Martin Geisler Online

I was lying on my couch, taking a nap, when I started to hear the distinct sound of water pouring down — lots of water pouring down — outside my window.

I’ve always liked it when it is raining heavily, it’s very cosy to sit indoor with some hot tea (or hot chocolate… umm!) and look out on the rain. It’s perfect weather to code in, too!

On the right you’ll see a small crop of a screenshot. I’ve been using gDesklets for some time now, and I have a great pile of them to the right on my desktop. They are nice eye-candy and also a little bit useful. If only Enlightenment would understand that the 12 little windows should be left out of my tab-list, then I would be really happy. I hope that DR16.7 has support for the hints sent out by the desklets — I haven’t tried it yet since it’s still in pre-release and nobody seems to have packaged it for [Debian][]. I’ve thought about using another window manager, but I’m very fond of Enlightenment, especially how it chooses to place new windows: I can predict fairly well where the new window will be opened because I’ve been using it for so long.

Hmm… I’ve been using Enlightenment from the very first time I installed GNU/Linux, so I must have been using it for five years now. Wow! That is one of the greatest things about GNU/Linux: you can keep using your programs for years because they are reliable — of course there has been updates to Enlightenment during the years, but basically it has just worked, just like my favorite program: [Emacs][] which quickly becomes your reliable, quick, familiar friend. You know that it wont suddenly stop working, you know that will display your files tomorrow as it did today. When I see people working in programs like MS Word I often have a hard time understanding why they put up with it? They want to move some text around in their huge report — Word decides to change the font during the move. They want take their finished report with then to their university department and print it there — Word decides to change the margins (or is it the papersize?) during the move, making all their efforts in avoiding poor page breaks irrelevant.

Anyway… enough ranting about the deficiencies of MS Word — I’m of course using [LaTeX][] which may look strange when you sees it for the first time, but will later save you huge amounts of time and spare you of many frustrations, and give your papers a very professional look.

During the storm I saw a funny coincidence: I have the PSI-Weather desklet running on top of the psi-alt-uptime desklet, and that gives the funny impression that Tux is being hit by the lightning. I didn’t do it on purpose — honest!

Today is birthday of my littlebrother Kristoffer — congratulations! He’s turning 17… only one year left until he can get a drivers license and other fun things, and, if he’s unlucky, military service.

And on a totally unrelated note: somebody stole an hour of my time today! I woke up, and at some point during the day I noticed that my computer clock was an hour ahead of my wrist-watch clock. “Strange” I thought… my computer should be synchronized using NTP against some Danish timeservers. So it should be accurate to within ±15 ms of UTC time.

(If your computer isn’t already doing so, then it ought to start using NTP right away. Install a NTP client and make it synchronize against pool.ntp.org. That DNS name will resolve into one of over a hundred different public timeservers from all over the world, see http://www.pool.ntp.org/.)

And indeed my compter was right: we’ve just switched to summertime in Denmark (and probably the rest of the EU if I’m not mistaken) and therefore we all have to live with a Sunday with only 23 hours.

I’m still getting tons of spam sent to my address(es) at GimpsterDotCom, but none of it gets through thanks to the extremely accurate POPFile filter that I use.

POPFile is using good oldfashioned statistics to sort my mail into different buckets — you’re not limited to a simple spam/non-spam classification, POPFile can sort mail into any number of buckets.

I’ve now had 19,275 mails sent through POPFile, and I’ve had to correct it 16 times. This gives an accuracy of 99.92%(!). And what is more extreme, is that it tells me that I’ve received an average of 292 mails each day in the last two months…

Now for the stupid spam that just caught my eye, here’s the headers:

Return-Path: <$STRIPPEDUSERfT@MSN.COM>
Delivered-To: phpweather-subscribe@gimpster.com
Received: (qmail 20512 invoked by uid 506); 4 Nov 2003 05:42:30 -0000
Received: from $STRIPPEDUSERfT@MSN.COM
by sky.netsite.dk by uid 503 with qmail-scanner-1.20rc1
(clamuko: 0.60. Clear:RC:0:.
Processed in 0.06725 secs); 04 Nov 2003 05:42:30 -0000
X-Qmail-Scanner-Mail-From: $STRIPPEDUSERfT@MSN.COM via sky.netsite.dk
X-Qmail-Scanner: 1.20rc1 (Clear:RC:0:. Processed in 0.06725 secs)
Received: from 216-187-212-197.ded.btitelecom.net (HELO exchange.jano.net) (216.187.212.197)
by mail.netsite.dk with SMTP; 4 Nov 2003 05:42:30 -0000
Received: from smtp0281.mail.yahoo.com ([211.158.48.239])
by exchange.jano.net with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.6713);
Mon, 3 Nov 2003 15:59:29 -0500
Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2003 20:56:38 GMT
From: “wilda “<$STRIPPEDUSERfT@MSN.COM>
X-Priority: 3
To: phpweather-subscribe@gimpster.com
Subject: $RANDOMIZE

Apparently they spammers cannot even get their filthy software to work correctly… That’s all for now, see ya!

Don’t people have anything else to do than mess up my pages?! Yesterday I made a new release of [PHP Shell][], and 13 minutes later some idiot (with an IP address of 12.151.162.13) replaced the entire page with the text “H A C K E D B Y A L N O R 3 S”.

First of all, you haven’t “hacked” anything — you’ve used the readily available editing facilities in PhpWiki to edit the page. Now, that’s really impressive — it shows that you can submit a form through a webbrowser! What a cool way to demonstrate the great computer skills possessed by the so-called hackers from this “alnor3s”… I guess we all have to fear these guys who have such great knowledge on how to do WikiVandalism…

Secondly, the term hacker is used about a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. according to JargonFile:hacker. Perhaps you confused yourself with a cracker (see the Jargon File), but I wouldn’t even call you that since you haven’t cracked anything — a WikiWikiWeb is already wide open to everybody.

Even if you have no creative skill, there’s no reason to destroy the work or others, especially when this work is given away for free in the hope that someone out there might find it useful.

We hear so much about how we’re living in the an Information Society these days… To help that become a reality, I’ve just ordered two pizzas online from http://evonax.com/ for myself and Camilla. It’s really easy: you can either select a pizza from their menu, or you can compose your own pizza — I’ve now made “My Pizza | Martin” with my favorite ingredients, very cool! You order and pay the pizza online, and then you only have to go to your door to pick it up when it arrives.

I’ve now had my pizza and both I and Camilla Johnsen agree that the pizzas were a little boring. Mine tasted fine, but it was not as warm as it could have been, and it would also have benefitted from a stronger taste. Camilla said that hers didn’t taste of anything… The conclusion is, that we might as well order our pizzas from the local pizzaria next time. They can make two good pizzas in 15–20 minutes compared to 45 minutes for evonax. It’s not as hightech, but it’s better and cheaper that way.