Yesterday I had to temporarily blackhole all mail to this domain. The spam and its resulting bounces were completely out of control and I was seeing something like 1500 pieces of mail blown out of a fire hose at my mail account per hour. I know this isn’t impressive for most people but it got even worse towards the end of the day. After about the twentieth notification that I was nearing the quota cut off point I finally just started flushing everything down the toilet of /dev/null. I thought it would eventually freak me out but I was more relieved than anything. Email fucking blows as both a method of communication and as an ecosystem. I also switched all of my accounts from IMAP to POP again after swearing more than once that I would never go back down that ‘lost all my shit’ road again.
Thunderbird also ate shit after a few hundred rounds of trying to battle the spam/bounce influx in IMAP mode. It remained broken when I switched everything to POP and didn’t want to build new accounts correctly. I sat and stared at the rubble for a little while and then fired up the Apple Mail.app. I like it a lot more now that I did in early versions. Its speed has improved tremendously since the last time I used it and the integration with Spotlight is actually pretty handy. I don’t know how long I’ll stick with it but it’s a nice stopgap measure for the short term. I have no idea if there were recent vast improvements because I didn’t fire the application up until after I’d successfully installed all of the recent (10.4.7) upgrades. I have no idea.

So, I deleted around 30,000 pieces of mail yesterday without looking at any of it. If you sent me anything important then please do it again. I was able to save most of my address book from Thunderbird so almost everyone I mail regularly shouldn’t get arbitrarily filtered but keep that in mind if you don’t hear from me for a couple of days.

As I go outside to have the first cigarette since roughly two o’clock this afternoon (it’s now nearly eight p.m. if you’re playing along at home) I am greeted with the piercing cries of what must either be a toddler with a speech focused learning disability (before you start parading around that ‘P.C.’ bullshit y’all are so fond of waving around like the bloody shirt for stupid consider the fact that my actual and real knowledge of child psychology borders on negative nil or its equivalent) or an infant on the fast track to puberty.

I’m rapidly annoyed but, more importantly, this also gives me a perfectly subjective instance of evolution at work with no noise and an uptime that would make *BSDers cringe. I understand that the basic function of a crying child is to summon a parent or an adult capable of resolving the situation or want. The moment I heard the grinding repetition of the endless and miserably tearful cries my teeth were clenched. This system is pretty much working.

I initially thought the same system had broken down when several minutes passed where a child was screaming with an unnerving velocity and at crippling volumes without the acknowledgement of any adult. It seemed like the entire chain had been broken until I realized that the screeching of this feral-sounding child had a secondary and auxiliary effect on me: I wanted to hunt down the people responsible for the barrage of noise and bludgeon the region in which their genitals dwell until they are incapable of banging out any more offspring. See? Evolution is self correcting and my faith in it is renewed at least in the comic/absurdist sense. In addition there is the cock punching part which is admittedly appealing.

Just when your nightmares got more bearable someone had to go and post a video of that scary ass centipede catching and eating a bat.

Plug your ears when the narrator talks about the potency of its venom because that is information that no one needs to know.

I finally caved and created a Skype account. This doesn’t really mean anything since I am incredibly impatient with telephones generally and I tend to walk away from my machine pretty consistently. Anyway, it probably is easier to get in touch with me over one of the IM networks but I’m teammurder666 if you swing that way. I will only crank up the application when I have time to talk so don’t feel like you’re bugging me necessarily.

Ooops. It looks like WinFS, the only really compelling thing that a next gen Windows really had to offer other than to video card manufacturers, is permanently playing possum. This should not surprise anyone but it is a little disappointing since I have to support this shit day in and day out. I was really hoping for one less broken aspect to the operating system and had dreams of a halfway robust file system but as is nearly always the case with MSFT this was largely marketing in the Longhorn days. Instead you’ll get a bloated interface that costs more than the hardware you bought to run it on. Jesus. The comments attached to the post are more brutal and specific than I could ever get as someone who is more accustomed to fixing broken Windows machines than fixing them so go read those.

Update, I guess

I’ve been reading a little more about what other people think about this announcement and I’m not sure that the abolition of WinFS from the operating system is quite as apocalyptic as I first thought. Tim Bray said his piece about it and some of the links he included in his post were pretty informative. It seems like a lot of folks are pretty happy that NTFS is going to stay whether they’ve weathered the storm of the transition with Windows 2000 or whether they’re working on FOSS software that needs to place nice with NTFS. I’d entirely forgotten about the much hyped Cairo project which is probably the point here. Announce the vaporware, kill the vaporware and endure the small bit of outrage, and then announce the next batch of marketing bullshit new technology that will never make it into production and people will just keep forgetting.

My friend Tony notified me that this site is blocked by another filtering service and in this case it is the one built into the SonicWall firewall appliance. Because I have such an affinity for four letter words this doesn’t surprise me but it does remind me that I need to get to work on something I’ve been thinking about doing for quite a while: I want to assemble a static page here that lists as many of the look up tools for filtering agents as possible and proxies and the like that people have noted as ways to get around those filtering devices. This page will eventually appear somewhere in the link list over to the right. This post serves as a reminder to get this done.

That said I should also mention that I understand why people employ prefab filtering stuff. I also work for a state agency that is underfunded and with that job comes any number of ridiculous expectations. I don’t blame anyone with more budget for technology than staff for taking the somewhat easier route to getting thankless tasks accomplished. That won’t stop me from trying to share information about how to get around those technologies though because they’re seldom accurate or really helpful to anyone outside the organization. This becomes especially annoying when organizations that theoretically exist to distribute information use this crap and unknowingly (in the specific details at least) neuter their capacity to provide information.

Weighing in about the whole Apple open sourcing their applications debate makes me lean towards Apple letting some of that stuff go. Why? Because most of the real innovation comes from ripping off shareware developers which requires a higher degree of engineering for Apple coders when they could be making web sites about their family vacations or something. Instead of merely waiting until shareware developers have determined the market value of a feature and then devouring their constituency it would seem a shorter path to bags o’cash if there were some common code that wasn’t limited to APIs and the other bits like Webkit. Less work for Apple and more control for users sounds pretty good to me and I’m joking about a lot of this but I think Tim Bray is spot on in his take on the situation and its relative advantages and disadvantages. When you have total control over both the hardware and the core software that makes the magic possible then you don’t have a lot to lose if developer involvement in the platform takes an upswing.

Doing my coffee and wake up thing at work between telephone calls (note that anything posted before 5 a.m. will likely be an unintelligible pile of syllables) I noticed an article linked by Techdirt about the apparently fluid liability that goes along with offering open wifi at a business. This is another one of those things that is maddening since it is amazingly simply to limit access to wifi if you have the slightest clue about technology or are literate enough to RTFM. Most wireless routers are pretty easy to set up these days with browser loaded admin interface and all sorts of other goodies so excusing incompetency with ‘it’s just too hard to set up’ are less valid than they were a few years ago. There are just too many easy analogies here like pay radio stations broadcasting over the usual AM/FM bands and then suing you for picking up their signal without paying. Granted, there is at least some question of consuming limited resources but similar to all the above ranting and raving about configuration it is fairly easy to block those you don’t want connected to your network if they’re perpetually sucking up your resources. I wonder if the cafe worker in question really called 911 about the man leeching their wireless from outside. Really?

I’m not often captivated by novel interfaces which is probably one of the reasons that more often than not I simply look askance at projects that simply meta-manipulate the terms of the desktop interface. It just seems a lot like adding a whole bunch of arbitrary complexity to a metaphor that is already being stretched like hot taffy. I feel the same way about the BumpTop interface. Yes, it is fucking cool especially in the feature demonstration mode where you can show off all of that grouping functionality and rotating on axis bling but it still seems a step towards the clusterfuck desktop that breeds the sort of intellectual laziness leads to people ‘losing’ files they’ve just downloaded by adding another layer of hierarchical complexity that can be completely altering on the fly. Prototype and all that but the only sane application I could really envision for this is as an extension of an email client as the file types there are similar and fine tuned sorting and archiving according to weird user preference might actually be advantageous. Maybe I’m just a stick in the mud for hierarchical structures but I would lose my mind in a matter of ten minutes if trapped in an environment like that.

A whole bunch of places were passing along the announcement that Gnu-HALO actually rolled out a release which is based on Linux (specifically SLAX) instead of the originally planned BSD architecture. Yes, it is yet another live CD but the feature list should at least pique your oh-so-jaded interest. There are some good ideas at work in this project and although many of them may well be rolled into distributions I know nothing about the presentation of the features makes it sound extra special. This is killer:

Software whitelists. Under a default configuration, no application can run on the system unless it’s been properly registered as an authorized application.

As I said earlier, it’s probably already been implemented in other distros but that just sounds particularly kick ass and is a total pain in the ass to configure on Win32 without either purchasing some commercial application or charging into regedit and AD settings blind drunk and with both pistols drawn. I’d love to say that I’m going to take it for a spin but I can’t imagine that I’ll have time to do anything more than determine that it does indeed boot. I don’t think they need my help testing that.

This guy has been haunting my inbox in the form of Korean language spam. I have no idea what sort of spying he’s supposed to be doing but the next time you’re by yourself in the house late at night just imagine this weird old white man positioned outside your house chuckling gently like Wilford Brimley and possibly mispronouncing ‘diabetes.’

I had pieced together this long and tedious recollection about getting most of the developer tools that I need up and running on the MacBook Pro but I’m actually a little concerned with obsessing over mundane details. It’s a lifelong habit of mine and I’ve seen it manifest itself in what I’ve written here more often than I’d like it to. Instead a list:

1. MySQL: The story begins and ends with me wondering why in the hell I thought compiling this from ports was a good idea. Use the stupid binary, stupid. So, yeah, now that is up and running with a few misgivings about the version I compiled a while ago not working. I especially don’t like the fact that the same files were installed in the same places and suddenly they work. Did I forget the magic fairy dust? Was I aesthetically impure?

2. PHP: For PHP I did what I should’ve done in the first place and used the Entropy PHP module instead of dicking around so much. It works like magic. I have only begun to feel stupid. I also set up Rails while I was at it which took exactly one script and one gem update. The story is boring, okay? I’m not entirely sure that I’ll even use rails for anything remotely productive but it was one more pointless troubleshooting exercise so who am I to argue?

3. Enigmail: The initial failures with this Thunderbird extension were sort of a show stopper. I can’t really find a particular party to blame. I reinstalled TBird with the old files in place and it mysteriously began working. I don’t like magic it makes me think of fucking Doug Henning and I want to decrypt and sign mail not get creeped the fuck out. It is working now and I have no idea why. Do you? As a side note: Macgpg was working the entire time and I was able to manually encrypt and decrypt text files.

4. Airport deciding to take a two hour lunch break at random: So, I’ve been experiencing a lot of wireless network connection drops which pisses me off to no end since I’d rather have my email client dealing with my spam clogged IMAP boxes while I’m sleeping than making me wait fifteen minutes to filter 3500 pieces of mail that no one wants to read before I can read the half dozen that I need to read lest all of my ties to other people be severed and overrun by crybaby users who can’t remember their passwords. I wanted to blame the Airport Extreme or whatever grandiose name Apple bonged up for their wireless card but it really had to do with a firmware upgrade for my router. That was a pretty scary process that involved three consecutive failed installs that yielded errors that read something like “Update has are failing.” You really can’t ask for a more alarming error message than that and you’re absolutely foolhardy to run the same firmware upgrade four damned times before you foil the space-time continuum of mixed tenses and bring your wireless router back away from the light. So, fewer clicks on the stupid wireless icon on the menu bar is a good thing.