The Free Speech

Akismet has caught 101 spam for you since you installed it.Woo Hoo! Never imagined blocking comment spam could have been this easy.

Used to get heaps and heaps of comment spam before upgrading Wordpress, and more importantly, before installing the Akismet plugin. And now, none. And I am yet to find a false positive!

Many thanks to the Akismet plugin author.

The idea of reusing source code available freely, in an ‘open’ license is not new. No one likes to reinvent the wheel. I do it regularly. As a sys admin, when I am asked to write a quick script, my first reaction is googl’ing for something already written that can be used. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. After all, why reinvent the wheel?

Today I was on one such mission, except I was looking for some examples on some simple socket programming in perl. I found two well-reputed sites, with a tutorial on the subject. Now for the interesting bit - The example code that was used on both web sites were IDENTICAL. Look:

Link 1

and

Link 2

The latter comes from:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3237

Simple code, I accept, is prone to being similar. But that would only be for a “Hello World” kind of script, not for an example in socket programming. I don’t beleive that the same syntax, same port numbers, and even the same variables could be coincidence. The only difference: Devshed’s print statement reads
print CLIENT "Smile from the server",
while LJ’s reads:
print CLIENT "Hello from the server: ".

This IMHO, is plagarism. Now I am assuming the devshed article being written well after the LJ one, is the suspicious one. Not withstanding the licensing, I would expect at least one reference, for the sake of goodwill.

Anyways.. let me get back to my socket programming..

Pagani Zonda,
originally uploaded by Himanshu Shukla.

Hmm.. Wish all good toys could come cheap, say like the Linksys WRT 54G. The most expensive car at the Brisbane Motor Show, at $1.3 mill - The Pagani Zonda.
Mommy.. can I please please have one??

Found this while surfing the web. Maybe this has been there all along and I just happened to know about it today. Pretty cool. Something new to kill time with

My shot at being a wildlife photographer

The photo was taken in the rainforests of Maleny, near Sunshine Coast. Hope you can spot the dragonfly.

Upgraded to the Wordpress 2.0.1 release today. Went smooth, and even created a Wordpress.com account (etcetra.wordpress.com). This was mainly so I could use the akismet plugin to block blog spam. Lets see how that works out.

Revisiting kcheckmail now that my perl is slightly better than what it was when I wrote it.

Here are some improvement ideas that have sprung to mind:

1. Remove as many perl module depencies as possible.
2. Remove the config file option from script. The script is too simple to need a config file. Just tweak script variables instead, or pass arguments on the command line.
3. Add an option to monitor emails in biff mode. This is how it would work. Say you are interested in a particular email that matches a certain criteria (example From: your_boss@company.com). Tell kcheckmail to alert you only for those emails and not worry about the rest. The reverse should also hold true. For example, don’t tell me about an email from google alerts, but tell me everything else.
4. Check email for X-SPAM and other popular spam headers and trash them. A usual Popup message should notify the user that the message has been trashed.
5. Verify spam against online rbls and either add a header or optionally trash them
6. Add logging / debugging capabilities.

Hmm… I had it all the time, but it only worked on Windows.

Its a Linksys USB54G, which does 802.11G. The only way I know of getting this working under Linux, was using ndiswrapper. Now I had it installed and configured earlier, but the load average peaked at 100%, with my laptop battery draining in no time. Now, I believe (I might be wrong) this was because of a continuous poll on the usb port to check if there were packets.

But the good news. Don’t know when this version got released, but apparently it fixes this problem.

I have been evaluating distributions over the past few days. Essentially, I have had a Debian system for quite a long time, and haven’t really played with the latest distributions for a long time now.

Last week I installed SuSE 9.2 on my laptop. I must say it wasn’t bad - not bad at all. Very professional in its looks and almost all of my hardware worked out of the box. I say almost because my Linksys USB wireless adapter didn’t get picked up. Not that I was surprised, but was just being a bit over optimistic. What struck me (in a bad way) was that SuSE, inspite of being a Novell product, doesn’t come with the Ximian (a part of Novell) Exchange Connector, nor with the RedCarpet package management tool, that can make installing it easy.

This week I installed the much talked about Ubuntu. Well, mixed reactions for this one. I must say beforehand that I am probably not among the target audience of the distribution. Its a very very desktop-oriented distro. Anyways, what I didn’t like about it, or in other words, what I didn’t know earlier, was it simply doesn’t give you a package selection choice. It is a Gnome based distro. Well, but as I said before, I am not necessarily the target audience of the distro, and secondly, the package selection of Ubuntu is quite good. What I really liked about it, was the non-availability of root account by default to the end-user. Instead, the default user, has full access via sudo, a la Mac OSX. Excellent stuff.

So am I sticking with Ubuntu? Don’t think so. As I write this, I am installing Debian again.

Hmm… Updating this blog after a really long time. This inspite of all my vows of updating it regularly.

Anyways, lots been happening since. Got married, and brought a Powerbook - among the more important things. Ami is beautiful, and so is the Mac

Hope to keep writing.