PreshBlog

I’ve got a Samsung ML-1610 laser printer, which is a great value solid little laser printer (it was around fifty quid IIRC). Samsung even supply Linux drivers for it, which is great. However, their drivers use a GUI installer, which isn’t a lot of use if the box you’re connecting the printer to doesn’t run X (i.e. it’s a server).

For my future reference, and for anyone else who finds it useful, simple steps to get it working (for CUPS):

(continue reading…)

Okay, this dude has serious skills… that’s some amazing bike control!

Okay, I’ve been having strange problems where procmail will suddenly stop moving messages to a mailbox.

It works fine for a while, then (with no changes to the recipes) it’ll suddenly stop moving incoming spam to my spam box.

Looking at the procmail log shows it’s failing to write to the mbox file:
(continue reading…)

Okay, I came across this site the other day: http://www.netauthority.org/

They describe themselves as:

The Net Authority is an organization dedicated to the removal of offensive material from the Internet. The online world is teeming with pornography, depravity, blasphemy, and all kinds of hate propaganda. It is our mission to define a set of guidelines to which all information posted on the Internet must adhere, and to hold responsible those who would knowingly break those guidelines.

Erm, who the fuck do they think they are? “To hold responsible those who would knowingly break those guidelines? What the hell do you think you’re going to do about it? You’ve made up your own set of arbitrary guidelines, and want to threaten to somehow punish people who don’t abide by them?
(continue reading…)

I’ve just written a Perl module to fetch lyrics from www.lyricwiki.org and released it to CPAN.

It’s a fetcher designed to be used with Lyrics::Fetcher module on CPAN">Lyrics::Fetcher (although you can also use it directly without Lyrics::Fetcher).

Get Lyrics::Fetcher::LyricWiki module on CPAN">Lyrics::Fetcher::LyricWiki on CPAN now (it’s just been released and will take a little while to reach all the mirrors so if it’s not there when you read this, give it a little while :) )

Wanda’s dishwasher quit working so she called a repairman. Since she had to
go to work the next day, she told the repairman, “I’ll leave the key under
the mat. Fix the dishwasher, leave the bill on the counter, and I’ll mail you a cheque.”

“Oh, by the way don’t worry about my bulldog Spike. He won’t bother you. But,
whatever you do, do NOT, under ANY circumstances, talk to my parrot!” “I
REPEAT, DO NOT TALK TO MY PARROT!!!”

When the repairman arrived at Wanda’s apartment the following day, he
discovered the biggest, meanest looking bulldog he has ever seen. But, just
as she had said, the dog just lay there on the carpet watching the repairman
go about his work.

The parrot, however, drove him nuts the whole time with his incessant
yelling, cursing and name calling. Finally the repairman couldn’t contain
himself any longer and yelled,

“Shut up, you stupid, ugly bird!”

To which the parrot replied, “Get him, Spike!”

OK, I’ve been meaning to post up a few pics of my new house for ages, but finally got round to it. So, here they are!

This is the front (ours is the one on the right, it’s split down the middle (I wish it was the whole building :)

Inside, looking at the front door:

The French doors out into the garden:

Looking across the garden:

The bathroom:

The bedroom (it’s slightly bigger than it looks in this picture, there’s a little alcove that goes round the corner on the right too):

The (admittedly quite small) kitchen:

In time, I think we’ll re-fit the kitchen, making better use of the space – the current kitchen is pretty badly planned, and doesn’t make good use of space at all.

And finally, this is the view looking out of our front door:

All in all I’m chuffed with it – it might not be a huge mansion, but it’s a good start! Above all, it has a reasonably sized garden, so we can throw BBQ’s whenever we actually have reasonable weather!

I joined Project Honey Pot today. It’s an interesting project using Honey Pots to detect email address harvesters.

I’ve set up a couple of honey pots to help out, and donated several MX records (it’s easy, just create a sub-domain MX record pointed to their server.
(continue reading…)

As well as my normal development duties I deal with some of the incoming abuse reports at work, and recently I’ve dealt with a number of phishing sites which submit data to a script named “Mr-Brain.php”. A quick Google showed no useful results, so I’m posting about it here.

(continue reading…)

I’ve started seeing a trend in spam over the last few months increasingly using samples of Linux/Open Source software documentation for the subject line / random text to confuse Bayesian filters. Mostly it doesn’t help them get past SpamAssassin, but they’re trying to be clever and increase their chances. It does seem kind of futile though – technical users generally aren’t stupid enough to respond to spam.

(continue reading…)