I finally gave in last night and switched my spam proxy to using the SORBS DUL DNSRBL (also their web and http RBLs). This means that you can't send mail to me from a dynamic IP, or an open web proxy.
Why? Most of my spam comes from hosts listed in those RBLs, and none of my legitimate mail. And I'm doing SMTP-time rejects based on spamassassin scores, and spamassassin chews CPU time like there's no tomorrow. I'd already added a DNS whitelist (white.dnsl.dis.org.nz) which listed the people I[*] usually got mail from, and I hacked qpsmtpd's spamassassin plugin to ignore mail that had been whitelisted. But spam still chews CPU, and it seems to come in waves.
So far, no one has complained (but it has only been 12 hours or so). But the spam proxy's load average seems to be hitting 10 much less often, which can only be a good thing.
Oh. And qpsmtpd is wonderful. It's a perl SMTP proxy designed to sit in front of your ordinary MTA. It's amazingly easy to write plugins for. You should all use it.
[*] Well, mail to me, or to tepidmail users, or to lists.dis.org.nz.
update: or to *.interface.org.nz. Which seems to have unhappified some people whose TCL cable modems are listed in the SORBS DUL despite their IPs being static. But that's what the whitelist is for.
The URLless[*] church at which I worship (Island Bay Presbyterian) had an AGM last night. At it, I was elected (or whatever the appropriate verb is) to Parish Council. Which means that I get to go to even more meetings.
[*] Well, there's a mailto:; I don't think that counts.
Went with Richard to the Recycling Day thingy on Saturday to drop off some old gear. Apparently so did many others.
There are photos.
...has been announced. It's not enormously cheap: $28/mo for 128k up, $38/mo for unconstrained both ways. But this is still significantly cheaper than Telecom's current UBS wholesale pricing for the 3.5Mbps service ($55 for 3.5Mbps/512Kbps).
But still no clothes-optional DSL. And no ADSL2. I think we'll be on our 4Mbps/2Mbps cable for a while yet.
TradeMe have recently launched a new service that allows people to bid via SMS. This is, hoever, a service they offered several years ago (I even used it) and then pulled for some reason. I'd love to know why they think it'll be successful this time.
Seems that dropping an iPod in an aeroplane loo is terrorism too. Of the "oh noes, we must land immediately and worry" variety.
(via the Techsploder)
So last week eeyore, canllaith and I went to Chaffers St New World, as a culmination of some minutes of planning.
Chaffers St has exciting electronic LCD pricetags, seemingly solar powered and configured via a set of odd light-like things that I suspect send out signals via IR. It would be neat to work out how they do this.
Therefore, a DSE serial IrDA adapter and 486 laptop running irdadump were stashed into a backpack, and we walked through the supermarket trying not to look suspicious.
This trying to look suspicious in no way involved me standing in the middle of the bread section holding my backpack up to the IR transmitter on the ceiling.
Alas, our attempt was unsuccessful; irdadump only showed the laptop's usual shouts of "look at me, I speak IrDA!". Which means either they don't use IrDA, or they don't transmit anything most of the time.
I have decided upon an exciting new way of rating video content, involving a number of categories
- 0: Can I get those 135 minutes of my life back?
- 0.5: Watchable once, but not note- or enthusiasm-worthy
- 1: Worth watching so you can say you've seen it
- 2: Engenders a desire to enthuse to others about, but not really watchable with the same group more than once
- 3: Watchable more than once
- 4: Really really good
Ratings 3 and above should not be given until a movie has been seen more than once to ascertain that it does survive repeated viewings. So some twos must be potential threes. I'm too good at enthusing about movies only to discover that I find a second viewing tedious.
Movies I have seen recently, and their ratings under this exciting new system:
- In My Father's Den [2]
- The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension [0]
- Ring (Original Japanese; less scary than the American "The Ring", but made marginally more sense) [2]
- Mon Oncle [3]
- 12 Monkeys [2]
- 2001 [1]
- Young Frankenstein [2]
- The Truman Show [3]
- Adaptation [2]
Updated my Typo install, and switched to SCGI in the hope of gaining better performance. Found a nice guide to doing so.
Alas, while I get less errors than I did with FastCGI, my blog is still slow. I don't know what to blame now. The host being 230ms away, maybe?