August 2004

It seems like everyone else is doing this quiz, so:

You are a XPYG–Expressive Practical Physical Giver. This makes you a Roving Spouse.

You are magnetic, charming, and impossible to resist. You have no problem with approaching the opposite sex — it just comes naturally to you, and the thrill of warming up a stranger is one of your great drives. Still, very few people really know you. You don’t just *feel* misunderstood — you are. You are probably nursing a heartache that you never let on.

<lj-cut text=”Tell me more”>

You’re calm in a conflict (almost *too* calm — a more emotional partner may wonder why you’re not more engaged) and quick with affection. Fighting makes you uncomfortable, but as you avoid direct conflict your frustrations can manifest in the cold shoulder and passive-aggression, which is no better! Still, you make a loving, doting parent — giving more love than discipline — and your children prefer you.

Like an XSYG, you put so much thought and effort in what you give to your partner that you feel dismissed and unappreciated if you don’t get the same in return. You also give and think so much that you can also talk yourself into cheating — physically or emotionally — and this can lead a cycle of conflict, guilt, conflict-avoidance, chilly atmosphere and then more cheating. But you’ll stay with your partner in the long run from guilt and a desire to please.

You’ve got to open up! You express and give so much of yourself in other ways — don’t be afraid to express what’s bothering you.

I’m only being so hard on you because you remind me of me.

Hmm… not bad, although I think I’m getting better at that opening up thing, and some people seem to understand me just fine.

There is a confusing multitude of spam filters out there. I once wrote an article listing all the ways of filtering spam I could think of. If you’re confused by all this, here’s what I do, along with ways of doing the same thing on both Unix and Windows systems.

<lj-cut> My first line of defence is a bunch of blacklists. These don’t work on the From address of the spam, which is usually forged, but rather on the IP address of the machine sending the email. There are a multitude of blacklists available, too. They differ in their listing criteria from narrow listings of machines which have sent spam, to broad listings of entire networks, intended to help you boycott ISPs which support spam. Getting legitimate email is more important to me than filtering all the spam, so I choose narrowly focussed blacklists. I use:

  • The Spamhaus Blocklist, a manually edited list of the worst corners of the Internet. These days, spammers tend to host their websites in these places and exploit other people’s machines to actually send their spam. Which is why I also use…
  • The Spamhaus Exploits Blocklist, an automatically compiled list of machines which have been taken over by spammers, probably without their owners’ knowledge. Windows users with cable modems, usually.
  • The Open Relay Database, another list of machines which are exploitable in a different way (mostly not a way which is used by spammers these days, but it occasionally catches something).

If you want to filter your email using these blacklists, and you’re on Windows, you could try Spampal. It is completely free and very stable. It will work for you if you collect your mail using something like Thunderbird or Outlook Express (but don’t use OE unless you want to become one of the aforementioned exploited Windows owners). It works by sitting between your mail server and your mail program and marking suspect mail as it goes by. You then configure a filtering rule in your mail program to move the suspect mail into a separate folder. If you pare down the blacklists Spampal uses to just those listed above, it shouldn’t slow your mail downloads too much.

If you’re on Unix and you run your own mail server, receiving mail directly from the Internet, that server will probably have support for using these blacklists. If you pull mail from elsewhere, using fetchmail, say, so that your mail server doesn’t see the IP address of the machine which originated the mail, there’s a little Perl script called rblfilter which will help. It doesn’t seem to be maintained anymore, so I’ve put a copy here. You’ll need to work out how to tie it into your email system and edit the script according to the instructions in the comments.

The next line of defence is the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse. The DCC works by sharing information about how many other copies of a particular email are floating around the Internet. If there are a lot of copies, it’s either something like a mailing list, or it’s spam. To use the DCC, you tell it where you expect to get legitimate bulk email from. Everything else you get which is bulk is therefore spam. The DCC is designed for Unix, so the web pages and Google will tell you how to get it set up there. There is a plugin for Spampal which will also let Windows people use the DCC. It’s beta software, that is, released to the public for testing, so it may contain some bugs: I’ve no idea how stable it is (despite getting a credit on that page, I didn’t actually write it).

If someone else manages your email for you, and you read it via a web interface, for example, then you should have a look a the spam filtering options you have available. I’ve just noticed that Pobox.com, who provide a forwarding address for me, now let people configure their service to reject mail based on those blacklists.

Fight the pink menace!

I stumbled across saltshakers on my Friends of Friends page and got into a debate about morality and various other things. Don’t really want to be the sort of atheist who hangs out on Christian internet sites and harangues them (I have my own site for that, after all), but I couldn’t resist this one.

I’ve also contributed in small part to a discussion involving cathedral_life on the ToothyCat Wiki, which seems to have replaced ucam.chat as the place where the Next Generation of Cambridge geeks hang out. The discussion starts off being about the Historical Jesus, moves on to talk about pigeonholing Christians, and ends up being about how many university CU members leave the faith after they leave university. Interesting stuff.

The Lakes were lovely. We had excellent weather, and the scenery was beautiful. S and I took many, many photographs. We walked up Cat Bells, went to the Sellafield Visitors Centre (which, disappointingly, does not sell fluorescent T-shirts saying “I’ve been to Sellafield”), went on a boat trip, and also managed to do a bit of reading in the evenings.

At Brantwood, John Ruskin’s former home, we happened across a performance of The Tempest by Illyria, who were excellent: a company of 5 actors, a simple set and a rollicking performance, in the best tradition of traveling players (being a Pratchett geek, I thought of Vitoller’s Men in Wyrd Sisters).

We also happened across a “3 for £10” deal on SF classics in a bookshop, so I bought Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowiz. I’ve read Canticle, so that’s gone to S. The Forever War‘s grinding tale of the pointlessness of war came to mind when I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 on Sunday night. My favourite was The Left Hand of Darkness, though, for the evocative and touching description of an alien society. Recommended.

Fahrenheit 9/11 was biased and polemical and relied too much on pathos (or do I mean bathos?), but was quite terrifying for all that. I hope lots of Americans are watching it.