Older blog entries for ingvar (starting at number 289)

Seems as if the lates addition to the spam-controls has done something for the comments section. Out of 128 attempts to post, only 10 resulted in a user-visible comment. Unfortunately, all 10 of those were spam and I have no idea how many of the others weren't. Currently doodling on a mod-queue system, so I can actually observe these things in a bit more "what gets trapped, what doesn't" fashion and actually allow me to experiment and tune the predictors.

Slapped in some marginal spam protection on my essays site about two weeks ago. It worked, briefly, but as all it did was verify that there was an MX or an A record for the submitted email address (and otherwise silently discarding the submission, as all failed "you are not spam" checks lead to), I have now instituted another.

Alas, I was a bit over-eager with the cleanup this time and I am considering putting up a static page with "commercial content archiving policy" stating that, yes, you can post spam and have it stored, at a cost of UKP 10 per day, per message. This is, of course, a more modern version of my spam archiving policy from the mid-90s (no, I received neither apologies nor money, but I did have great fun sending out a couple of emails asking for it, referencing said web page; I also know that it was adapted by some other people).

You know? I suddenly realised what I consider important in a mailing list software (with moderation, filters and other goodies). The ability to transparently impose administrative policy on multiple lists lists in one go.

Background would be "I have several Mailman lists on common- lisp.net" (where "several" is, I believe, 8) and they do, of course, get spam. But, I essentially do NOT use any of Mailman's spam-fighting measures (there's a few "just drop" non-subscriber from-address regexps and a "moderate all non- subscriber posts") because while all the lists get spam, any measure needs to be duplicated to all the lists to be worth the effort and that is WAY too much like actual work.

Of course, as these things go, I fully expect that someone will tell me "install the Blahonga module and you get it" or "buh, all you need to to is to frob around in the config and it's there!" and that would be fine, too. Until then, I will keep deleting 1-5 spam emails from 2-6 lists daily (no, not all lists are hit in parallel, some are also more attractive than others, it's all probably worthy of having been data-collected and charted).

4 Nov 2008 (updated 4 Nov 2008 at 15:04 UTC) »

Just had a look through the comments that had been posted to my essays site and disappointingly, every single one was a spam attempt.

I'll probably have to go back through the web logs and see if there were any more attempts to post, so as to determine if my (rather weak) anti-spam measures actually work.

Some quick looking indicates "no, not at all". The measure I've taken is (essentially) to have a hidden field, initialised to an empty string, with a name that (ideally) should trick a screen scraper to fill it in and simply not file the comment if that is present.

chalst comments on my emacs musing and says: I wonder if my life would have been different if I first used vi before emacs?

For me, at least, I don't have to wonder, since I used vi before I used emacs (specifically, I went to emacs because vi without any easy reference is painful for a newbie and emacs had the built-in tutorial). Of course, I went to try vi after having endured ed(1) for about two months. OK for email and Usenet, just about, but painful for coding. Or so I found, at least.

I shall have to modify the question to "I wonder if my life would have been different if there'd been a vi in a nutshell book near me, when I first used vi?"

Scary stuff. Actually, more in the "gosh, that is a surprise!" department. But, nonetheless, enough to make oneself take a step back and ponder.

Yesterday, there was some enthusing over the Asus Eee in my (virtual) vincinity an dI flippantly said "can it run emacs?" and a short while realised that it's around 20 years since I first used emacs. That's an editor I've used for more than half of my life (and now, 15 years later, M-: for an eval prompt feels natural, but when it changed mid-90s, i tfelt very, very strange).

Curiously, I've actually coded in lisp longer than I've used emacs (and emacsoids), but only by a year or so and the first few years, what I had at hand was XLisp 1.2, not the most Common of lisps around (it's essentially a lisp-1, rather than a lisp-2 and it has its own bizarre object system that I never, ever, understood, even after having perused the interpreter's source).

It's slightly scary, though, having the thought "I've used emacs for more than half my life".

Maybe-useful shell oneliners #n:

(date +%s; read foo; date +%s; echo r - p) | dc

Press return to start the timer, press return again to stop it and get a rough time in seconds between the two presses. May require GNU date, as I do not know how widely spread "%s" is as time-in-seconds-since-epoch time format control.

Sadly, the first version did the subtraction and then multiplied by -1, but I think properly swapping the two top elements of the stack is a slight win for elegance (if piping things into dc can ever be called "elegance").

Busy, but not necessarily productive. Beginning of September saw me in the US for a week, then back to the UK and busybusybusy at work.

But, I have now finished off something that's been underway, one way or another since about January. It's both a good feeling and slightly sad. I have compiled a report of the first year-or-so of the Snooper Project, essentially an attempt to determine how unused IP addresses are being scanned and probed.

The report looks at the first roughly 13 months, correlates spikes in probing activity to BugTraq reports and presents several statistical breakdowns of the raw material. It also goes into more detail for a few prolific or interesting scan sources.

Here, marnanel writes about early mornings and it resonated.

Due to an assortment of reasons, my primary "I am alone, there is no external pressure" hacking time tends to be from not-too-long after 6 am (depending on how promptly I can get up and go through the normal first-things-in-the- morning routine), until about 07:30, when it's time to finish getting dressed and head towards the train station, for another exciting day in the office.

That's also the first time period of the day when I can check my email and do a brief check on assorted web stuff. Most, if not all, of my coding is accomplished in these 45-80 minutes of the day. At times, I am surprised I get anything finished...

This "paper writing" is both familiar and unfamiliar, in a strange, frightening, way. At least feedback from the first- ish round of independent readers is starting to drop in.

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