Skye's Blog of Doom

Since Skype doesn't seem to be interested in the Canadian VOIP market (idiots) I'm looking at alternatives, like vbuzzer, for when we move up to Canada. This blog outlines an interesting alternative using a SIP phone:

$5 Phone Number in Canada

Come on Skype, get with the program.

A lot of the fileserve bots on IRC these days have disabled the xdcc list command, presumably because of abuse from bots and crawlers. Here's a simple mIRC script that will automatically get the next pack. To kick it off, just type:

/xdcc start BotName Pack#

The script automatically stops at the last available pack.

on 1:FILERCVD:*: {
inc %xdcc_pack
/msg %xdcc_bot xdcc send %xdcc_pack
}

Alias xdccstart {
%xdcc_bot = $1
%xdcc_pack = $2
/msg %xdcc_bot xdcc send %xdcc_pack
}

Pretty simple really, I'd like to add the ability to fetch specific packs or skip packs based on description regex or pack size at some point. If the script goes nuts you can stop it with:

/remote off

Interesting comparison, I'm considering the Nikon D50 myself, but I'll probably wait until next year when the new Nikon models are released and the price drops.

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My servers at F4 Systems are getting a lot of image based spam lately; you know the ones, where all the text is presented as an image (usually a stock scam) and as such the spam filters don't have a chance to scan and tag it.

My first attempt was to add this rule:

# "CRITICAL INVESTOR ALERT!" image spam - added dynamic image size
rawbody __LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG_TEST1 /^font-family:Arial'<>img width=[345]\d{2} height=\d{3} id="_x0000_i1025"/m
rawbody __LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG_TEST2 /^src="cid:image001.gif@/
#rawbody __LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG_TEST3 /^ name="wetback.gif"$/
meta LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG (__LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG_TEST1 && __LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG_TEST2)
score LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG 3.0
describe LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG BODY: Contains CRITICAL INVESTOR ALERT! image

It blocked quite a few, I'd say about half, but I know I can do better. The first thing I'm doing is upgrading SpamAssassin from v3.1.1 to v3.1.4 to see if that helps. If not, it's on to try an OCR Plugin. Great... more CPU load. Did I mention about 80% of all the email my server receives is recognized as spam?

Update: Well the upgrade didn't seem to help at all, so I'll tackle the OCR plugin soon.

Have you seen the videos over at Firefox Flicks? There's some great stuff, and make sure to check out the crop circle! Here's one of my favourites:

Stumbled across a really cool piece of software listening to the Hak.5 Video Podcast last night. It's called Synergy and it's like a virtual software KVM switch without the video; it allows you to share one keyboard and mouse among many machines. You simply download the software on all the computers you want to control (they have binaries for Windows, Mac, and most Linux distros), start a server on any machine, and start the client on all the others, and presto! Drag the mouse to the edge of one screen, and it appears on the other machine, and the keyboard input goes to that machine.

I used to have two keyboards and two mice on my desk, one for each machine; now just one keyboard and mouse (my Apple keyboard and a Logitech MX518 optical corded mouse) controls both my Windows XP PC and my Apple PowerBook G4. It also has other cool features like a shared clipboard (copy from PC, paste on Mac seamlessly), synchronized screen savers and more. One of those things that makes you instantly wonder how you ever got by without it...

The Synergy software is still a bit rough around the edges, especially the Mac OS X version, where you have to configure the application by editing a text configuration file and run the software from the Terminal. No big deal, but not great for newbies. I'm sure someone will step up and get it polished soon. The Windows installer was dead easy, and has a nice simple GUI for client and server configuration, as well as installing it as a service so it starts at boot time, so you can control the XP login screen.

I'm running the server on my OS X laptop, so I also had to add a new rule to the built-in firewall on TCP port 24800, as well as add static DNS entries to /etc/hosts on the Mac and C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on the Windows box for the machines being connected. Would be nice if it supported Bonjour or some other sort of autodiscovery protocol.

The mouse movement is a bit odd, possibly due to a lack of development on the OS X software. If the mouse is on the XP screen and I shake it back and forth quickly, it "ghosts" on the OS X screen simultaneously; the reverse doesn't happen though. Sometimes the mouse pointer doesn't hide on the Mac, which is a known bug. Also, if I accelerate the mouse quickly on the OS X screen towards the edge, it pops out in the middle of the XP screen unexpectecly. I enabled an edge delay of 500ms which helps with this issue. I'll continue mucking around with the options and file some bugs to help the developers.

One thing I've found very useful is to add the following two lines in the screens section of the config file for the Window box:

alt = ctrl
ctrl = alt

Since I'm used to using Mac keyboard shortcuts, namely having the Command key under my left hand thumb, this swaps Control and Alt so that they same keystroke activates Control- on the Windows box. Hooray for muscle memory.

Wish I had time to contribute to the project! Having all this reclaimed desk real estate is awesome.

Go to the Synergy web site on SourceForge

I've also found a Synergy GUI Project for OS X but haven't tried it yet.

Really cool article over at Damn Interesting about pre-WWI colour photos:

Damn Interesting » Color Photos From the World War I Era

The photos by Prokudin-Gorskii of pre-revolution Russia are like stepping back in time. Then again, in some of the documentaries I've seen of Chechnya, the buildings don't look much different; the peasants are always on the edge of poverty, it seems.

A few nights ago I was listening to the CBC Radio podcast "The Best of Ideas" series on the life of Karl Polanyi, the author of The Great Transformation. I wasn't familiar with the book but it has a very interesting perspective on the dissonance of the market economy and society. I won't go into detail about the theory (go get the podcast yourself) but it got me thinking about society and the Internet, and the rise of social networking (Friendster, MySpace, etc), RSS aggregators, sites like eBay and craigslist, flickr, and the hundreds of accounts the average Netizen has on all the large and small websites they visit. I suddenly realized there was a whole new kind of service that could be implemented in the brave new Web 2.0 world, one that seemed too simple to be true. I've been looking around and I don't see anything quite like what I've got in mind; exciting, but it's still early going.

I'm working my way through the Mashable blog and Wikipedia's list of Social Networking Sites for starters. Another thing to consider is the recent Friendster Patent # 7069308 on social networking. It seems like the patent is way too broad but who knows? Anyway, I'll let Rupert Murdoch's lawyers battle it out for me, I doubt I'll be targeted even if it takes off.

Anyway, stay tuned; it shouldn't take too long once we're settled down in Vancouver to get a proof of concept site up and running. Can't say much more that that for now. I think this idea might even be NDA and patent worthy!

I recently noticed on my FreeBSD 6.1 server that login failures from ssh weren't being reported in the daily security email like on my older box. Since my old box gets a few hundred ssh login crack attempts every night (good old zombie PC brute force hack attempts...) it's kind of something I like to keep track of. I discovered it was because "fail" no longer appears in the auth.log line on my FreeBSD 6.1 installation, and /etc/periodic/security/800.loginfail was only grepping for "fail" and nothing else. The lines look like this now:

Aug 11 08:39:20 hostname sshd[48839]: error: PAM: authentication error for someuser from somewhere.some.net

So I simply modified the grep in 800.loginfail to read:

n=$(catmsgs | grep -ia "^$yesterday.*\(fail\|authentication error\)" |
tee /dev/stderr | wc -l)

I also submitted the patch to the FreeBSD bugs database under PR conf/91732 which is closely related.