Allow me to make that more sensational: Hotmail has a bad spamproblem. Despite everything that Microsoft has said and done aboutbeing against spam, their Hotmail service is the source and thefacilitator of an increasingly large amount of spam email.

As noticed most recently by Chris Linfoot in a series of blogentries( How to abuse Hotmail and get away with it and More on Hotmail and Personal Addresses ),Microsoft will allow more or less anyone to register a 'MicrosoftPersonal Address'.

A 'Microsoft Personal Address'

This LiveJournal posting wound up raising the question of when one could or should avoid usingclasses to implement something. In Python, my warning signs are somecritical mass of:

• lots of NonMethodFunctions on the class.
• either every piece of data is part of the single object, or nothing is.
• only one object of the class is ever created by the program(as distinct from 'only one copy at any given time, but we throwit away and make a new one every so often').

At a certain

To go with the other FC4 Anaconda bugs (and still no updated installer images), we just ran into anotherAnaconda bug in the process of attempting to upgrade a server fromFedora Core 2 to FC4. This server, like most of our other servers,uses mirrored system disks, which in turn means it has two swappartitions (one on each drive).

If you have this configuration and are upgrading from a previousFedora Core or Red Hat version, on some of your systems Anaconda willabort the

I'm not the first person to notice this, but the MSN search spider ('msnbot' if you want tosearch for it in the user agent portion of weblogs, or just look forrequests from the 207.46.98.* subnet) seems to have gone crazy.

Specifically, the MSNBot is repeatedly and aggressively crawlingcompletely unchanging URLs, while paying much less attention to changingones. On this server , the past 29 day's worth of logs show:

• the

The issue of identity on the Internet is a tricky one, and one of thethings that makes it so confusing is that people often want them to dotwo different things:

1. prove who someone is: the web site really is EBay's.
2. prove who someone isn't: that email isn't from a well-known spammer.

This is confusing because the issue mostly doesn't came up in the realworld, where physical identities are generally one to aperson. Checking drivers' licenses at the

A recent ONLamp article on the Python debugger included the line:

The only time we reach for a debugger is when something goes wrongor breaks and our standard debugging techniques such as print statements (or better yet, log messages) do not reveal the root ofthe problem.

This sparked an insight about why print -based debugging is so popular.(It is; a surprising number of people swear by it, and get good results.The quote got my attention because it made me go 'yeah, the author

Overall connections are down slightly from last week : 200,000 SMTP connectionsfrom 33,800 different IP addresses. The frontend's highwatermark for simultaneous connections hit 24 this time around.

Top 10 kernel level SMTP rejections:

Host/Mask           Packets   Bytes24.145.152.139        13125    630K213.4.149.11          10706    48

What I mean by a 'CIDR' is a network address specification in CIDRnotation (more at the Wikipedia entry for Classless Inter-Domain Routing ).

A 'proper' CIDR is one where the host address portion is all zero.It's easiest to see this for /8's, /16's, and /24's; for example,128.100.0.0/16 is a 'proper' CIDR, with the last two

Anyone who's read online tech magazines for very long knows that by andlarge, the 'trade press' is pretty wretched. Bad articles abound; goodones are rare. (Periodically Slashdot will rise in righteous indignationover a particularly egregious example.)

Yet the field survives, and has no problem getting people to write morearticles for them. How? Follow the money.

Most of the free trade press exists to sell things: it sells readereyeballs to advertisers, and it sells exposure to its authors .