The Lone Sysadmin

• Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Gavyn Davies does the maths
  (tags: security science stats)

Moron: “Our mail server is blacklisted in SpamCop. I need you to fix it. I’m trying to send an important email out.”

Me: “Didn’t you tell me last week that you were going to start doing your part to end spam by sending all of your spam to SpamCop?”

Moron: “Yeah. What does that have to do with this?”

Me: “Did you teach SpamCop your mail server IPs? Did you read the instructions?”

Moron: “Sure I read them. Didn’t see how I’d tell them my mail server IPs. Why would our mail server be blacklisted now? This is really inconvenient — this mail has to go out right now. You need to do a better job of securing our mail server so this doesn’t happen.”

Somehow I think he’ll complain when I lock him out of his own mail server, so this doesn’t happen again.

In other news I’m hoping to get some of those Nazi rally photos up, but it’s just not happening with all the other stuff going on. Hopefully after Sylvia opens tomorrow night I’ll have some time again.

Dear New Orleans,

Get well soon.

…Bob

• SSRN-Porn Up, Rape Down by Anthony D’Amato
  Go pr0n go.
  (tags: politics statistics pornography)
• Spraygraphic Apparel - thought provoking style - cool clothes
  (tags: shirts)
• Agile Design Session for minnēbar 2006

On Saturday I attended my first protest. As of this week I have lived in Madison, WI for eleven years. I had not attended a single event even remotely like a protest until this.

I wasn’t going to go. I wanted to go home and mow my lawn, having spent the morning working on Stroller’s production of “Sylvia.” However, two of my crew employed drastic coercion methods to get me to go (they pointed out that it was raining and I couldn’t mow my lawn, and that they’d probably go for beer afterwards). The result was that I had a blast, which may be an odd thing to say about a Nazi rally.

On arrival we walked past Genna’s bar, where a small gathering of gentlemen in pink bunny suits was drinking. After all, Saturday was a day where you could wear a bunny suit and not be the most absurd thing in downtown Madison. They were met with great cheer when they walked to and through the rally. They were probably the highlight.

A couple of observations of mine, including some questions:

- I’d like to see what would happen if nobody showed up to these things. If I mentioned this in person I received one of two responses: “Something like this cannot go unchallenged in a public space” or “We can’t ignore these people, or they’ll get bigger.” I hate to point this out but they were there to rile people up. They are like terrorists, where their goal is not really to blow things up but to cause chaos and fear. A solid show of censure seems like a more powerful message than to do exactly what they want and chant back.

- The signs I saw ranged from retarded to hilarious. On the retarded end was a sign protesting the war in Iraq. Wrong rally, pal. On the funny side the leader is the woman with the sheet of paper saying “Hi Crazy Nazis!” accompanied by flowery drawings. She waved at them and smiled. Others that were good stated “Where are Jake and Elwood when we need them?” and a depiction of Hitler eating a handgun, entitled “Follow Your Leader.”

- The Nazis were defacing a bunch of Israeli flags, which made me think: “Why isn’t the other side defacing Nazi flags?” I guess I was hoping someone with more protest experience would have thought of that, too.

- Anarchists. Um, yeah. So there was this gaggle of anarchists running around, complete with their own complement of sheriff deputies. It seemed like there were three or four anarchists that really were into anarchy, and tried starting something, and were promptly arrested. Then the group devolved into dancing and bongo drumming. Besides that, isn’t a gathering of anarchists sort of an oxymoron? :-)

- The police seemed to be in good spirits. Someone joked that it was because they weren’t the fascists that day. I laughed but you know, I have no idea what it’s like to stand in riot gear protecting a bunch of Nazis while listening to their bullshit. Overtime pay probably helps, but I still bet it is barely worth it. Then again, you know the score when you decide to be a cop. Maybe Madison just gets all the better cops and all the jackbooted thug asshole cops go to Milwaukee.

- There were four types of people at the rally: Nazis, people who were decidedly anti-Nazi and actively participating, people watching the whole event but not participating aside from being there, and police.

- I didn’t know police horses have riot gear, too. That’s kinda cool. Their saddles also have the word “MOUNTED” stitched in. Um, duh? Is there a cop on a horse that isn’t mounted? “I’m sorry Officer Joe, but since this saddle says ‘mounted’ it is only for use on a horse.”

- The Nazis were from Minneapolis. I know Minnesota is politically all over the place but geez. They also need a better sound system, because, as a friend put it they sounded like the teacher from Charlie Brown.

- Next Nazi rally I attend I am bringing a megaphone and a recording of “Springtime for Hitler” from “The Producers.” Again, I thought maybe one of the anti-Nazi protesters might have beaten me to it, but the only other guy to think of that was a Scottish guy I talked to. Another option is to dress up as a very bondage-esqe Hitler. A little bondage gear here, a little fake moustache there… I think I have a riding crop somewhere…

My dad said something a long time ago that I kept telling myself all throughout the two hours of the rally: always support the first amendment and the right of people to gather and speak their minds. How else are you going to find out that they’re a bunch of idiots?

Okay, I don’t know what it is but in the last two days I have had to delete about seventy different spam comments. WTF. I don’t know if Akismet is just not up to the task anymore or what, but this is crazy.

I think it said about 3750 spam comments blocked when I clicked the “Delete All” button for the latest batch of 100 or so.

They come in waves, too. No idea if it’s an indication of the popularity of my site, but I doubt it.

I think tomorrow I will write two new utilities for my blog:

1) A script to automatically close comments for certain types of articles after a certain number of days. For instance, nobody is going to comment on my del.icio.us links. Ever. Why run with them open? Maybe I’ll leave them for three or four days.

2) A script to automatically find and kill comment spammers. Not just a quick death, but a long, painful one involving cucumbers, grizzly bears, and sandstone. And not the nice cucumbers, either, but the homegrown ones with all the little spiky things on them.

Grrrr. I sorta don’t want to moderate all comments because I’ve inadvertently hosed legitimate comments among the spam deletions. I don’t want all y’all to have to wait for me to get around to approving them, either, because that’s lame. At the same time the signal-to-noise ratio must be maintained.

Maybe for now the best defense is just limiting my exposure where I can.

Update: Apparently Akismet suffered some downtime, causing this. BTW, I love blogs (and ping services) because where else can you make a comment about software and have one of the lead guys comment within minutes? Thanks Matt!

• DataMonster: building a cost effective shared filesystem

Alt-248 is the first thing that I discovered on my own on the IBM PC. At least, the first thing I discovered that I still use today.

I was messing around one day with the keypad one day after I discovered that the bell was Ctrl-G. It was shortly after my parents bought me my first PC. An Epson Apex 80. 10 MHz of 8088 goodness, 640 KB of RAM, and dual 5.25″ 360K floppies. Some days I get nostalgic for B:. It was 1989. I was 12. Four color CGA was fine.

I was absolutely distraught that BASIC wasn’t included. The first productive thing I did with that PC was fire up the bundled copy of PFS: First Choice and write a letter to Epson requesting a copy. A week later a package arrived for me, a momentous happening for a 12 year old. Inside was two disks of BASIC and a hand-photocopied, three ring bound GW-BASIC manual. I had won the lottery.

I indexed my baseball cards with the database. I wrote papers for school. I wrote a program in BASIC to predict my father’s work schedule (the odd looping schedule of a firefighter). I printed a million signs with Print Shop. I played “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” several million times, too. In my first act of piracy I copied LOGO from school and programmed in that. I wrote a self-modifying program in LOGO, having it flip to the back side or whatever the code area was called and move to record the iteration of the loop it was on in a variable. Turtle power.

I wanted to play SimCity, but it required a mouse. So I saved up and bought a mouse. $100, from Egghead Software. It was a bus mouse, too, and a good choice, because I would later need my serial port for a modem. I got SimCity for my birthday. That kept me busy for months.

Somewhere in there I discovered Ctrl-G. Wow, a whole new world when the Ctrl key is down. Maybe Alt does something, too… I had known about the bell since my earliest forays into annoying WHILE loops, but this was all new.

Most of what I did on that PC wasn’t directly relevant to my everyday life now. The papers I wrote are still saved somewhere, my baseball card database, sadly, is probably still accurate. Microsoft Windows, though, honors Alt- number combinations for ASCII characters. Damn you, Character Map! I know your secrets!

And I still smile every time I get to type Alt-248.