steps:

• Swapped disks

• Powered up box while holding down 'Backup' button on front panel. This caused a download of the firmware, giving an alarming 'Don't remove mains for at least 10 Minutes' display on the TV.

• After looking dead and ignoring the remote for a while it came to life and started downloading listings.

• Went to 'Services' menu and pressed 4 for the 'system setup' menu, '01 Select' for the secret housekeeping menu and 8 to reformat the hard disk.

• Box again went dead for a minute or so.

• On again, using remote, and downloaded listings.

• Turn to BBC 1, press live pause and marvel that it worked.

The secret with this is to stay calm and be patient when the box looks dead.

Now, fingers crossed that the drive lasts longer than the 6 days that the accursed IBM Deskstar survived (P366).

Ashford

My first chance to photo blog from starbucks. Sunny day in ashford, not hot like it has been recently. Global warning means horrible humidity in this part of the world. Not sure if this is better than rain.

It's my birthday on monday so i'm trying to think of a tech birthday present for myself. More memory for my pc is top of the list. It has only 256Mb and i ought to upgrade it before sdram becomes obsolete.

Hello from Dallas

Got a version of Visual Traceroute free on a cover disk. It's a souped-up traceroute that shows a world map and gives a host of peripheral information.

It confirms that this blog is hosted in Dallas, Texas and is on a Debian linux box. These days you don't always know where the servers may be.

Ooh Er, it even shows the town I live in if I search for my home server. Do I want the world to know?

My friend zugz uses NTL World for hosting and it seems he is hosted in Canada. He owes me some maple syrup.