Aquarionics

Ahh, the sweet smell of Home.

Clever Spam.

I get quite a bit of spam. Spamassassin catches about 40 pieces per day. I look at most of it, mostly to see what types I'm getting most today. Yesterdays totals were:

• Misc: 21
  • Leads, 100 Time Dated..FREE! (Cheap pencil refils with best-before dates)
  • Colon Cleanse (Cheap, Clean punctuation)
• Viri: 4
• Search Engines: 2
• 419: 1
• Unrenderable Subject Lines: 14
• False Positives: 1
• Porn: 4
  • TIGHT VIRGIN TEENS ON CAM (Young employees of Richard Branson go punting)
  • free amateur xxx (Cheap remake of Vin Diesel movie)
  • Safe sex with a bored housewife (Be still my beating heart)

But my favourite one is this one:

You're probably thinking to yourself, "Oh geez, not another
miracle diet pill!"  Like you, I was +skeptical at first, but
my sister swore it helped her lose 23 pounds in just four weeks,
so I told her I'd give it a shot.  I mean, there was nothing

Because the code - which Mutt displayed, not being a HTML Mail reader - was like this:

You're proba<!--PPSOjQ-->bly thinking to yourself, "Oh geez, not another<BR>
mira<!--PPSOjQ-->cle die<!--PPSOjQ-->t pill!"  Like you, I was
+ske<!--PPSOjQ-->ptical at first, but <BR>
my sister swore it helped her lose 23 pounds in just four weeks, <BR>
so I told her I'd give it a shot.  I mean, there was nothing <BR>

Meaning that Spamassassin failed to catch it because it contained the words "miracle diet pill", and was resorted to... lets see...

SPAM: -------------------- Start SpamAssassin results ----------------------
SPAM: This mail is probably spam.  The original message has been altered
SPAM: so you can recognise or block similar unwanted mail in future.
SPAM: See http://spamassassin.org/tag/ for more details.
SPAM:
SPAM: Content analysis details:   (15.9 hits, 5 required)
SPAM: Hit! (2.4 points)  'Message-Id' was added by a relay (2)
SPAM: Hit! (1.0 point)   From: ends in numbers
SPAM: Hit! (1.0 point)   Subject: contains a question mark
SPAM: Hit! (2.8 points)  BODY: Offers a full refund
SPAM: Hit! (1.9 points)  BODY: Contains word 'guarantee' in all-caps
SPAM: Hit! (1.5 points)  BODY: Asks you to click below
SPAM: Hit! (2.1 points)  BODY: FONT Size +2 and up or 3 and up
SPAM: Hit! (3.2 points)  HTML-only mail, with no text version
SPAM:
SPAM: -------------------- End of SpamAssassin results ---------------------

Spamassassin good. I like Spamassassin :-)

Works

So, I can run Baldur's Gate 2, Unreal Tournament 2003 and The Sims on my new Linux install. I can listen to my mp3s, watch the DVDs, get things from my Digital Camera, send things to my MP3 player, read my mail, follow my RSS feeds and edit documents.

Finally, after four years, I can do everything under linux that I'm using windows for. The only thing I can see using windows for day to day now is those few games that don't like WineX.

The only blip on the horizon is an editor. Now, whilst I like and respect vim, I would prefer to have a graphical text-editor that will highlight html & php, preferably be able to load and edit files over an ftp connection, and ideally (though not critically) be open-source. Any ideas, world?

(and yes, non-geek stuff coming soon, this week's been a little unbalanced)

advsh

A discussion on IRC has just led me to fix the infamous advsh (well, the shell script version) for more modern Unixies (Like Linux). It’s online, and linked below. Bug reports welcomed, I’ll see if I can fix them…

Adventure Shell

Everyone loves Spam Statistics

This is a graph of my spam-count:

This is how I created my spam-count. It’s a combination of spamassassin, procmail, shell-script and PHP, and therefore full of Stuff Wot No Man Was To Wot Of. Or something.

First, I run spamassassin, which just generally rocks. All my email comes into one mailbox, aq which is at gkhs dot net. That includes every mailing list, every aquarionics dot com address, all my suespammers mail, and my hotmail account (via the really quite nice program, gotmail. It then gets fed though procmail which uses various script-fu to deposit mailing-lists into newsgroups on the local news server (I prefer reading discussion via usenet), and everything else gets sent though Spamassassin like this:

• ^X-Spam-Status: YES
$MAILDIR/spam/`date +%Y-%m-%d`

  meaning that everything that SA thinks is spam gets forwarded to a mailbox within my spam folder with the name as the date. Most solutions I saw for this kind of statistics generation put all the mail into one box and then grab the date from it. For the way I’m doing it, that’s a waste of processing, plus it ignores Rule One: Spammers Lie. The date on the spam usually has no relation to the date you got it.

  So, we now have a box called – for example – 2003-06-09 containing today’s Spam (On the second day of every month, a cron-job wraps all the last-month’s spam into a tarball and dumps it somewhere to rot). Every morning at 1:12am, the following runs:

  #!/bin/sh
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
SPAMTODAY=`from -f ~/Mail/spam/$DATE | wc -l`

  echo $DATE, $SPAMTODAY >> ~/logs/spam.log


  (from is a program that displays the from: header of every mail in a mailbox. In this case, it generates one line per mail which is what we want). Giving us a file like this:

  -<del>snip</del>-
2003-06-02, 328
2003-06-03, 134
2003-06-04, 130
2003-06-05, 152
2003-06-06, 125
2003-06-07, 123
2003-06-08, 267
-<del>snip</del>-.

  Which we can do whatever we want with. In this case, a PHP script (or you can view that nicely formatted) which generates a graph.

  And thats how I know I get about 100 to 300 pieces of spam every day.

  Best yet, that’s the only way I know I get 100 -> 300 pieces of spam a day :-)

  • Link
  • Trackback

  • 2003-06-09 18:46:42
  • By Aquarion
  • From Catrion Towers, Reading
  • More Journal Entries
  • Filed under Linux & PHP

I have a weblog?

Lack of entries? Lack of life. My entire life at the moment seems to consist of Wake up, Go to work, Code, Go home, Dinner, Sleep, Wake up. Go to work, fix computers, go home, dinner, sleep…) with variations like reversing dinner and going home and having dinner in London with ccooke & ruthi,

The last few days have been mostly spent putting my new work setup together, which consists of a box running Gentoo Linux (named aziraphale) running enlightenment (I like enlightenment, it Just Does, but I’ll be switching to gnome tomorrow, when it’s compiled…) and vmware workstation, which in turn is running XP Pro (as crowley), which is our development environment. The main reason for that is that I have a backup of crowley on aziraphale, so when (not, not if. When) the XP install dies a nasty and horrible death (Our software has a couple of bugs atm, meaning that occasionally it’ll install itself and not be able to uninstall, and since it’s an IE thing this is complicated) I can just restore the working config, and keep coding.

This would be bad if they were both on one monitor, but usable. Fortunatly I found a spare graphics card, so right now I’m typing into OpenOffice on the little monitor to the right, whilst IRC, Mozilla and everything else runs on the 17, this was suprisingly easy to set up once I groked the XFree config file sufficently. Only problem is that VMWare appears to dislike running on a second monitor in maximized mode (moving to the edge of the screen which should take me to the first monitor wraps the pointer to the other side of the small screen unless you move reaaaaaaally slowly. All other screen edges are hard barriers, incuding and this is the annoying bit the opposite side of the monitor). On top of all this, I’ve been told that at some point I’ll be developing a cross-platform version of our s/w, so that looks to be fun.

Slightly worried about the direction of the nomic, mostly worried about people flooding the game with some rules that make actually doing things difficult. Mostly, though, I’m annoyed that I’ve spent more time administrating the game than I have playing it, and that people are trying to drag the admin into the game, which is exactly the oposite of what I wanted to do. If I’d wanted imperial nomic (A variant where an emporer decides wheather rules pass on the fly) I’d have proposed it. Bah.

The writing fails to happen. Three hours a day on a train, sitting down, would you may have thought have been perfect for writing, and this would be true if I had something to write on and with that wasn’t manual, until I can get nemo (my ancient laptop) a battery (100, roughly, that I can’t justify) that might change.

Or a powerbook. That’d help too. (My CEO was given a powerbook. Given. By a friend. Nevermind, a couple of years and I’ll be a millionaire.

(I was voted person mostl likely to be a millionaire before he’s 25 at school. This appears to have been inaccurate, so far, but I live in hope)

(Acutally, I live in Reading, but it’s close)

Software. AqWiki will get a release as soon as I can be bothered to package it, Nomic Rules Manager will get a cool name and a release some point very soon, and Aquaintances will get a release when I work out why it isn’t catching the errir that is fulling my mail box with cron errors.

Epistula will now not get a packaged release, probably, until I’ve convinced myself I don’t want to completely rewrite it in perl. It’s live code is still online, though.

Networks are weird

A query for the networking geeks in the audience…

• Box A runs Windows XP, it’s an Athlon 2000XP.
• Box B runs Debian Sarge, It’s an Athlon 1200XP.
• Box C runs Debian Stable, It’s a Celeron 300mhz.

Downloading a file from a HTTP server with Box A takes $time

Downloading the same file with Box B or C (Or similerly sized files from the same server, so no caching) takes $time/3

Downloading said amount of data from the same server with Box A running though a squid cache server on either B or C also takes $time/3

All are plugged into the same hub, behind the same router, on the same ASDL.

Why? And how can I fix this? (Apart from installing Linux on A, which is mostly a games box ATM, and dual boots to Gentoo anyway)

Schizophrenia

pick an operating system

legals

from ssta’s LJ

[smsie] Tron: about the only people NOT afraid of the MS legal division is the FSF legal division :)
[tron] smsie: Heheh
[smsie] everyone is afraid of the FSF legal division
[tron] smsie: And that’s only because they’re far more intelligent. :)
[smsie] Tron: nono, it’s because (a) they’re prety good lawyers and (b) they do it for free from a sense of zeal. ph33r the pro-bono lawyer with zeal. He’ll tie you up in court for a century and not care how much it’s costing you
[smsie] Tron: the FSF have armies of zealous pro-bono lawyers…so not only can they keep you in court forever…they can do it in shifts
[smsie] the FSF doesn’t have to be right....they just have to be convinced that they’re on the moral high ground

Packaging the future

What I want, you see, is for the requirement that a popular linux app support nine different packaging formats to go away. In this utopia, there would be *an* – for example – ‘Open Office for Linux i386’ in the UPF which you download and and it then hands a list of dependances to apt-get, rpmdrake, rpm or whatever which then translates them into packages and gets them by the current way.

Various people are doing the “One True Packaging” thing for distribution, not least Installshield – whose eponymous system is pretty much the standard for Windows applications, but all these have dependency problems, in that they all include every possible dependency in the package itself, meaning you’d end up downloading and installing a new JavaVM for every Java application you use.

Ideally – as Stephen pointed out when I mentioned this on IRC - this would be LSB based, so that it could see “Well, I don’t have that library, so I will ask apt for $(standardised name of application)”, and if it worked that way it’d be great, but the current system whereby everything is packaged separately for every distribution means that developing a major Linux application requires either understanding every variant on each package management system or a willingness to get the community to do all the work for you, and do it exactly how you want it to be done. And if a job’s worth doing…

All of which could be avoided with a little co-operation, which is something OSS people are meant to be good at.

Today's Trick

Today's Spambeating Trick Of The Day:

Where it fails:
When there is more than one address on the To: line.

Why I don't care:
I don't often send mail to more than one person.

Here and back again

Things that have happened in the last five days since ‘Threadnaught’:

• I’ve learnt that the secret to chocolate sauce is to shake the bottle with the lid closed.
• Brown shows up on white curtains, seven feet from the table where there was ice cream and a limited amount of chocolate sauce.
  • And the carpet.
  • Also the television, speakers, post and furniture.
• Do not follow Aquarius blindly when he says “Kernel-image-2.6.4-k7” as your laptop is not a K7 and this won’t work.
  • 686 works better
  • XF86 doesn’t like your laptop much.
  • Project Utopia is Neat.
  • Debian Rocks.
• It’s a good idea to pay your rent
• You should remember that you’re getting paid by cheque, and these take four working days to clear.
• My bank has just decided that cheques now take six working days to clear. The age of communication is upon us, and Halifax is going backwards. May it fuck off and die, and take my overdraft with it.
• Buying a Young Persons Railcard is cheaper than the discount it gives you for a ticket to Durham.
  • ...yet despite already having a Railway Photo Card (for my Letchworth/London railcard) I need another photo card for the YP Railcard.
  • I still don’t deal with photo booths well.
  • Using the advice a model gave me on how to not look like a serial killer in passport photos makes me look like a male model.
    • Who is also a serial killer.
    • Train compains remain morons.
  • RedDragDiva’s Mushroom Thing is really nice.
  • It’s vitally important to take your keys when leaving the office
    • Especially when the following day you can’t get out of the house because your girlfriend deadlocked the door (your keys for which are in London) and the back garden backs onto three other back gardens.
    • The spare keys are in LC’s room, on the dresser.
    • You moron.

I’m off to Durham for the weekend. TTFN

Dayze

So, the week then.

Tuesday I got home from work at about 20:00 as usual. I discovered that atoll, my main server and home to my life, documents, music and email was thrashing at a 50.00 load average and the terminal was spewing out line upon line of “DriveSeek Failed” errors. This was not an unknown error, Atoll’s previous hard drive (Identical make and model) died in a similer way about a year and a half ago. The drive can read fine, but as soon as you try to write to it it thrashes the computer completely. I ended up buying the replacement drive (the one that has just died) and eventually (about two months ago) sent the old one off to be repaired. So I sat and swore at the drive for a while, redirected my email, powered off the computer, and wished I had more time to deal with this.

At this point, there was a doorbell. Nobody apart from the Jehovahs Witnesses and the Pizza People use our doorbell, so at 9pm this was unexpected.

It was, in fact, our neighbour. He was delivering a package that UPS had failed to.

It was the replacement hard drive.

The timing of this was so incredibly fortuitous that my immediate reaction was to install the drive and start copying the data. This was hastily kyboshed. The last thing I want to do is replace the dead drive with the same model that has died so faithfully twice before.

Wednesday I got atoll to stay together long enough to be able to edit /etc/fstab so that the broken partition (it was only one partition this time) was mounted read only, which means the server is back together until next month, when I can buy a new hard drive. Eventually, I decide to put the replacement 120 gig drive into my desktop, where it doesn’t matter so much if it dies. I resolve to do this at the weekend.

Thursday

Can you guess what happens Thursday?

1. Everything works perfectly.
2. The main server dies
3. The main server explodes
4. The hard drive in my desktop dies.

Anyone who went for the forth option can have a cookie.

This has been a bad hardware week.

Random screams of fear

Lack of posts. Here’s why:

My main problem with Zope is the documentation which is either a) for a version in advance of the one I’m using; b) has a prerequisite level I can only aspire to; or c) Doesn’t answer the question I have (like ‘What parameters do I feed it?’) whilst being the comprehensive, only documentation on the subject.

I’ve switched to KDE at work, because whilst I don’t like the interface, bloatedness or flakyness of it (esspecially JuK and Artsd, which I have to manually kill several times a day), the KIO system rocks (Basically, it allows me to open webdav documents with the filename ‘webdav:user@server/path/to/doc’, other documents over an ssh connection (fish:user@server/path/to/doc) or anything. There is absolutly no fucking way this should be part of the desktop environment, it should be split off from KDE so that everything, everybody, from curses to gnome to enlightenment should be able to (and should) use it.

Most of all, because the only text editor I can use with it is Kate, the KDE Advanced Text Editor, and I keep getting syntax errors because ”:wn” isn’t valid python. No, kvim doesn’t work. The Ubuntu (actually Debian in this case) package for AMD64 doesn’t actually include the kvim binary and I can’t get the thing to compile manually.

And now I have 10 minutes to get up and dressed before I have to go try to catch the bus. TTFN