This appears to be the coolest thing I've seen for at least a couple of weeks. It describes how to convince XULRunner to run as an ActiveX control to support XUL and SVG in Internet Explorer. Could be useful for those situations where you just have to run IE...
In this post I would just like to thank Eolas (this one, not the defunct one from Lewis) for their very helpful and not-remotely-frivilous lawsuit against Microsoft in 2004 with regard to patent 5,838,906. The one that prevents people from using Flash movies and other embedded content without clicking on it first. Honest, it's really not annoying to have to do that every 10 seconds when doing Cisco online courses using IE. And people wonder why we don't like the idea of software patents in Europe...
I just saw a post somewhere advocating the FireBug extension for Firefox, so I decided to go and install it to see what it's like. I clicked the link, but since I'm running Firefox 2, things were a bit different - instead of saying it will be installed when I restart, it said "Restart Now". When I clicked that, it warned me all my tabs would close, so I let it do that. Then, it restarted, and came back up with the same contents in all the tabs - including a Bloglines window, complete with posts being displayed, that wouldn't have appeared properly if it had only used the URL and not pulled it from cache. That was very cool. It's a minor thing, but very nice to have.
Incidentally, Firefox 2 seems to be a lot faster than 1.5, and looks a bit nicer too - again, nothing major, but minor improvements all over the place. I think the new tab bar (with close buttons on every tab) is cool, though since I remembered to start using middle-click all the time, I use it less than I would have done before. Highly recommended.
I decided recently to check how much spam I was getting and to see if there was much I could do about it. So, I wrote some convoluted bash pipelines with some nice big regular expressions, and discovered that I was getting about 40 per day instead of the 2 or so that I was getting this time last year. Most of it was being taken care of by SpamAssassin and filtered into a Junk folder in my IMAP account before I saw them, but I decided I shouldn't have to waste any more CPU power on these morons.
Postfix, which is my mail server of choice at the moment, is very capable and can do all kinds of interesting things - though knowing how is handy. I did a bit of research, and after reading a few pages on the subject, I decided to implement something along the lines of this. Now,
Now, I appear to have dropped about 96 emails in 24 hours, of which about 80 would have got past the checks above (though quite a lot would have been dropped by being destined for invalid users), and no legimitate email has been rejected either. SpamAssassin still runs after the mail is accepted, but by dropping rubbish before it even gets to the DATA part of the SMTP conversation it doesn't run nearly so often which saves CPU time and memory on my server for other more important things (like serving this page to the 1 hit per month it gets).
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Anyone who connects to my server has to present a valid HELO or EHLO before going any further. This kills about half the spam I get straight away. I've also started checking that people aren't using "localhost", "mgdm.net", my IP address or 127.0.0.1 as the HELO, and if they are Postfix will tell them to clear off.
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All senders have to have a valid domain part in the return address. Now, this could go wrong if my DNS resolution falls over, or if the domain that is sending to me is having problems - but I consider it an acceptable trade-off.
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I use some DNS real-time block lists to reject the IP addresses of known spam senders. At the moment, I have relays.ordb.org, lists.dsbl.org, sbl.spamhaus.org, and cbl.abuseat.org in use. The last one in that list seems to drop quite a lot of traffic, which is nice.
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Checking to see that there are no funny characters in the address takes care of quite a lot too. I seem to get a lot of spam attempts to send to "@mgdm.net", which now definitely won't work (not that it did before).
This post might well appear to be a bit opinionated, but this is a subject that annoys me a lot.
I have sometimes wondered why I much prefer to have a CD copy of an album rather than downloading a digital copy. I think it's far better to have a physical object for my money, rather than a sort of ethereal representation of what I had bought. Here's another reason. From this site:
Windows Media Player 11 does not permit you to back up your media usage rights (previously known as licenses). However, depending upon where your protected files came from, you might be able to restore your rights over the Internet.
So, that basically means that any protected files you "buy" will be useless to you if you move them to a new computer, reinstall an existing one, or buy a new music player. There are a good number of scary quotes in that site as well as the above, too. You might well be able to jump through the right hoops in the right order to restore your "rights", but I'm sure it'll be painful. It would appear that Microsoft, presumably sponsored by the RIAA, are trying to apply their "Software as a Service" model to music as well. Eventually you'll have to pay every single time you want to hear a track, I'm sure.
Do not use Windows Media Player. Do not use iTunes. Do not use WMA or AAC. If you rip or create music, use MP3 or (even better, if you have hardware to play it) Ogg Vorbis. If you don't, you will just get screwed over in the end. Even buying proper Red Book CDs aren't perfect, seeing as about 90% of the profit goes to the record companies and is never seen by the artists. But, they're better than nothing, and at least you have a copy that can be used without your "rights" to use it being spontaneously revoked.