Author: Paul Tomblin

Spam Karma 7, Spammers 0

It’s two months to the day since I switched from MovableType to WordPress, and the spammers finally found me. And SpamKarma deleted all 7 spams without a whimper. It even decided that one IP was a repeat spammer and banned them from my blog entirely. I checked and that IP has a http redirector on port 80, probably installed without the computer owner’s knowledge.

I hate spammers with the firey passion of a thousand suns. I’ve been waiting with bated breath for them to start spamming my blog again, and I’m quite relieved to see that SpamKarma handled the first onslaught with nary a whimper.

In other geek news, I’ve got good news: I’ve got Tiger on my laptop. It’s been running the CPU and disk for hours now indexing it for Spotlight. But Dashboard is pretty cool. I kind of wish it would have an option to display the widgets all the time like Konfabulator, but it’s a good replacement for it. I hope somebody fixes GnuControl soon.

And in other geek news, I’ve got bad news: My Linksys router did that thing where the wireless side loses its mind again. The new firmware didn’t fix it. I’ve heard there are hardware problems with the V2.2 hardware. I guess that’s why it was so cheap. I’m also guessing there is no way in hell I’ll get Linksys to take it back.

It’s still September

In my blog entry Rants and Revelations » 4166 September, 1993, I expressed some hope that with AOL dropping Usenet access, it might mean that Usenet would go back to being the place where only the clueful hung out.

As usual when I express optimism like that, I spoke too soon. There is a new scourge on Usenet these days. It’s people accessing it through Google Groups (or other web interface) who think that Usenet is an invention of Google, and that Google is in charge of monitoring everybody’s behaviour. Representative quotes from this new breed of wankers:

  • “I saw a couple of spams in this group. Where are the moderators?”
  • “I’ll report you to Google if you don’t stop insulting me.”
  • “Speak english, this is an American system!”

Hello and goodbye

A few months ago, I was thinking about going to Oshkosh this year. (I’m pretty sure I’m not going after all, since we’re going to be moving house around that time.) I used to be on a mailing list for pilots of Piper aircraft, and I’d met up with some of them at Sun’n’Fun in 2002 and at Oshkosh in 2003, and I thought I’d check in with them again to see who was going to Oshkosh this year.

Now, I quit that mailing list last year because like any group of pilots, it had a lot of hard core right wingers, and not just traditional “low taxes, low regulation, no government services” conservative types, but a lot of “George Bush is always right and anybody who disagrees is a traitor to the country” rabid neo-cons. And it just wasn’t fun any more. But I missed the non-jerks on the list, so I resubscribed. I vowed to stay away from any political conversation, and not be goaded into political debates no matter how uninformed and stupid some of these people’s opinions are. (The loudest and most vehement ones were always the idiots who got their “facts” from Anne Coulter and Fox News.)

Last week, somebody on the list asked what we meant when we referred to “ripping” a CD. I, and two other people, explained that it was the process of taking music off a CD and converting it to digital files like MP3s, WMA or other format for either storing on a computer, transferring to an iPod or other (lesser) hand held music player, or even burning to MP3 CDs that some CD players can play. The person who asked was satisfied with the answers he got, and asked some follow on questions. So far, so good. But three fucking days later, somebody responds to the original question with the “fact’ that “ripping” is just a synonym for “burning”. I said no, it’s the exact opposite. I don’t know if he hadn’t read the intervening days worth of discussion, or just thought that he was right and we were all wrong. So I told him that if he’d read the several correct responses to Neville’s question that were posted in the days before, he would have seen that “burning” is the process of putting information onto a CD, and “ripping” is the process of taking information from a CD.

After this exchange, guess which one of us got flamed? The guy who provided the correct information and then three days later had to correct the guy who waited three days and then contradicted him, or the guy who ignored all the correct information and arrogantly wrote something wrong? Yeah, I think I just figured out why Bush won this election – because to these people correcting wrong information and lies is being “intolerant and snotty”.

Well, sorry Blanche, Roger, Rhandi, Neville, and all the other good people on the Piper mailing list, I’m gone. And I’m blogging this as a reminder to myself not to go back.

Here’s hoping!

A few weeks back, I bought a Linksys WRT54G. I only had minor problems with my existing wireless router, but I’ve been hearing some great things about how customizable this one is because it’s open source and runs Linux. Hey, $60 for a Linux box is pretty impressive.

However, if I loaded it moderately heavily, like if I attempted to bittorrent the latest Doctor Who episode while listening to mp3s NFS mounted from my server, the wireless connection would start acting weird, and eventually stop transferring data at all, while showing full signal strength in MacStumbler. But the wired connections to the Linux server and the G4 downstairs kept working. But the only way to get wireless working again was to go downstairs and power cycle it. Which is a pain in the knees.

So it was recommended that I try one of the third party firmwares out there. I’m not sure if I want all the bells and whistles of the full Sveasoft distro, and so rather than paying the $20 for it I thought I’d try on of the free ones. I just installed dd.wrt.v22.prefinal3.1.bin. It adds a few nifty features, most of which I don’t care about. But it does have busybox on it, so I can ssh into the box. That’s just weird. But what I really want to see if it can go a few days without needing a power cycle.