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One week of blogging
I've now been blogging for a week and must say that it is kind of neat to be able to write what's on my mind and not have to bug my wife. I don't expect my ramblings to be very interesting to anyone, but at least I can get things off my mind.
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Email Spam
Email spam, as everyone knows, has gotten completely out of hand. I use a system called DSPAM which works amazingly well. However, today I decided to upgrade to the latest version. The configuration on the program is a royal nightmare. I wanted to remove the hacks I put in place for retraining false positives as they're hard to maintain each time I upgrade. This turned out to be a loser proposition. After several hours trying to find hints on the net and reconfiguring, I finally gave up and put my hacks back in. (Basically the web CGI for re-training doesn't seem to work right and puts the mail into a blackhole instead of delivering it.) If anyone knows an easy way to install DSPAM on Linux with sendmail, please let me know. However, I want to invoke it with procmail and not directly from sendmail as I want the ability to have certain filters act on mail before DSPAM gets it; DSPAM wants to classify certain senders as spam even though I know they're not.)
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Update on Sirius radio
After discussing my complaint about Sirius radio with someone else today, I realized that while my complaint is still valid, overcoming it is extremely hard. Sirius is a one way broadcast and there is no way for the receiver to tell the broadcast that it missed some day. However, there still must be a way to handle this without all the dropouts.
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Server Downtime this morning
My server was offline for a few hours this morning due to no fault of my own. My cable provider had some network issues that finally got resolved by around 8 am. I called them (Time Warner Cable) around 6:15 am when I woke up and discovered the issue. When I spoke to the help desk, the tech (national help desk) was pretty useless. He ran the standard diagnostics, but luckily didn't ask me to reboot my computer as I know that would have been a waste of time. I specifically asked if their were network problems and he said he didn't know of any. I received a call around 10:15 am from a tech in the local office and he said that they resolved the problem around 9:45 am. I appreciate getting calls back from them when I have issues, however, when I call and speak to the national help desk, they're not always helpful. Overall, I'm pleased with Time Warner as a provider...they just need to give their techs updates on network issues.