Link: OpenBSD spamd
OpenBSD spamd - greylisting and beyond is a presentation by BobBeck of the University of Alberta about the OpenBSD's spamd system, howspammers react to it and similar systems, how you can exploit this,and the University of Alberta's experiences with spamd, complete withinteresting numbers. I'm sadly jealous, as local feelings insure thatI'm not going to get to deploy this sort of technology any time soon.
(Also from Richard Johnson of river.com.)
Link: varnish, a HTTP accelerator
Varnish - the http accelerator [PDF] is the slides for apresentation about a HTTP accelerator for dynamic websites/CMS systems(its website is here ). Slide threemade me laugh out loud, and I have to say 'what he said'.
(From Richard Johnson of river.com.)
A thought of the day
Something that occurred to me not too long ago:
Once you start thinking of furniture as a type of computer hardware,it becomes much easier to talk yourself into buying a decent deskchair.
In some sense it is completely absurd how many computer people arewilling to pay several hundred dollars for a good monitor (LCD or CRT),but will balk at spending even a hundred dollars for a comfortablechair. (In another sense, it is very human; we're not exactly entirelyrational creatures.)
Link: A lovely summary of the XHTML issue
On the WHATWG mailing list, Henri Sivonen put together a marvelous andconcise summary of the whole problem with XHTML in today's world, andwhy XHTML advocates usually irritate me. I'm not going to quote anything;just read the whole thing here .
(From Sam Ruby , who linkedto an Ian Hickson WHATWG mailing list message that quoted HenriSivonen's message.)
The problem with #ifdef
Something that crystallized in the process of writing the earlierBourne shell quoting entry is that #ifdef abuseleads to bad results for the same fundamental reason that multiplelevels of escaping are bad: after a certain point, people can no longerclearly see what the real code will look like.
When you can't see what the code looks like, it's really hard to makesensible changes; either you make blind stabs or you have to carefullyreconstruct the actual code, usually by hand. Either process is error
What Google Sitemaps isn't
The Google Sitemaps XML format has a somewhat underdocumented The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site.[...] The Google documentation is somewhat imprecise here, as there are atleast two meanings for 'priority' and they don't really say which onethey mean. The first sort of priority is 'which pages do I want crawledfirst'; the second sort of priority is 'which pages (within my site) doI The SMTP frontend died and was restarted at 2:24 am Wednesday morning,so some stats are only from then. That said, this week we: Following up the previous case , here's something weran into recently. Imagine that you want to pull lines out of So what do you have to write? It turns out that you Here's something I would like to grind into various people programmingcallback email address verification: Don't do callback email address verification with a MAIL FROM of <>unless the address has actually sent you email . Why? Because if an address never sends any email to start with, it maynot be willing to receive bounces (the major source of email from <>).Blocking null MAIL FROMs from sending email to such addresses is acompletely rational way to block bad bounces from forged spam runs. The After yesterday , I decided to spend some timeworking out how many of the root DNS servers are reachable overour Internet II link. The answer surprised me: 9 out of the 13root nameservers are reachable over Internet II . (The necessary disclaimer: your view of what is reachable over InternetII may well vary from ours due to routing and local policy issues.) We prefer to send packets over our Internet II link, so working out thisnumber was relatively simple. I got a list of the IP
Weekly spam summary on December 23rd, 2006
Another example of why Bourne shell quoting makes me grumpy
/etc/shadow for specificlogin names; you'd use, for example, ' grep "^${UNAME}:" /etc/shadow '.Now imagine that some of your login names include '$', so you want togenerate a version of $UNAME with the '$' quoted.
Something to avoid in callback email address verification
How many root DNS servers are reachable over Internet II?
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