I hate spam, you hate spam, we all hate spam…
(to the tune of that annoying Barney song)
Anyway. I’ve moderated all of those comments you left for me (I approved them all – I don’t throw away any comments unless they’re actually legally iffy or whatever) and I’m sorry I didn’t do it before but I do tend to get a lot of spam these days, even after tagging things as spam. For example, last month I had around 20,000 spams in my email. A few hundred spam comments got through the filter I have in wordpress and while I was moderating, several new spams appeared during that time. I’ll try to do this more often, I guess.
The worst thing about spam is when things break under it. Like how printk recently suffered from mailman problems due to the sheer weight of spam backed up in the mailman queues (dudes – please please please fix the admin interface for mailman and please make it wipe its bum after you manually delete pending mail and not just crash out horribly. Pretty please). There have been other spam problems too but I have a cunning plan. The main thing I need to do right now is to get the hosting sorted out for my email/websites under my own Xen so that I can twiddle things properly. We’re upgrading our boxen next month so it’ll hopefully happen around that time – then I just need to work out way to make my Xen VM port itself properly to boxes running on different physical networking infrastructures. I’ll get it done.
In no particular order:
- Chris! Sorry, I didn’t mail you yet – I will fix that now I’ve seen your comments.
- David! I bought the wireless cameras on ebay (just search for “wireless camera” or 1.2GHz camera or whatever). One of them arrived today and didn’t seem to work but I confirmed my initial suspicion that the reason for the advice of using a high spec 9V battery is that the receiver draws quite a bit of current. With a mains adapter attached to deliver power, it all works great.
- Paul! Yes. I did work out the LGA->JFK transfer and thanks for backing me up on the flights front. I enjoy travelling. It’s just unfortunate that it’s not environmentally as good as it could be.
- Toby! (and others). I respect your views on the banning smoking in public places issue. Thanks for making them so clear to me
Anyway. I finally got up and started doing stuff. My DE changed so the book is getting some figuring out over the next few days as we adjust the schedule to make it more realistic (thanks go to the contributors so far – you’re great!). I’m switching to EST properly soon so I’m getting a few clocks setup here with different times on them and I’m probably going to buy myself a new desktop machine soon. You might also notice an insane amount of weekend travelling is now booked – Zurich next weekend, Ottawa the weekend after that, then Boston, and finally Portland. It’s looking likely that I’ll have to go to Ottawa again in the middle of April for various reasons. I find I’m able to think better when I’m someplace interesting with my laptop. Viva le weekend!
We did some printk stuff yesterday. As part of that, I hooked up with hj at the Apple store in London and played around a bit. I checked out the new Apple Mac Mini and was photographing the device tree output on my cellphone camera when I had the realization that these are probably one of the most supportable Apple products on the market at the moment. Since Hussein isn’t interested in trading his PowerPC Mini, I might buy one. I need to think about that – on the one hand, it’s an Intel Mac (it’s not a laptop though and I currently have an x86 desktop PC that it would swap for) but on the other it has a graphics chipset that has a vendor supported Open Source driver. Mumble. Anyway, the Apple Store annoyed me for all the reasons I thought that it would.
Jon.