Peter's Blog 2004/9

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.