Better Living Through Thinking

The Work of a Critic

Fri, 04 Jan 2008

Transcription of Anton Ego's ending monologue (from Pixar's Ratatouille)

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Stevey's Blog Rants: Code's Worst Enemy

Fri, 28 Dec 2007

Excerpt from a recent blog post from Steve Yegge:

<http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.html>

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Faygo Original Root Beer

Mon, 10 Dec 2007

Faygo Beverages, Inc. Detroit, MI 48207

I had to check the bottle twice to make sure there was some kind of flavoring at all in it. Astonishingly weak, but unoffensive.

Scott's Score: 3 (out of 10)

received_from - find the last MTA hop

Thu, 25 Oct 2007

received_from parses any mbox style mailbox and prints out the IP address of the last MTA to connect to the given hostname. This list of IPs can be useful for generating black- or whitelists.

(version 0.20, updated 25 October 2007)

Usage:

formail -c -s < spam.mbx | received_from --days=30 --last_hop=my.hostname.tld --class_c | sort -u > $HOME/spammers
...

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Making 'find' go faster

Wed, 24 Oct 2007

The mysterious Unix find command has some interesting things about it. For one, the order of the command-line parameters is important--earlier commands affect later commands. The ramifications of this finally became clear to me after using find for 12 years.

So here is this and a few things I've learned over the years to make find go faster:

...

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Giving up (maybe for reals this time)

Tue, 25 Sep 2007

I don't think I'll post more on this subject. I feel that I've got a long-term solution that works for me--I have beat spam and it takes less than 10 seconds per day to do it (about the time it takes for me to save the handful of spams in my 'spam' folder).

When last I wrote, my spammer friends had tried 215 times (thats 215 half-hour long connections or 107.5 hours) to alert me to a "hot stock" or some other important message. Since then, they've gradually declined again: ...

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Welcome back!

Wed, 19 Sep 2007

I want to give a hearty "welcome back!" to my spammers. They're really showing some cheek the past few days, making me rescale my histospam:

20070911: #################################### (77)
20070912: ################################################ (101)
20070913: ###################################### (81)
20070914: ################ (35)
20070915: ############# (28)
20070916: ########### (24)
...

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Tarpits Work

Tue, 18 Sep 2007

Here are a few juicy processes, eagerly waiting for that heavenly "connection closed" message from my server:

10:34AM  sendmail: startup with mx150.immensedispersalpublicity.com (sendmail)
10:36AM  sendmail: startup with mx149.immensetradepublicity.com (sendmail)
10:44AM  sendmail: startup with mx149.immensetradepublicity.com (sendmail)
10:54AM  sendmail: startup with mx150.immensedispersalpublicity.com (sendmail)
10:59AM  sendmail: startup with pd1.peanutdays.com (sendmail)

The first couple have been going for about half-an-hour.

Giving Up?

Mon, 17 Sep 2007

I think the spammers are giving up on me. This is sad because my beautiful blocked-to-spam ratio is certainly going to drop. Here's the sender-blocked histogram:

20070912: ##################################################################################################### (101)
20070913: ################################################################################# (81)
20070914: ################################### (35)
20070915: ############################ (28)
20070916: ######################## (24)
...

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Teddy's Root Beer

Mon, 17 Sep 2007

Unique Beverage Company, LLC Everett, WA 98213

Nothing remarkable in this one. A bit too much wintergreen.

Scott's Score: 6 (out of 10)