Getting your spam crossed
Received today:
MAIL FROM:
[...]
From: Andrew Bailey.
[...]
Good day partner,
I am Andrew Bailey of International Private Banking at BANK OFENGLAND. I am contacting you concerning a deceased customer and aninvestment he placed under our banks management three years ago. [...]
This spam message apparently can't decide whether it's phish spam oradvance fee fraud spam. Probably some spammer's mailer
CSS is assembly language
I was struck by a thought today: CSS is an assembly language. Thisexplains a lot of its issues, because (like other assembly languages)it suffers from the problem that you can't communicate your high-levelintentions, only your low-level actions.
The whole rat's nest of columnar layout issues and the ensuing irritations are where CSS's true colours show through most clearly.But it's not the only area; almost everywhere you look, CSS is about thelow-level
Link: HTML Doctype declarations inventoried
Activating the Right Layout Mode Using the Doctype Declaration is pretty much summarized by itstitle. As a bonus, it includes a handy chart of how various browsersreact to various specific DOCTYPE declarations (or did, as of when thechart was made; browser DOCTYPE behavior is an ever-changing target, andthe chart is a good illustration of how much variety there can be).
(From Anne van Kesteren .)
An Amanda gotcha with dumps to disk
One of the configurations that Amanda supportsthese days is dumping to disk instead of to tape. The leading way to dothis is to use your disk space as virtual tapes, using the 'file' outputdriver (per here ).
When you do this, it is vital to remember that to Amanda, these aretapes . Very fast tapes, but tapes. And they have all of the limitationsof tape. Such as that only one thing can be written to them at once.
So if you do not
Why have an MX record to yourself?
In a recent entry ,Russell Coker brings up an issue:
One issue that has been the topic of some pointless discussion iswhether a mail server should have an A record or an MX record.
It's harmless not to have an MX record that points to yourself,but having one can save people a DNS query in many situations.
Answers to DNS queries have three sections: answer records, authorityrecords, and additional records. Authority records are the NS records ofthe authoritative nameservers (and SOA records for negative
On the various meanings of <tag />
With the growth of XHTML, some HTML documents have started sproutingthings of the form '
' or ' ', intended to representempty tags. Sometimes this is due to attempts at XHTML to HTMLcompatibility , andsometimes it's just due to HTML superstitions. (Most people who writeHTML are not experts and have not read the W3C specifications , so superstitions arenot uncommon.) These people and documents are making a mistake. Unfortunately, thereare three entirely
Weekly spam summary on October 14, 2006
This week, we:
- got 13,890 messages from 262 different IP addresses.
- handled 18,923 sessions from 1,185 different IP addresses.
- received 187,506 connections from at least 50,091 different IPaddresses.
- hit a highwater of 22 connections being checked at once.
Connection volume is up again from last week ,but everything else is down. Things fluctuated over the week:
Day Connections different IPs Sunday 2
Link: Warning Signs for Tomorrow
Warning Signs for Tomorrow is a collection of warning signs for tomorrow. Amusing and potentially usefulones (for me; your mileage may vary) include 'lack of internet connectivity','ubiquitous surveillance', and 'motivation hazard'.
(From James Nicoll .)
Why quoting in the Bourne shell makes me grumpy
Imagine for a moment that you have an almost arbitrary string(no nulls, newlines, or other funky control characters) thatyou want to quote so that it passes through the Bourne shellintact. How do you do it?
The Bourne shell offers you two quoting schemes, strings insingle quotes and strings in double quotes.
Strings in double quotes need special characters escaped withbackslashes. There are five of them (quick, do you know them all?), orsix in some situations in some versions of the
How stable my AMD 64-bit systems have been
In a comment on a recent entry , Ryan asked me howstable my 64-bit Linux installs have been. The answer is kind ofcomplicated, but the quick summary is that I am happy with themachines and they're stable.
Currently and in the recent past, I have dealt with three AMD 64-bitmachines, two using ASUS M2N4-SLI motherboards, and one with a TyanTomcat K8E S2865ANRF, and all with 2GB of
Menu