Hacker's Diary
A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
- November 30
- My current spam filtering setup includes scanning mail at
ingress, meaning I can simply drop emails immediately if they set
off the spam filter; this saves me storing spam on disk, and also
(by and large) prevents me sending unroutable or misdirected
bounce messages. I am currently attempting to understand how to do
this with Postfix; it appears to require either
libmilter, which isn't trivially available on MacOS, or
some variety of bits and pieces that, to my reading, don't
necessarily give me anything more than inline scanning and tagging
- I don't get the inline rejection feature I'd like to use. Still,
I'm inclined to run with one of these less than optimal solutions
if only so I can move things off the crashy server a bit
faster.
Of course, I could be REALLY stupid and just accept all the mail,
and let Mail.app deal with the mess...
"Filtering
spam with Postfix"
is a good article on basic anti-spam configuration in Postfix,
focussing largely on cutting things out before they get to your
filtering proper, which is what I want, really. Do note the RBL
hosts in the sample config may be out of date.
Someone with better artistic chops than me can probably explain
why it is that a well-done but formulaic movie is often (indeed,
more often than not) a more enjoyable experience than one which
tries to break the formula with an unexpected twist; perhaps it's
dependant on the particular formula, in as much as I think most
people will enjoy a movie that implies that there's a fairness or
balance of some sort in life: the good guy gets his reward, the
bad guy gets his comeuppance, the couple finally get together
despite the odds, etc. Definitely Maybe is, for the
most part, a formulaic tale with elements of things like How I
Met Your Mother and The Parent Trap, but it derails
briefly at about 90 minutes in (there's only another ten minutes,
and it gets back on the rails just in time) where, yes, they
attempt to do something different. And really, it doesn't work,
despite the rest of the film running like clockwork according to
the "single-parent nice-guy with precocious daughter"
genre as laid out in Act 1. I'm hesitant to say it's a chick
flick; sure, it's not in the Stuff Explodes For No Reason
category, but I have recently had reason to theorize the existence
of a genre which could perhaps be referred to as the Metro-Flick,
the defining feature of which is that men think they're watching
a chick flick (and thus indulging their other half, or showing
their sensitive side, or whatever) while any women who happen to
watch the same thing will most likely scoff at it. But I
digress. The movie, aside from the aforementioned derailing, is
witty, sweet, funny, touching, and laden with 90's nostalgia,
particularly through the accompanying music ("Who's Kurt
Cobain?") and the backdrop of Clinton's 92 campaign,
reelection, impeachement, etc. It's quite possibly worth watching
for the touchpoints of that decade alone, although maybe that's
just me. Anyway, if you're looking forward to The Transporter 3
(in cinemas now), this is probably not something you want to
watch; on the other hand, if you enjoyed Jersey Girl, I
suspect this will be very much your kind of thing. And that's
quite enough Movie Analysis 101 for now, time to back to the
nerding.
The Tempest: well, there's 90
minutes I won't get back. Even the deliciously pixie-like Toyah
Willcox didn't make up for the brain-numbing High Art boredom of
the thing.
Hmm. Briefly switched the Cube to being the active mail
server. Duly noted a complete lack of incoming mail. However, this
appears to be because, er, the flood of incoming mail has cut WAY
back. Bizarre. Anyway, I'm not sure that the spam filtering is
being invoked, so I need to tweak that before I switch again. Also
need to verify that everything that's supposed to autostart is
actually autostarting, and that I've moved everything off the
to-be-retired box that I'm likely to want (I know that my CVS and
PPTP servers are still untransferred, for example).
Aha. Spam filter works better if invoked using correct
path. D'oh. Also, no PPTP in fink for MacOS 10.4.
After the linux box crashed about five times in the space of half
an hour, I got fed up with it and switched mail back to the
Cube. I've no idea why the box has become so crashy, but I may as
well drop it since the replacement is more-or-less
operational. Still need to flip the web server, but we'll get to
that. Anyway, this means I'm using a new and not wholly tested
mail server, so if you have trouble getting email through to me,
try the obvious username at gmail.com...
- November 29
- Apple Mail is, for some reason, having issues talking to the
Apple-supplied Postfix server I'm trying to run on the Cube. That
annoys me, obviously. Also the IMAP server, but that's probably my
fault.
Hmm. IMAP appears to have been some sort of oddball PAM
screwup, plus a client config screwup, plus a server config
screwup. Now working.
Ok, In Bruges was absolutely nothing like
what I expected, mainly because I didn't know anything about it
other than that it stars Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, and is
set in the town of the title. It's a distinctly odd film, and I'm
not wholly sure that it actually works; some of it is overly
contrived, some of it seems poorly paced, and all told it's more
grim than comedic despite my impression that it was pitched as
being the other way around. Anyway, on the whole it turns out to
be a good watch, but not excellent.
- November 27
- Apple's launchd stuff is a bit weird, and Fink's "let's drop an
overlay on it and other things like it" daemonize is
even more weird (and unfinished, to boot), but I'm getting the
hang of the former and basically ignoring the latter. Most if not
all of the Cube's essential stuff is now wired to autostart,
including (as of last night) SpamAssassin; I need to wire it up
to Postfix and test it somewhat, and then I should be about ready
to flip 99% of the traffic from the current web/mail server to the
Cube. W00t.
- November 24
- To answer the RAM-oriented questions: (a)yes it does appear
that at least one of the DIMMs is fried, (b) it turns out that the
box has only 320MB of RAM, 256 of it on two DIMMs and the rest in
onboard RAM which is why I still had 64MB to play with. Also,
resizing a 200GB filesystem over USB 1.x took 15
hours!
Spamassassin: successful make test run. Excellent. Need
to bolt on a few more modules before it's fully ready, but that's
one less thing to concern myself with when flipping various bits
over to the Cube.
- November 23
- Well, that was entertaining: fired up one of the old Compaq
laptops to see about attending to this drive repartitioning, and
midway through a forced fsck the screen flared like some sort of
Tony Scott editing move and the laptop rebooted, then failed to
come back up to an operational state. Some poking and prodding
indicates that it may have spontaneously fried both DIMMs, or
perhaps the controller for the socket they live in, or
something. Removing 384MB of RAM from a 384MB laptop curiously
left it with 64MB; also, watching Fedora Core's desktop attempt to
cope with 64MB of RAM is rather amusing. I think, if this laptop
survives the further adventures of disk partitioning, it may be
heading straight for the electronics recycling - although the
screen might be worth trying to salvage...
He Was A Quiet Man is an odd
piece of work. Christian Slater is excellent as a middle-aged
office drone suddenly elevated to hero, but I'm left scratching my
head at the end wondering what the point was supposed to
be.
- November 22
- So, I think I've finally possibly found out how to build a
SpamAssassin with Fink on MacOS 10.4. The problem: an
older-than-required version of HTML::Parser installed in the
system library, coupled with SpamAssassin's liberal use of Perl's
taint mode, which means that the newer version installed in the
Fink tree is disregarded. There are a number of approaches to
fixing this: the brute-force one is to switch off the
taint-checking, which SpamAssasin's configuration mechanism
conveniently allows you to do, along with a shouty warning that
you shouldn't really, plus it doesn't seem to work, entirely, in
that some of the scripts still wind up with the -T flag; I could
also try an older version of SpamAssassin until I find one that
works with the HTML::Parser module I've got; I could overwrite the
system HTML::Parser with a sufficiently new version (which is
probably the most correct solution, but the one I'm least happy
with since overwriting system files always seems like an admission
of defeat to me); or I could patch all the taint-check files with
an explicit include for the fink libs, which seems like what I
want to do, except that some of the test code appears to
explicitly rebuild the command line rather than using whatever's
in the #! line of the script. At least I know where the problem
lies, which should make it easier to solve.
Postfix is mostly working at this point, with the exception of my
virtual domain setup, which is mainly down to me having not read
much documentation so far.
Oh, and the USB drive has a resized filesystem but I've not as yet
resized the enclosing partition to match for handwaving reasons to
do with software versions and what not.
All this activity brought to you by the fact that I was on-call
today and thus housebound until 6pm...
- November 21
- After my typical round of customer abuse, I managed to get
my finisher photo from MarathonPhoto. The first copy they sent had
been swallowed by my spamfilter, and in the two weeks it took me
to get them to resend, I'd turned the spamfilter aggressiveness
WAY back (and coped with a massive increase in spam,
obviously). On returning it to its usual settings this evening, I
found this message: Nov 21 20:06:12 kreng
spamass-milter[3903]: Could not retrieve sendmail macro "b"!.
Please add it to confMILTER_MACROS_ENVRCPT for better spamassassin
results. I have no idea what this means. And given
that once I put this stuff on the Cube I'll be using Postfix, I
guess it's hardly relevant.
In other Cube-related news, I finally got tired of
waider.ie going offline because I was trying to resize
the filesystem on the external USB drive; yanked the drive and
plugged it into the office laptop instead, which boots into Linux
and doesn't crash at the drop of a hat. Currently
resizing the filesystem for once and for all to allow me to do
whatever silliness I need to do to make it work with the
Cube. Not long after I'd done this, the server crashed
anyway. It's seriously getting out of hand.
- November 18
- I'm still trying to move things to the Cube. The main bits left
are still mail (particularly mail filtering) and the honkin' great
drive hanging off the back of the current webserver, which I've
cleverly formatted as EXT3, which the Mac won't read without
help. So I'm trying to resize the single filesystem, so I can redo
half of it as something that both Mac and Linux are happy with
(e.g. VFAT), and it started the resizefs some time this afternoon
and it's still running several hours later. Whoopee.
- November 17
- Above The Rim: another in the
"Why did I rent this?" series; possibly on account of it
being one of the few movies Tupac Shakur starred in before he was
shot, and it's not a particularly good role - Gridlock'd is a far
better showcase of his talent. The movie itself is a fairly bland
Kid Overcomes Ghetto With Basketball story. Nothing exciting, but
not awful.
- November 14
- In The Valley Of Elah is
a long, slow movie, but it fills the time well. The only thing I
found disappointing was the eventual explanation for what had
happened; it didn't ring true, and felt like just another cover-up
- I was expecting a further denoument before the end of the
movie. Definitely worth watching.
- November 13
- MBNA tweaked their layout a bit, so I've had to correspondingly
tweak my Perl modules... it'd be nice if these tweaks actually did
something other than, you know, rewording the text on the page
while providing no extra functionality whatsoever.
- November 11
- Moved mysql to the Cube last night. It works, hurrah, but I
still need to add autostart, etc. Looked at moving over email
config tonight, and discovered that the "sendmail"
binary on OS X is, in fact, a compatability wrapper around postfix
for clients. In other words, I'll either have to build my own
sendmail, or learn how to get postfix to do the stuff I currently
do with sendmail. Bah.
- November 9
- I installed GreaseKit in a vain
attempt to get GreaseMonkey scripts
running on Safari; after being initially puzzled with the fact
that I couldn't get even my most basic script to work, I poked
around a bit and discovered that (a) it doesn't seem to be paying
any attention to the @include header and (b) due to a
security issue all the actual useful functions were removed two
versions back, which basically makes the whole thing
useless. Looking at the security issue, it appears to require you
to enable greasemonkey scripting for a malicious site, which is I
guess a concern if you're using scripts that interact with
all sites but it still seems a bit overkill. I may, he
said to himself, with blatant disregard for how these things
usually work out, have to hack this.
- November 8
- The Last Legion is quite
enjoyable, if not entirely taxing on the brain. It gets a bit
silly in places, but that actually works pretty well. I did figure
out before the reveal the nature of the Turkish "ninja",
but I didn't actually see the epilogue coming somehow. And Ben
Kingsley's face looked like a rubber mask throughout, whatever the
make-up department were doing. Good for a bit of fun, not
necessarily a run-out-and-rent-it offering.
- November 6
- The Brave One is an okay
thriller; the setup is from Ghost, the love interest is from (I
think) Double Jeopardy, and, uh, that's where I run out of
references. It's nothing special, but it wasn't a waste of time
either.
- November 1
- Hmm, that's two movies in a row that I lost interest in -
today's viewing was There Will Be Blood which,
among other things, has a really annoying score. I wouldn't really
recommend this; it doesn't really have a solid story that I can
see, the lead character is totally unsympathetic, and frankly I'd
like that two and a half hours back, please.
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