Category: Geekery

Today’s jihad

Today I wish to hunt down everybody who makes an email virus scanner that sends back a message to the “From” address telling them that the message that they sent contained a virus, and all the morons who install these things without disabling this option, and kill them. Slowly.

Free clue: VIRUSES FORGE THE FROM ADDRESS, FUCKWADS! The “helpful” message ends up harrassing some innocent third party. And because you all feel you need to customize your “helpful” message some how, it’s impossible to filter these damn things out.

I get over 1000 pieces of spam a day, and all but one or two are filtered out by my spam filters. But I get 10 or more of these virus warnings a day, and most of them get through my filters. So most of the spam I have actually deal with in terms of seeing the “new mail” indication and opening up a mail client and reading it and deleting it are these messages.

Spoke too soon

Ok, everything wasn’t all sweetness and light. I went to bed with the rsync going on to the ext2 partition, and a cp -r going on to the VFAT partition. An hour or so later, I was awaked by my cell phone beeping to let me know that the program I have running on my Gradwell account to monitor my web sites was saying that my home box wasn’t serving up web pages.
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In computer terms, I came out ahead.

I bought a 200Gb hard drive ($141 with a $40 mail in rebate) and a USB external enclosure ($15). The idea was that I would have a hard drive that I could use as a backup for the 80Gb drive on the server, and also have some semi-portable storage so I could give Kodak back the 200Gb firewire drive I sort-of appropriated from them.
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You know what would be cool?

You know what would be cool? If there was a Mozilla plug-in where I could click a button on any text field and it would pop up my favourite text editor (in my case, vim, a graphical vi clone) to edit the text field, instead of using the built-in editor.

The main reason I’d like to use my own editor is that the built-in editor is too mouse-intensive. I like vi because I can navigate with home-row keys.

The other reason is that I’m continually hitting vi command keys, which does entirely the wrong thing in Mozilla.

:wq

Is that so hard?

I have an iPod. It stores 20Gb of music. I also have about 80Gb of music on my hard drive. All I want is a way to put certain select music on the iPod, and then fill the rest with random music selected from that hard drive. Ok, as an added complication, the hard drive lives on a Linux box, and is NFS mounted on the Mac that drives the iPod. That shouldn’t matter, should it? It’s a fast network link (100Mbps) and goes through a switch instead of a hub.
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