Never been one to let the carrier drop

Well, I’ve been testing out a new mail server by teeing all my email to both it and the current live mail server.

The results are:

1) On the new mail server, one spam message leaked through the spam filter. On the old mail server, seventeen did.

2) The new mail server is approximately ten times faster (in terms of searching the inbox, opening folders, etc). It is in fact fast enough that it is practical to search all my old email.

3) It is now difficult to convince myself to open the old mail server.

So, I need to, sometime soon (possibly as soon as this weekend) shut down all access to both servers for a few hours so I can copy everyone’s mail over to the new machine.

This will nearly conclude my efforts to retire Gateway. Once this is done, all that needs to be done is to set up another server to take over DNS handling for Gateway – I will probably use one of my cobolt Raqs if I can get nsd to compile on them (which I probably can).

Also I need to reload the OS on my AIX machine (it came configured for graphics/3d work, which isn’t what I have in mind) and get it on the network.

Be nice to me or I’ll post a link that downloads Mischief Committee to your cell phone as a ringtone.

Every once in a while, I forgive a spam message for getting through my spam filter.

This would be a example: (from today’s inbox)

Good afternoon pal!
If you want to have a sex
But you have some problems
Do not worry just relax
We have already solved them!
Down our Cialis pills
Wait for 30 minutes
Look at her pretty tits
And you will be listed in the book by Guinnes
Everything will be ok
Bring her lots of pleasure
You can do it every day
And have a mind-blowing leisure
Buy Cialis here!
Good luck

I mean, it rhymes, it has some of that ‘all of your base are belong to us’, and apparently it even fools SpamAssassin. If I get 50 of them I will be annoyed, but I can deal with one.

Okay, so, I’m hopping. I’ve been writing Java applets for cell phones for one of my day jobs, and I am right now trying to get J2ME-Polish and Apache Ant to work togeather properly on my system. I’m somewhat slowed by the fact that JAVA_HOME is set *somewhere* but I can’t seem to figure out where, and it’s set *wrong*.

In the meantime, I’ve made much progress on the mk3eb project. There is the beginnings of the perl packet code at perl-api-dev, including CRC signing, hamming encode and decode, etc.

Right now I’m pondering whether maybe the reg code shouldn’t *have* a outgoing packet buffer, instead generating each byte as the transmit code is ready for it. This would look like a godawful lot of case statements, but it would probably be more optimial from a ram usage perspective, and it would offer the option of longer output packets.

OTOH, the code is much easier to write if I do use a outgoing packet buffer, and that may be what steers me.

The other thing I’m pondering is whether I should have one of the len/type entries be a true variable length packet, or whether I should require even nodes that haven’t a clue what hamming encoding is to understand how hamming encoding affects the packet length. Doing the latter would make the code much cleaner everywhere, and could be done by a simple lookup table. So I’m inclined to do it. But not right now, because right now I need to wrestle with j2me-polish and see if I can get it to compile my application, and then make the modifications required.

Progress is being made on the retiring of Gateway. Last night I copied /usr/local to the new server – I’ve already copied /home/workspace and /home/mpeg. For those of you with files on Gateway, they will be being copied as part of the final mail migration. If you used MMDF folders, your old mail folders will be gzipped and archived in a subdirectory of your home folder, as well as being converted to the maildir format and hot and live on the imap server.

Enyc still doesn’t seem to be able to make ssl certs that match the machine.. I’m going to look into this, but in the meantime, this patch makes the nasty errors go away:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2131/
How to Install in Thunderbird:

1. Right-Click the link above and choose “Save Link As…” to Download and save the file to your hard disk.
2. In Mozilla Thunderbird, open the extension manager (Tools Menu/Extensions)
3. Click the Install button, and locate/select the file you downloaded and click “OK”

Hope you’re all doing well, and that the above bit of geekese didn’t make your eyes cross.

My PA system sits and gathers dust in the garage. I have no contacts here for putting it to use, and I lack the energy right now to figure out where to find some.

Some part of me wants to rent a generator and drive out into the desert until there’s no one around, set up and listen to 80s songs loud enough to feel every note. I go to clubs and I think, ‘my system sounds better than this..’. Why does it languish in my garage doing nothing? I even went through and tested everything and replaced all the burned out bits before I left Seattle. But yet.

I am beginning to make progress again on my EV project. You can watch my growth and confusion if you want at http://wiki.evtech.org/index.php/MK3EB

I still need to finish mixing Mike’s session at Wayne’s World. I made some improvements to the mix the other day – among other things, I grouped the vocals, the drums, and the instruments onto three main faders so I can get them balanced against themselves, and then balance them against each other.