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From Silicon Valley… |
Group Warns Of More Junk E-mail – International Business Times –
This is simply insane. I use the Spamhaus RBLs as a filter before Spamassassin touches the mail so that Spamassassin won’t have to work as hard. Hopefully, Spamhaus will be able to keep Spamhaus.org. At least I have Spamassassin working well these days.
Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish: Fareed Throws In The Towel
Wow, I’m with Andrew in saying that Fareed know his stuff about the Middle East. I wonder how Friedman feels about Iraq right now, and what can be done.
I’ve had dry eye over the past two days – especially after waking up from a long night or overnight. I would characterize the feeling as how your eyes feel after you wake up in the morning after forgetting to take out your contacts the night before or the dryness after a bad hangover. Right now, I’m trying to drink a lot of fluids, and I’m applying artificial tears every hour. Hopefully, the dry eye syndrome goes away sooner rather than later.
I removed Darwinports from my OS X mailserver because it was affecting my perl builds since my perl builds were going to /opt/local instead of their normal location. This was really messing up all the perl program dependencies for Spamassassin. All I had to do to remove Darwinports was to remove the /opt/ directory and the /etc/opt/ directory. After that, all the Perl builds and pointers went to the correct location.
On another note, Spamassassin has been working very well between FuzzyOCR, the network checks and the Bayes database.
John Varley skewers Ann Coulter
From the Gaea Trilogy to Steel Beach, I’ve loved John Varley’s original science fiction. I’ll have to check out Red Thunder and Red Lightning since it appears their homages to the Heinlein juvenile novels I dearly loved in my youth.
Back at you, Santorum – The Boston Globe
The scandal in Washington so mirrors what’s happened in Boston and other Catholic dioceses the nation over to the point of being surreal. A rank-and-file member of an organization does wrong by a minor. The hierarchy, in turn, does nothing. Now, rather than a priest, it’s a 52-year-old Republican congressman — or make that a former congressman, given Mark Foley’s resignation on Friday. Foley, by the way, has pulled the Patrick Kennedy defense, checking himself into rehab, as if everyone is supposed to applaud the courage of self-awareness.And rather than a bunch of archbishops and cardinals, it’s the House leadership, which showed a breathtaking lack of curiosity after they learned of Foley’s e-mails to a 16-year-old page. They contend to have never learned of Foley’s exchange with a page in which he wrote: “Well, strip down and get relaxed.”
Humiliated church leaders ended up in Rome, or at least Cardinal Law did. Humiliated Republicans will probably end up in the minority party, this scandal coming at the worst possible time for a party already under siege over things like Iraq and Jack Abramoff.
I noticed this parallel immediately. Cardinal Law – Priest / Speaker Hastert – Foley. So when do the lawsuits begin?
For well over a year now, I’ve been wondering why Bayes worked in my manual scans when I ran a piece of mail that made it through mailserver’s filters. It appears that spamd and the manual scan weren’t producing the exact same results. In order to get spamd working as well as a manual scan, I first had to debug by looking at the mail log at /var/log/mail.log. Immediately, I noticed some permissions problems. I chmod 777 the areas where spamd needed access and then set up a site wide bayesian database per the instructions at this link:
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/SiteWideBayesSetup
With this in place, Bayesian use by Spamassassin and autolearning are working fine now. The only sad thing is the mysql database I set up for the Bayes database was unusable due to some weirdness with a perl component DBD::mysql. It worked fine yesterday, but then it broke. I just went back to using the default DBD database. The strangest thing that was going on was that my manual scans were using a different local.cf and directory for plugins than the spamd scans. Upon realizing this, I knew where I had to put the latest version of fuzzyocr so that I could write to the fuzzyocr.hashdb. This seems to be working well in catching the noxious image spams that are coming in a lot more frequently these days. I’ve also upped the scores for any emails that come in with attached or inline gifs since they are rarely legitimate emails.
The combination of Bayes finally working and fuzzyocr will really cut down on the amount of spam hitting the clients. I’m very happy about that!
I rolled back Spamassassin from 3.2 to 3.1.5 since 3.2 wasn’t catching some spam, and not showing some results under debug mode.
I managed to get the fuzzyocr plug-in 2.3b working again under 3.1.5. I just had to change some settings for it to work again. The ocr doesn’t kick in unless other scores are under a total of 10. This keeps the ocr from working unless it’s necessary.
My big accomplishment today was moving the Bayes database in Spamassassin from a dbm to a mysql database. This should perform a lot faster than the default dbm, and hopefully resolve any force expire or scanning issues that stalled Spamassassin. I think these Bayes issues may be what’s causing the hiccups in Spamassassin that allow obvious spam to get through. phpmyadmin made it very easy to create the databases and import the tables need to convert the Bayes database over to mysql.
I’m trying out the development version of Spamassassin 3.20. I’ll see how it does this week as it is a development version and not a stable version, but I know how to roll things back if it’s unstable. For the moment, it appears to be running quickly and correctly.
Some Good News Arrives at Last for a Bad News Bear – New York Times
“I remember even from his teenage days he looked like somebody who had lived,” Mr. Zaillian said. “I didn’t really know what to expect, in terms of what kind of person he would be. I had really no idea even what he would look like until I saw the tape. The things you imagine with a child actor, you can’t help but think the worst.”
For me, this was the key quote in the article. I remember junior-high and high school classmates of mine who looked like somebody who had lived, or in other words, had had a tough life one way or another at an early age. Who knows how they turned out 20 to 30 years later.