I updated to mirc 6.11 today, and while doing that, browsed the author’s web-pages. Khaled is a vegetarian like me, and he links to a really good description of the kind of attitude meat-eaters are showing when they hear that I’m a vegetarian.
I recognize pretty much everything on the page. So if you’re not a vegetarian, and don’t want to make an ass of yourself the next time you meet one of them, read these simple edicts and take them to heart:
Yikes. I just managed to overwrite one of my articles with a new one. That’s what you get for only writing frequently – you forget the quirks of your posting software.
Luckily I made scripts a while ago that take a daily backup of the mysql database, so everything was still there 🙂 When it comes to missing backups, I’m one of those people who got burnt too many times, so I’m extra-careful now.
No, that’s not a virus. And no, there’s nothing with a .dat attachment on my emails, even though Outlook Express wants you to believe it. It’s a digital signature. It looks like this:
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-nr2 (Windows XP)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird -http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQE/fSqo2FTH6fnzT0IRAv81AJ42L5GD3XrqN0Sv/
ksXaKvcOCuQhgCeOlgy9FaROdCRoGB3Qd6lunjKDvk=
=NHUe
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
What it does is to confirm that this email is actually written by me, and noone tempered with it. It’s like putting my signature under a written letter, only more safe against tampering.
Why is this such a problem for some people? Outlook Express. This degenerate piece of shit software decides that “if I don’t know what it is, I’ll make it look funny, invent an extension for it, and oh, while I’m at it, I’ll also not show my user the plain-text parts that I *could* understand, but pretend it’s in a .txt file attachment. And on the default security settings, it removes them:
If you’re an Outlook Express user, this is pretty annoying. But trust me, the mails from Outlook Express users are painful, too – and not because of a fault in anyone’s mailtool but the sender’s. So if it’s okay for the OE users to send their non-standard borked emails, I don’t see why I should stop sending my perfectly standdard-compliant emails just because OE doesn’t want to handle them.
“But Enno”, you’ll say, “don’t you care about whether people can read what you write?”. Yes I do. But the people I really care about are tech-savvy, and they don’t use mailtools that are old and broken. The standard for MIME (RFC 2048) will be 7 years old next month, and standard for OpenPGP/MIME (RFC 2440) will be 6 years old by then. They were practically invented before Microsoft realized that the Internet was something that mattered to them. Plenty of time to implement them. And about time to shrug, shake your head and go on with life. OE is dead.
I was upgrading enigmail today, and after restarting Thunderbird, it gave me the message that “A previous install did not complete correctly. Finishing install”. I googled for a fix, then helped myself: Whenever the file C:\Program Files\Thunderbird\xpicleanup.dat exists, Thunderbird will give the message. I deleted it, and Thunderbird starts. Not sure if I broke something in the process, though. The newer enigmail version didn’t install, and any time I tried, it gave the error again. the final solution was to remove my chrome/ folder from c:\Documents and Settings\enno\Thunderbird, delete the xpicleanup.dat file, delete and reinstall Thunderbird, then reinstall all extensions. A hassle, but at least now I’ve got a clean and working mail client again.
Der Eressea-Server hat die letzten Tage ein echtes Problem damit gehabt, all meine Spams zu filtern. Was ist passiert? Meine private Email läuft über den Account, und ich bekomme einen Menge Spam. Auf meinem alten Uni-Account lagen letzte Woche z.b. 2200 Mails, von denen etwa 15-20 kein Spam waren.
Um dem ganzen Herr zu werden setze ich Spam Assassin ein. Das Programm ist super. Leider braucht es relativ viel CPU, und der Eressea-Rechner ist nicht grad schnell. Auf einer der beiden PPro 200 CPUs dauert es 40 Sekunden, eine Mail von 126 Zeilen zu bearbeiten. Irgendwann, bei einer Load jenseits von 100, hat der Rechner keinerlei Speicher mehr gehabt, er hat ja eh nur 64 MB + Swap. Und an dieser Stelle fängt Linux dann an, Prozesse in Notwehr abzuschiessen. Irgendwann lief nix mehr, und Andreas mußte physikalisch an die Maschine heran. Danke, Krawi!
Was habe ich gelernt?
1. Lass andere die Arbeit machen.
Es ist nicht gut, alles in Spam Assassin zu füttern. Die Uni Paderborn hat auf ihrem Mailserver einen eigenen Spam Assassin laufen, und den werde ich von jetzt an zumindest einen Teil der Arbeit machen lassen. Alle Mail, die über meine eigenen Domains laufen, kommen aber weiter ungefiltert zu mir. Ich benutze nebenher meinen Account bei despammed.com für alles mögliche, wo ebenfalls eine Menge für mich vorgefiltert wird.
2. spamd einsetzen
Spam Assassin kann man als Daemon starten, und das tue ich jetzt. Statt dass er jedesmal seine Konfiguration und Regeln neu laden muss, wird im Fall einer anfrage dann wirklich nur die Mail bearbeitet. In meinem Fall senkt das die Verarbeitungszeit von 40 auf etwa 25 Sekunden herunter. Immer noch eine Menge.
3. spamd richtig konfigurieren.
Ich habe mehrere Optionen angeschaltet, um spam assassin zu beschleunigen: --local --max-children 10 --auto-whitelist. Außerdem habe ich die Bayes Filter abgeschaltet (Eintrag in user_prefs: use_bayes 0)
4. exim richtig einstellen
Mein Problem wurde vor allem dadurch verschärft, dass ich mit fetchmail in regelmäßigen Abständen sehr viele Mails auf einmal bekommen habe, und exim dann für jede Mail einen procmail-Prozess gestartet hat, der wiederum einen Spam Assassin startete. Plötzlich liefen hunderte Prozesse, die alle versuchten, das gleiche Lock auf meine Mailbox zu bekommen. Das ging nicht gut. Ab heute ist mein exim so konfiguriert, das er ab einer Load von 4 keine Mails mehr auszuliefern versucht. Das geht mit den Parametern queue_only_load und deliver_load_max in der exim.conf.
Jetzt bete ich mal, dass das alles ist, und der Rechner bis zum Wochenende überlebt.
One of the nice things about getting mail from 1500 people every week is the ability to do statistics over their mails. I’ve written a little script to analyze the distribution of mailtools among Eressea players:
Not surprisingly, Outlook Express is the most popular software. But what is surprising is the amount of web mailers that people use. They account for more than 30% of all mails, and that’s pretty surprising given that Eressea doesn’t like HTML mail and is generally a game for more tech-savvy folks.
The chart software I’m using to make these charts is OWTChart, in case you need something to generate charts for web pages, this one gets a recommendation from me. And I’m pretty happy with how those pastel colors turned out 🙂
A week ago, both my harddrives were not recognized, and my PC booted saying “insert system disk”. I guess this is among the most dreadful things a PC can say to me, and my mind started racing: “What do I have backups of?”, “I didn’t commit those changes to …” and worst, “My entire mail archive will be lost”. Luckily, Windows had just somehow shot the boot sector, and I was able to get back at the harddisks.
There’s no backup of stuff on my Windows PC. I decided I had to change that, and since I’m too lazy to shove my data onto my home on the network at regular intervals, I needed software to do that job for me. I found Second Copy. It’s something like an rsync for windows, with a user-friendly interface. You say which folders it should back up, and every few hours, it checks whether you’ve made changes and synchronizes them to the target directory (a folder in my home). It can also store the backup in a ZIP file. Or, if you want two computers to be in synch, it can synchronize in both directions.
I analyzed which folders I’d really miss in case of a crash, and now I use it to synchronize my User Profile, My Mail, and my local Documents folder.
This is very, very useful stuff, and I recommend you try it out for yourself. It costs money, though, so if any of you anyone seen something like it on sourceforge or anywhere that we can use for free, that would of course be even better…
I have two monitors on my desk. Dual monitors on your PC may be nice, but having two different PCs on them can be even nicer – you get twice the CPU power, after all. Up until this week, I needed two keyboards and two mice on my desk. Then I found Synergy – it’s a software that lets you use the same Mouse/Keyboard/Clipboard on several machines. When I move my mouse out the right side of one screen, the second PC comes active, and the pointer appears on the left side. Very cool. The two PCs can even share the clipboard, so I can copy/paste between PCs really fast. And they can run different OSs, too – so Linux on the right, Windows on the left, for example. That’s way cool.
With more and more people getting annoyed at spam, and realizing that for some reason I don’t have a problem with it, they ask me what I do about it. I’m using three tools to fight spam:
despammed.com
Get an email address at www.despammed.com. This is a good address to give in cases where you’re afraid it might be seen by spammers, e.g. on web pages, in forums, in usenet news or on mailing lists. The guys at despammed have some good spam detection tools and very little spam gets through there. Don’t use this address in day-to-day conversations with friends, though, because mail going through there takes quite some time to get to you.
Spam Assassin
I collect all my mail accounts on a central server (eressea.upb.de) using fetchmail, and run it through procmail. That way, I can run mail through special filters like Spam Assassin, a very clever program that gives your mail a spam score, depending on how many spam-typical things it finds in the text. You can decide what to do with mails that score more than a certain number of points, either mark the subject so it says ***SPAM***, or simply throw it away for good.
ASK – Active Spam Killer
ASK checks all senders against a whitelist of people that are allowed to send mail to you. If somebody is not on that list, they get a message asking them to please reply to that message, and if they do, ASK will put them on the whitelist, and the original mail gets passed on to you. That way, each new sender needs to register with your ASK protection once. Most spam doesn’t have valid return addresses, and never gets authenticated. And if someone does, there’s also a blacklist to block him from ever sending you anything again.
Those tools together, when used correctly, can eliminate almost all your spam, without losing important mail. You need to have a Unix account somewhere, of course. I don’t know of any good software that would do the same thing on Windows and not cost a lot of money.