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For your stylish recovery: > Riedel Wine Glasses. Can I Have A Glass For This? Yes, you can. Riedel make the best glasses in the world (well, with a little competition...), painstakingly suiting each drink to the best shape and size of container, for the benefit of nose, mouth, eyes and hold. A very recent addition, not yet found on their official list, is the bourbon glass, made with expert advise from Fred Noe, of the legendary Noe family, overlords of Jim Beam. Form means content indeed! More's the pity that the great majority of drinks are served in inappropriate glasses and therefore never fully enjoyed. [ MetaFilter]

Although I think that Eisch makes much better glasses, especially the Scotch Malt Whisky glas of the Jeunesse series is superior to all of the multiple other glasses I tried (and I do usually use Riedel glasses for Scotch).

Gefunden bei MetaFilter.

Ingo Rammer: "Exchange Server 2000 rocks. Within a couple of hours, I've been able to render my ...

Ingo Rammer: "Exchange Server 2000 rocks. Within a couple of hours, I've been able to render my weblog posts directly from an Exchange public folder." - shudder. If you think you know it all you find that deep in the pits of hell there is even more torture ...

Found at Scripting News.

Polyhedra Polymath

Polyhedra Polymath. > Prof. George W. Hart, of the Computer Science Department at SUNY Stony Brook, has an enviable web presence. His Encyclopedia of Polyhedra alone is worth the visit, his geometric sculptures make the nerd in me weep at their beauty, and his trilobite recipe looks mighty yummy.

Damn. This could have been straight from asr, but it's just something I found on Metafilter. But Trilobyte recipe? This would even be strong for asr people ...

Gefunden bei MetaFilter.

MS licensing

MS licensing. >An explanation of Microsoft's licensing model (from a person that actually likes their software... but not their licensing). Read it and weep. Specially interesting is the situation they got in which they had to pay a license for the new Office (XP) simply to be able to run Office 2000.... which they had already purchased!!

Truly insane. Another one of the advantages of a monopoly: you can force people to pay for a product they don't use, but rather to continue using the one they have already purchased from you. >[via Abort, Retry, Fail?]

Not much can be said about this. Only that people who buy from the devil will suffer what the deserve - okok, we do have some Microsoft stuff, too. And usually we do weep when we read the licenses ...

Gefunden bei Abort, Retry, Fail?.

more viruses

more viruses. From News.com: Email viruses doubled in 2002. And this, with MS's supposed new focus on "security". Oh well. Good thing that other virus-free solutions are coming along :-).

[via Abort, Retry, Fail?] Yep, looks like Microsoft really succeeded in their security focus - especially IE and OE should be burned, blown up and pulled out of reality. Please.

But it won't happen, I fear. Instead of that they will produce even more shit and name it .NET and even more stuff will go bozo.

Gefunden bei Abort, Retry, Fail?.

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It's a delight to just switch off and configure out broken NT machines, when they go bozo. Ok, usually we try to repair stuff, but since the machine that broke down twice today is the last NT based machine in our production environment, I wasn't that keen on getting it back to work. So I just switched the last three shops running on that box to dummy pages, unconfigured everything monitoring this POS and am done with it. On Monday the shops are transferred to a newer box on Linux.

But there is still a question: when a machine has automatic memory error discovery and automatic bank disabling, why can't this POS just do what it is expected to do and switch off the broken memory bank and go on? It worked the last time, why doesn't it work this time? Bah.

One of the stupidiest talks about browsers

One of the stupidiest talks about browsers - sorry, but those guys don't grasp it. Read their little article, find at least 5 errors (there are much more in there, but we want to keep this simple, don't we?) and then you can keep them. This could really be funny if it wasn't for the fact that they are serious on it ... (found through the "Jürgen Möllemann Gedächtnis Bloq")

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Found on Scripting News: A feature for a mail server?.

What if every mail server supported a new feature. An XML-RPC interface with one entry point. It takes one parameter, a user name and returns a struct containing a boolean. The boolean is true if there is such a user on that machine. It's a struct so more info can be returned later. My email program could send a message to the server each piece of mail came from. Hey you got someone with this name, and do they send out spam? If the answer is no, filter it to the bit bucket.

Nice idea, but it's already there. Ok, not "XML-RPC", but there are other formats out there and some are much older. You can use the SMTP VRFY command on many mail servers to verify a user. Problem: since user checking on many machines is very hard work (think about stuff like http://hotmail.com/ or http://gmx.de/ - multi-million-user sites!), so not every host supports it, many hosts don't allow VRFY to not give out too much data (since spammers can use this interface to check addresses for legitimacy, too!) and some only give you an OK on every check (for the same reasons, they just hide better).

So would it solve the problem at hand? No. Spammers would just start to use the very same interface to validate their own email lists and use one picked randomly out of the pool of their addresses as the sender. What would we get? Nothing better than now, only better disguised. You have to take into account that spammers do learn, too. They might be at the bottom of social behaviour on the net, but they are not necessarily stupid.

Maybe I'm missing something or it's too early in the morning, but couldn't we ask the servers if they know about this person sending me the spam. I have a feeling that most of the spam I get comes from made-up people.

Oh, sure they are. They have been for some time now. Spammers are not interested in responses. One of the most important things to note: spammers don't care for email replies. They actually don't care for the recipient at all - all they do is send out mail, that's all. They are paid for that. There might be click-throughs (most of porn spam is to get people to click the links in the mail, that's why most porn spam nowadays is HTML with embedded images). But nobody in that business wants you to return anything to the sender.

So what to do about spam? The currently best practice is to set up a Bayesian mail filter like bmf or any of the like projects. There are some to integrate into mail clients, some to integrate into the mail server. Just watch out for them. I use bmf to filter mail on my server and it works quite well after feeding it several hundred mails and it gets better every round. False positives are down to only 2-3 a day (and mostly administrative stuff that is easily spotted in the spambox) and false negatives are down to 5-7 a day, easily spotted in the prefiltered inbox, too. The vast majority of about 70-80 spam mails per day are filtered out just fine.

Found on Scripting News.

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What's wrong with Joshua Allen's coment on yEnc? One simple thing: yEnc tried to solve a problem in a way that is not stable: there are already implemented standards for encoding, but yEnc ignores them all and put's it's own on top of NNTP and Netnews. It ignores all RFCs in existance and reinvents the wheel.

Will this break things? Sure, it already did. Not everybody jumps on the bandwagon to implement yEnc, so people have to use external tools to get at the stuff they want. But since yEnc is implemented in the worst way possible, this won't always work. Take for example a bi-charset-Environment like the Mac OS. You usually use Mac charsets externally, but talk latin1 or other standard charsets on protocol level. So your data get's converted from one charset to the other. Since yEnc doesn't give applications not knowing about yEnc any clue about it's existence, the stuff get's broken.

yEnc makes almost all errors UUENCODE made, but adds several layers of it's own errors on top of it. This is just plain stupid. And that it "works" is no reason - it works to the extent that people using yEnc capable programs can exchange information. But the basic idea of the Internet is to enable as much people to use something as possible. That's why MIME is so complicated, it's idea is to set up markers in adavance to allow programs to know that something problematic is ahead, even if they don't know what it actually is - and hand it over to a helper application.

yEncs stupid idea of body-tags makes this automatic forward-compatible way of handling stuff problematic.

A very good discussion of the problems of yenc is at http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/yenc.html - read it, understand it and you know what is wrong with Johns little talk.

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If everything works, this should show up on lifejournal and in my own sysadmins corner and so make my life easier, as I only need to edit one system to replicate posts to several hosts. Footbridge rules.

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I hate broken mail servers and mailfilters going haywire. Today bmf played up on me and trashed some mail. Of course there was bound to be some interesting content in there, but I don't know, since I can't read them. fsck. So bmf is out again. But how to get rid of spam? At least bmf filtered enough of the shit out so I didn't have to wade through them all by hand. Now I have to set up some redirection to only filter stuff that's probably spam to protect important mails. Damn, that's bound to be work.

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ObStupidProgrammers: start/stop scripts that check for existence of a pid file but not whether the contained pid actually is still running or just left over from a crash ...

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People taking their notebook out of the network to go on a journey and not only taking their notebook but their cabling adapter and terminator for the 10base2 network with them should expect network troubles. And please don't blame them on the firewall ...

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Setting up a virtual host with Apache for a Python Community Server with Manila-style hostnames (one host for each server) is quite easy:

set up your domain to have a wildcard A record for the domain of the server

set up your apache to have a virtual host with a "ServerAlias *.doma.in" in it

add a ProxyPass rule for the new server where you rewrite / to become http://pycs.server.doma.in:5445/~~vhost~~/%{HTTP_HOST}/

enable the rewriting rules in rewrite.conf for PyCs so it recognizes those addresses

That's it. Run it. Have fun.

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Squid overdid it today when all those rules from yesterday didn't work and squid again went on caching files. So now it is replaced by apache. And guess what? It works as expected ...

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Squid annoyed me. Again. I had the experience that Squid pings servers even though it shouldn't do. Ok, annoying, but you can cope with that (although it produces timeouts from time to time).

I can live with squid sending out requests two or more times even though there really isn't a need to - looks like it's internal GET processing get's fucked up when some timeout on browser-side occurs.

But what really did it for me was it's stupid HEAD handling. It caches HEAD requests. Yeah, stupid idea, they were originally invented for bandwidth saving requests. They are supposed to go out and check the server, and not be cached, because if the document didn't change the client won't need to fetch it, but it needs to know wether it changed at all.

Ok, set up an acl rule for HEAD methods and set it no_cache (actually what braindead idiot invented the "no cache deny ACL" syntax with ACL describing pages that should actually not be cached? This is arse backwards two times!). Should work. Doesn't work. If there was a GET or POST request before, a HEAD will deliver data from the cache, even though it was set no cache. Stupid. Bad. Ugly.

So now I had to come up with an additional rule to suppress only those GET requests that may lead to bad HEAD requests (luckily this was possible because I was having Problems with AmphetaDesk and it's updates, and AmphetaDesk fills in the Browser name). So now I don't cache HEAD requests and don't cache results for AmphetaDesk. Does it work? Not really, if there are still documents in the cache of squid, it delivers HEAD from those documents, regardless of configuration. Damn.

So I had to remove them. That's what the PURGE method is for, right? Wrong. PURGE only purges Documents, not cached headers. So you first have to GET the document, than to PURGE it, to remove it's cached HEAD requests. Oh-my-god.

And now I still have some TCP MEM HIT in the log, although it shouldn't cache. Looks like it handles memory caching different than disc caching. Oh, and this is reproduceable with 2.2 and 2.4. Damn. Sucker.

Couldn't live be made actually easier for sysadmins? Please?