Funk Babblings

A year and a half after I started a revolution, I can finally say that the revolution is complete.

Of course, I'm mostly just an instigator. Someone in Germany did most of the work.

1. Between my MP3 player, my camera, and my 1GB flash drive, I have lots of use for the "USB Mass-Storage" interface. I use four different computers that I can connect these to -- all running Linux of course, kernel versions 2.6.7, 2.6.8.1, and 2.6.11.7. The only one of these that actually works properly and consistently with those USB devices is the one running kernel 2.6.7, the oldest of these versions.
I may never upgrade my kernel again.

2. Debian is finally getting close to releasing the latest stable version of Debian Linux, called "sarge". People are scrambling to make sure their pet programs make it into the release.... to the point of parody.

3. I switched funknet.net web and email over to a new hosting company (DrakNet, thanks to chronarchy's suggestion) a few weeks ago, right about the same time I was moving my company's email from an old Windows IMail server over to a new Postfix-based mail server I set up myself. The spam at work went down dramatically thanks to a combination of antispam techniques (SMTP protocol checks, sender domain validation, greylisting, realtime blacklists, local blacklists, and SpamAssassin) I used there, but simultaneously the amount of spam I get at home went up because DrakNet seems to use only one or two of those techniques (SpamAssassin, maybe an RBL or two) while I lost the use of my well-trained bogofilter. So now I'm working on tuning and training SpamAssassin.

4. I love Konqueror as a web browser, except when I'm typing these entries on my slow laptop and it loses characters because it's too busy checking my spelling or something. Doesn't it know I was once a spelling champ?! (Well, except for "perculator percolator"....)

Update: 5. I forgot this one before... The movie studios are putting out a new media format. "Studios are embracing the format because, unlike current DVDs, the new discs include robust features to prevent the movies from being illegally copied." Heh, replace "DVDs" with "videotapes" in that statement and flash back to the 90s! I guess that means that DVDs' CSS encryption is now officially obsolete, and DeCSS is now acceptable.

Oh yeah, and I think I need to start keeping better track of the calendar, since I missed Dramarama and The English Beat last Friday. :-(
I did get to see and chat with Watershed when they came around though.

According to Anne S. Baumgartner in A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Gods, Girru is the Sumerian messenger of the gods, as well as the god of fire and light, and the patron of civilization.


This is useful information when naming a mail server, and all the rest of the server names start with the letter G.

I'm on a lot of email lists. Some of them (mostly technical or pagan) I specifically chose to subscribe to, and others (mostly political) I ended up on through one affiliation or another and never bothered to unsubscribe. I also include status emails from my computers in the list category (at least that's the way my filtering/sorting system works). The way work's been going lately, I've had trouble keeping up with my list mail, so by this evening I had over 800 unread messages in that mailbox, going back to early October. So I spent much of the evening attempting to catch up.

Meanwhile, earlier this evening on a whim I read a bit out of a book on internet routing protocols. This may not seem immediately relevant.....

Anyway, going through this email from October (I haven't gotten up to November yet) was a bit surreal. Lots of messages about how well various Democratic senate candidates were doing (most of them lost, of course), lots of messages about Kerry and Edwards doing so much better than Bush and Cheney in the debates, and so on. Not good for post-election depression, though a sense of humor helps.

One message mentioned Bush's debate gaffe referring to the "internets", which every net-savvy person laughed at. But that routing protocol book reminded me that the truly net-savvy people are aware of other internets besides The Internet, whether small private inter-networks or large projects like Internet2. So maybe Bush was more right than he knew, though I still think it was a true mistake.


BTW, I'm heading to Columbus this weekend to help my grandmother recover from a stroke....

The funknet.net server is undergoing work today (replacing the machine, actually), so I expected things to be somewhat impaired. What I didn't expect, however, was this combination:
1. Not being able to send mail.
2. Not being able to receive mail I send myself from my yahoo account.
3. Still getting spam. In fact for a while I was getting a lot more spam than usual.

Update: Things seems to be working again, except that I'm still getting more spam than usual. Probably has something to do with a bogofilter upgrade. (Er, some upgrade, huh?)

Update 2: The bogofilter FAQ tells me why I'm getting more spam after an upgrade.

Lately I've been really amazed at how little spam makes it to my inbox. (Knock on wood...) I use a Bayesian filter, bogofilter, plus some additional filtering to get rid of virus attachments and a particular spammer that's good at getting around Bayesian filters (though I think my filter is finally getting trained well enough on those).

I have gotten some fax spam recently though. No, the laws against that haven't eradicated it. At least there was an 800 number to get off the list; it felt good that it might be costing them a bit of money for me to make that call, even if calling them only verifies that I received their spam so they send more.

Anyway, today I got a new one in email. Well, sort of new. We've all seen the "419 scam" in which some Nigerian supposedly needs help to discreetly transfer a lot of money. This one was similar, but instead of Nigeria it purports to come from a U.S. Army officer in Iraq, claiming to be trying to help an Iraqi businessman move millions of dollars out of Iraq. If I had more time on my hands I might actually mess with this one like some people do.

Do people actually fall for this stuff?

Yesterday I realized just how much my awareness (paranoia?) of scams has invaded my psyche. ( Scam dream.... )

This week I've attempted to be a bit of a minor revolutionary, but things have stalled a bit....

( Read more... )

Time for a geek entry, even though few if any current readers care about this stuff. My apologies.

Email must be stored somewhere. First, while it's waiting on a server to be downloaded with a POP or IMAP client; second, after it's been downloaded to a user's computer; third, when a user saves it for posterity. (Yes, I'm deliberately ignoring lots of earlier steps that aren't relevant to my thoughts here, as well as some other ways of accessing email that generally just skip one or more of these steps.) It's fairly safe to assume that this storage is on a disk, but in what format?

Email is normally organized into mailboxes holding multiple messages. Sometimes each user has a single mailbox, and sometimes a single user can have multiple mailboxes for different purposes. Multiple mailboxes are especially useful when the end user saves mail, since that person often wants to organize what they're saving. Most people don't think about the format used for saving the mail, but that format becomes important if more than one program will be used to access the mail.

There are three major types of email storage formats. One is for each mailbox to be a single file containing all its messages, with some internal organization to determine which message is which. Another is for each mailbox to be a directory (or directory structure), with each message being a separate file within that directory. The third is within a database outside the usual filesystem, with some method of organization enabled by the flexibilities of general-purpose databases.

There is not yet a commonly-accepted schema for storing email in databases; each program that does it has its own method, making interoperability impractical in the general case. This may change in the future, but for now, database storage is not useful if more than one program needs to access the mail.

That leaves mailbox files and mailbox directories, which each have their advantages and disadvantages....

( Read more... )