The brief outage was due to a scheduled move of the servers to a separate rack and subnet dedicated to our work with the Center for Information Assurance & Cybersecurity (ciac) at the University of Washington Bothell (uwb), and a11y.com

I am currently exercising the new (to us) equipment and hope to winnow the less than awesome equipment over the next quarter. I spent the last six months finding the best in breed of the surplussed DL385 and DL380 chassis we (work) were going to have recycled. The team and I were able to find enough equipment to bring up one of each with eight and six gigs of memory, respectively. These will make excellent hypervisors for provisioning embedded instances of Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, FreeDOS, etc.

When I initially configured this xen paravirt environment, I failed to plan for integration with libvirt, so I am now re-jiggering the software bridges so …

One of Gmail’s greatest features is its spam filtering. But, if you have a situation where you want to forward mail from multiple Gmail accounts to a single location, that fantastic filtering becomes a little cumbersome. In this situation, having junk mail sitting around in multiple Gmail accounts is actually the opposite of what you want. It would be better for all mail, including spam, to be forwarded so that you can waste time digging through a single spam box rather than many.

Dustin Li has posted (well, enhanced) a nice solution.

The idea is to make sure all email is forwarded even if it is spam. Dustin’s trick is to forward all email which doesn’t contain the EICAR antivirus test string. Since Google blocks …

There was a lot of talk about this being the next menace after email spam. I’m not actually sure what it’s called for VoIP systems, but my Asterisk setup has started to be attacked over the last few days. Lots of entries like: [Aug 27 19:20:30] NOTICE[18826] chan_sip.c: Registration from '"742"<sip:742@a.b.c.d>' failed for '208.109.86.187' - [...]

Dear Kettle friends,

Will Gorman and Mike D’Amour, Senior Developers at Pentaho, are presenting Pentaho’s Google integration work at the Google I/O Developer Conference. (at the Sandbox area to be specific)   Yesterday, Pentaho announced that much.

Here are a few of the integration points:

• Google maps dashboard (available in the Pentaho BI server you can download)
• A new Google Docs step was created for Pentaho Data Integration Enterprise Edition
• Running (AVI, 30MB) the …

For the past few months, I’ve been helping my friend develop and market Philtro .
We’ve gone through various iterations of the elevator pitch for it, and the one that seems to be kinda working, is: “It’s like a spam filter for your Twitter account.”

At SXSW, I got the opportunity to talk to Guy Kawasaki about this tool, and he said “There is no spam on twitter, if you don’t like it, don’t follow them”.

While that’s an easy way to handle spam, I also realized that the word Spam means different things to different people.

On Twitter, nothing is UCE. It’s easy to block the profiles with …

As you may know, Open Query is entirely self-funded, which means the banks owe OQ and me money not vice versa. Things like interest rates are of little concern, which is helpful in volatile times! Of course I do rely on my bank staying in business, but that's now subject to a government guarantee in Australia so I'll just have to go with that for now ;-)

So far, OQ has not experienced much from the economic troubles. But I'll tell you about the possible encounters, since I think they're of interest and lessons can be learnt.

We give away one book to each student at a training day, that is, provided they've paid on time (basically a personalised quick payment bonus). I've got a small shortlist of decent books, but generally I've been handing out copies of …

Today I’ve managed to finish initial version of our bounces-handler package we use for mailing-related stuff in Scribd.

Bounces-handler package is a simple set of scripts to automatically process email bounces and ISP‘s feedback loops emails, maintain your mailing blacklists and a Rails plugin to use those blacklists in your RoR applications.

This piece of software has been developed as a part of more global work on mailing quality improvement in Scribd.com, but it was one of the most critical steps after setting up reverse DNS records, DKIM and SPF.

The package itself consists of two parts:

• Perl scripts to process incoming email:
  • bounces processor — could be …

I don’t know about “me too” types of bug replies, but before everyone goes to the bug database and starts saying “me too”, “this affects me”, “please fix this ASAP”, “I won’t use MySQL 5.1 till this is fixed”, I wonder if this will cause more harm (i.e. more bug spam for the developer, and all those subscribed to it) than good.

It seems like the public Worklog interface gets this right - via voting. Having a count of those that have the same problems, even displayed via “stars”, is a much better interface, and shows urgency a lot better than “me too” posts.

Take one of my favourite worklogs - …

Today, I again spent about an hour to revert changes made by spambots on various MySQL Forge Wiki pages. As I was really sick of this, I now installed a new plugin: reCAPTCHA - this will hopefully raise the bar for spambots to create new user accounts automatically for spamming the Wiki. If you are a registered user already, you will probably not notice the change - by default, CAPTCHAs are only displayed on the following events:

• New user registration
• Anonymous edits that contain new external links
• Brute-force password cracking

Let's hope it helps! Please let me know if you still experience spam problems on the Wiki.

I am happy to announce the latest creation from foundeo: fusionKit.

fusionKit is a CD full of some handy ColdFusion components and UDF's. It is a similar concept to the DRK's that Macromedia used to sell, but is it's 100% ColdFusion.

My favorite component in the kit is the Bayesian CFC. You may recall that spam filters tend to use bayesian analysis to determine if a message is spam or ham. This CFC allows you to perform the same kind of analysis on any block of text. I am using this CFC in one of my client's blogs, and it has blocked over 4,000 spam comments in one week!

There is also the tagging CFC, which makes it easy to work with tags or …