Anti-spam work is pure overhead

Here is something that is perhaps obvious, but still worth mentioning:all anti-spam work is in a sense pure overhead, in that it is time andresources spent fixing a situation to return it to the way it was beforethe spammers showed up. Anti-spam work does not actually improve emailin a broad sense, it just makes it as not-bad as possible.

(It is possible that anti-spam work will lead to techniques thatimprove email overall, perhaps better ways of automatically sorting and


How to tell when your bug reporting system is at its limits

There reaches a certain point in the life of many projects, especiallyopen source projects, when your bug reporting system just doesn't workany more. By 'doesn't work' I don't mean that your systems fall overand the software stops working; I mean that the system stops doing anygood and instead becomes the place where bug reports go to die. (Actualimportant bugs get reported and often tracked by different channels.)

So how can you tell if you've reached this point


我也開心飲過酒

已經忘了是何時開始,我又翻來覆去地聽〈人來人往〉,在不開燈的房間,一根一根地抽煙,從整個工作意識型態和生活機器裡剝落下來,覺得處於另一時空,所有之前接下來逐漸到期堆積如山的工作,都顯得陌生不可理解。若

追 女 手 冊 ( 一 )

上 兩 期 一 篇 《 男 追 女 的 四 大 謬 誤 》 , 其 實 是 我 指 導 朋 友 追 女 仔 的 日 常 點 子 , 想 不 到 引 來 極 大 迴 響 , 居 然 有 很 多 男 士 電 郵 或 留 言 說 : 「 不 早 說 ! 」 ( 本 來 還 以 為 會 被 人 罵 內 容 沒 創 意 , 阿 媽 係 女 人 。 ) 徇 眾 要 求 , 會 將 我 對 女 人 怎 看 男


北京奧運開幕現場

我的開幕式門票,座位在北方,當然不是最好的位置

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  • (1) News That You Will Never Find In Hong Kong English-Language Newspapers (08/08/2008) ... and this was the biggest story yesterday at the Hong Kong Internet forums. ( The Sun ; Apple Daily )

  • (2) Where Are The Locations Of The Five Stars? (08/08/2008) ( Tianya Forum ) Why do some mainlanders hold bad opinions about Hong Kong'ers? Sometimes, it is the latter who

    難以拒絕

    羅展鳳寄來書封面的檔案,於是,我便迷迷糊糊地答應了參與。



    《出版之門》2008-08-05報道:香港三聯書店“現代中國”系列講座第二講──“70/80中國新人類”定於本周六下午舉行,將由《城市畫報》資深


    Scramble

    The online puzzle game Scramble has addicted my mind to its fun with alphabets for quite a while. Every now and then I find myself carried away by this remarkable word game, in which we line up the scrambled letters to from a new word.

    Although chances are that I am killing time by juggling with the alphabets, there are occasionally good lessons to learn. Trust me, the word game sparkles with amusing examples of life lesson. Think of the word "trust", and drop the letter t – alas,

    How to exploit unsigned repository metadata

    Courtesy of Don Kaminsky's slides for his Black Hat DNS talk, I wound up reading Attacks on PackageManagers ,which identifies a number of attacks that can be mounted if you canset yourself up as a package repository mirror for your favoriteLinux distribution. A number of the attacks are straightforward,but judging from the Slashdot discussion the dangers of unsignedrepository metadata are not as clear. So here is an attempt toexplain them simply.

    Suppose that you are an attacker with a repository mirror (the papershows that


    A workaround for the Python module search path issue on Unix

    One of the little challenges with writing Unix programs in Python isthe search path problem. The natural structure of Python programs is tosplit functionality up into a bunch of modules and then import themall in the main program, but the natural structure of a Unix program isto put its binary into one directory (such as /usr/bin ) but all ofits helper bits into a second, completely different directory. So theproblem is: how is a Unix Python program supposed to find its modules?

    (The