amdavidson

Updated .mailfilter for Courier Maildrop and SpamAssassin

posted on 2009-04-26 - amd.im/rnND

My spam count has exploded in the last few days, so I made a decision to adjust my filtering a little more.

Previously, all messages that got more than 5 points in SpamAssassin tests were flagged and sent to my .Spam folder. This got to be a bit of an issue as I still check there to make sure that no emails are miscategorized... Call me crazy, but I'm a bit anal when it comes to that stuff. (I once missed an interview because of Gmail's filters, but that's a story for another day).

For the last few days, I've been reviewing the spam counts for both the more cleverly hidden spam and the less-than-clever spam. I've come to realize that while the odds are low that any real emails will get marked as spam if they do they'll definitely get a score less than 10. So to combat the large amount of spam that's now coming through, maildrop will halt delivery on any emails with a score higher than 10.

Here's what I put in my .mailfilter file for courier-maildrop:

if ( /^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*.*$/ )
{
exit
}

if ( /X-Spam-Flag/ )
{
to "$DEFAULT.Spam"
}

This way, anything that gets more than won't even be delivered, and all other emails that get a spam flag (greater than 5 points) get sent to spam, then the rest of my filters are processed.

Tested the email with the GTUBE and with a normal message and it seems to work, but we'll see if I wake up in the morning and all my email has been dumped in the trash can.

Lifestreaming via Sweetcron

posted on 2009-04-20 - amd.im/eJK2

Had a Tumblr setup for a while at amdavidson.me but I already have a webserver and didn't like dealing with another host.

So I searched around a bit and Sweetcron came up as a viable alternative for an aggregator for all my internet activities. It's a pretty cool little app, very lightweight and seems to be pretty extensible, if I get around to it.

Anyways, check it out, it has a good summary of all the useless stuff that I do on the internet, all three of the blogs, my twitter account, my delicious bookmarks, and my flickr pictures. One stop shopping.

Sweetcron Stream Updating Cron Job

posted on 2009-04-20 - amd.im/zH0R

So the Sweetcron documentation isn't altogether clear on what you should put in cron for it to update automatically, rather than slowing down a user every 30 minutes.

It's fairly intuitive, but for those missing this logical step, do the following.

Change the setting in the admin panel from psuedo-cron to true-cron, and take note of the URL.

Then put the following in your crontab file (easily accessed with crontab -e on a debian machine):

*/5 * * * * curl http://your/true-cron/url

You can change the 5 to be the number of minutes between updates that you want, and you'll definitely want to change the URL to the one listed in your Sweetcron's admin page.

Changes to Flight Plan

posted on 2009-04-14 - amd.im/dREs

Had a surprise change to my flight plan when leaving Shenzhen airport on China Eastern Airlines.

I got to the airport early, as I usually do... I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not one of those that likes to run to the gate at the last minute. I prefer to take my time, find a little WiFi and relax before my flight.

Well today was not going to be one of those days.

I was sitting in a cafe above my gate relaxing a bit and checking some email, when, on a whim, I checked my ticket to verify the gate info and flight number. To my astonishment, the flight numbers didn't match, and worse, the departure time listed on my ticket was a full hour earlier than the flight I was booked on, and I was already 30 minutes late.

Fortunately for me, the flight that I had been changed to was running about 40 minutes late, so I still made it.

It bewilders me why a gate agent would make a change to my itinerary such as this without notifying me of the change so that I could adjust and plan ahead? Especially because the flight was already boarding by the time I got through security and got to the gate. Had I spent any more time just idly walking around I would have never made it.

Thanks trying to help me out with a bump to an earlier itinerary gate agent man, but tell me next time.

Site Redesign

posted on 2009-04-13 - amd.im/KzQK

Changed up the site a little. More to come, wanna try my hand at making the typography interesting.

I just thought the old design was a little over done, so thanks to the awesome theming capability of Wordpress... Here's a new one.

Thought Processes

posted on 2009-04-13 - amd.im/8Mka

I have no idea what goes through the head of some people in China. They have thought processes that are totally unfamiliar to me, and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to understand what causes them to do the things they do.

Here goes a story to elaborate on this point...

I spent most of the day in my hotel room yesterday. No particular place to go, so I caught up on some stuff I wanted to get done on the net and video chatted with Naomi.

Well right before I expected Naomi to get home, the housekeeping guy showed up and asked me to clean the room, after realizing he didn't understand "No" I threw out the little Chinese with a "Bu Yao" ("No Want") and he got the picture and scrammed.

Later on I headed out to Hua Qiang Bei, the local electronics district, and left the do not disturb sign unlit hoping that when I got back they'd clean up a bit when they come through to do the turn down service.

I returned to realize that this was not the case. The room looked exactly as I had left it, or so I thought.

I had no indication that there was anything amiss until the next morning when I went to hop in the shower and realized that my towel was missing. I'm certain that I did not remove the towel, and searched the room quite extensively to locate any other towels... Settling for a hand towel as my only recourse I proceeded to hop in the shower, only to realize that in addition to my towel, they had taken all my little bottles of shampoo and soap from the shower. There was definitely enough in there for another round or two of bathing so I have no idea why they would have taken it.

What confuses me more, is if you're only going to take the towel and shampoo bottles, why even bother coming in the, admittedly messy, room? I suppose they didn't want to clean up the rest of the room because I had already refused service that day, but why take the towel and shampoo bottles and not replace them?

I may never understand.

Bad HTML

posted on 2009-04-09 - amd.im/QLxK

Sorry to any visitors affected by the malformed site that cropped up due to my last post...

Old habits die hard, and I write too many of my posts in HTML only to have a missing quotation mark leave my page poorly rendered. I need to rely on the (fairly) excellent built in wordpress wysiwyg editor. At least until I write a proper, custom blog engine for this page...

The affected post has been fixed and you can now go about your business.

mod_rails && apache || mongrel && nginx

posted on 2009-04-03 - amd.im/wwce

Switch...

That's all I have to say. Passenger/mod_rails is so much faster and more competent at serving my RoR code than my hacked together mongrel/nginx scheme that I had before.

My ram usage spikes much more when visitors hit the site, but never starts swapping. The increased ram usage is more than worth it for the HUGELY increased speed that I'm seeing by the dynamic mongrel management.

Even better, when the visitors leave (as often happens), the ram usage settles down to the same place it did with my nginx and mongrel combo.

Enjoy the increased speed and stability AMDavidson.com visitors.

Engaged

posted on 2009-04-01 - amd.im/q3MS

Well... It's finally happened.

Naomi and I got engaged.

Last week, while vacation in Maui, I popped the question. It went really well.

We were hiking in a bamboo grove, off the side of the Hana Highway and found a waterfall that just seemed like the perfect spot. Fortunately, I was prepared, and had a pretty little diamond ring in my pocket.

The pictures are posted on Flickr.