Martin Geisler Online

It’s Easter and the holidays are near. The holiday starts this Wednesday and lasts for about a week. So I’ll have to be at the University both Monday and Tuesday, which is a little unfair, as I know that others have already started their holidays. Oh, well — at least I’m going to get some more of that sacred thing called spare time. I’ll be in Aalborg the first couple of days, and then back in Århus a day or two before we start again.

The image you see on the right was made with the Xy-pic macros for TeX. It’s surprisingly easy to make complicated pictures like the one on the right using Xy-pic, and because it’s a package for [LaTeX][] it’s easy to include mathematics in the diagrams.

I discovered the wonderful Xy-pic by reading a note about LaTeX made by Lars Madsen, take a look here: http://home.imf.au.dk/daleif/latexkursus/. There’s a lot of really good stuff in the note, so if you’re trying to learn LaTeX and want some Danish material to get started with, then you should definitely take a look at it.

You should also read The no so Short Introduction to LaTeX by Tobias Oetiker for even more information about LaTeX. It covers everything you’ll need to know to get started using LaTeX.

For those of you who don’t know this: it only takes 15 minutes to make a cake, when you use one of those almost-done mixtures you can buy in supermarkets. And the best this is, that the cake tastes really good — you might be able to make a better cake by making it yourself from the bottom, but these cakes taste almost just as good, and you’ll only need to invest 15 minutes of your expensive time.

I made a chocolate cake two weeks ago. And since I’m living by myself, I could just eat it whenever I wanted — it’s really cool to be able to say to one self: “Hmm, I wonder if I have anything exciting to eat… Ahh — there’s still some cake left! I’ll just have a nice big piece of that.” I can actually smell my new cake right now — it should be done in about 10 minutes, enjoy your cakes :-)

I have (of course) played some more with TMDA — the result is a script that will parse a logfile produced by TMDA and save the result in a MySQL database. When the data is in the database, it’s easy to subject it to all sorts of statistical analysis. This is exactly what I’ve done — take a look at[TMDA Logparser here (not online anymore).

I’ve been using TMDA the last two weeks and I’m very fond of if. I’ve received about 1000 mails in those two weeks, 50 of those mails are currently held back by TMDA. They are all spam except for two mails which does look legitimate. I’ve only received a single spam message — it tricked TMDA by using an empty sender address. Empty sender addresses are used by mailservers when they bounce messages that were undeliverable, so it’s a little dangerous to block those mails. But if I receive more spam using this trick, then I’ll probably change the filters so that mail from <Mailer-Daemon@*> are let through, while other mails with an empty sender address are dropped. (I cannot send out confirmation requests for those mails, because of the empty sender address.)

It seams that the confirmation request that TMDA sends to people works well — 7 people have added themselves to my whitelist.

I also think that I’ve found the problem that caused those strange uncaught Python exceptions. It turned out that I had a .procmailrc file lying around in my homedirectory. I thought that I had cleaned up after my first attempts with TMDA and procmail but I must have forgot that file. Since I removed it, I haven’t seen any errors from TMDA.