2003-06-01: Mixed stable/unstable
One thing that I forgot to mention about setting up a mixed stable/unstable
system using Debian. After you've made the change to apt.conf, added
unstable to the sources.list file, and done an apt-get update, the command
to install packages specifically from unstable is apt-get install
package/unstable.
Due to dependencies, one may have to specify multiple packages at once to
pull in a whole set. If libc is different in unstable from testing, this
can get rather annoying, of course.
The only problem I've encountered with Mozilla so far is that for some
reason WindowMaker can't figure out how to start it in the right virtual
desktop. Not sure what's up with that. I should probably submit a bug;
not sure which package the bug would be against.
2003-06-01: Backgammon
I'm clearly not nearly a good enough backgammon player, since playing
against the computer, while initially fun, is just frustrating after a few
games. Although I really don't know why the computer in gnubg has a
tendency to give up during the end game when it's almost certain that it
will finish before I will.
In other news, I'm having a bad day for communicating with people (I just
don't feel like it), and I'm coming down with a cold.
Oh well.
2003-06-06: Domestic advice
The domestic tip of the week, courtesy of my mother. If you're having
great difficulty getting a comb really clean, just put it in the
dishwasher. Works like a charm.
I don't think I ever would have thought of that, and I have no idea why
not.
2003-06-07: bogofilter
Now that I have a new, much faster desktop machine, I finally took the
plunge and set up Bayesian spam filtering. Hand-maintained rules were
missing more and more, not enough to really bother me that much for my
regular mail, but enough to bother me for group-advice and newgroups mail.
I was losing a lot of stuff in the spam deluge.
I've now got Gnus 5.10.2 all set up using the Debian bogofilter package and
it works like a charm. So far, it's been perfect. (I pre-seeded it with
the past six months of group-advice and newgroups mail, among some other
things, and apparently didn't make too many errors.) The only drawback is
that registering new spam or non-spam takes a little while, even with a
fairly fast machine, but not long enough that I think it will bother me.
The documentation has some real problems, though, so here are a few
additional notes:
The documentation really wants you to use customize, preferrably on each
group. I don't like putting a lot of stuff into group properties, so I
instead set the general variables. gnus-spam-newsgroup-contents takes a
list of pairs of regexes that match group names (including the
nnml: part) to either gnus-group-spam-classification-spam or
gnus-group-spam-classification-ham. Example:
(custom-set-variables '(gnus-spam-newsgroup-contents
'(("^nnml:mail\.spam.*" gnus-group-spam-classification-spam)
("^nnml:mail\.\(eyrie\|rra\)" gnus-group-spam-classification-ham)
("^nnml:work\.\(personal\|news\)" gnus-group-spam-classification-ham)
("^nnml:project\..*" gnus-group-spam-classification-ham))))
gnus-spam-process-newsgroups takes a list of pairs of similar regexes
matched to lists of processing functions, which is different than
what the documentation says. Example:
(custom-set-variables '(gnus-spam-process-newsgroups
'(("^nnml:project\..*"
(gnus-group-spam-exit-processor-bogofilter
gnus-group-ham-exit-processor-bogofilter))
("^nnml:mail\.\(rra\|eyrie\)"
(gnus-group-spam-exit-processor-bogofilter
gnus-group-ham-exit-processor-bogofilter))
("^nnml:work\.\(personal\|news\)"
(gnus-group-spam-exit-processor-bogofilter
gnus-group-ham-exit-processor-bogofilter))
("^nnml:mail\.spam.*"
(gnus-group-spam-exit-processor-bogofilter)))))
Another point that's very unclear from the documentation that I found out
through a lot of fiddling is that you need to add both the spam and
ham bogofilter processors to the list of processors for each of your ham
groups. Otherwise, the spam that you mark never actually gets registered
with bogofilter.
I played with the option to move marked spam into a different group but
decided that I didn't like it. I would then have to go read that group and
see that spam again to get it to actually expire. So I just leave it in
the group and let it expire with the rest of the traffic.
Note that the spam processing stuff does not play well with groups marked
auto-expire, since the expirable mark E is not one of the marks that causes
a message to be registered as non-spam. I switched all of my auto-expire
groups over to total-expire since that's how I use them anyway, and since
the registration functions like read marks (r or R) much better than
expirable marks. You can change the definition of ham-marks to include
expirable messages, but the problem there is that each time you go back
into the group to look at old messages, those old messages will all get
re-registered as non-spam, which skews the counts.
Other than that, the documentation is okay (you want to use the spam.el
package, and I recommend bogofilter over the built-in spam-stats stuff
since the latter is going to be a lot slower). Do pay attention to the bit
about not running messages through bogofilter in groups where you're not
going to use bogofilter filtering; for example, all the groups that I split
out before I apply spam checks also aren't registered as non-spam groups
because it would skew the counts for the things that bogofilter actually
gets to see.
One final note: bogoutil is the program that lets you fiddle with the
databases. One thing that's useful to do is to clean out all the tokens
that only have one occurrence, to clean out things that are unlikely to
recur. I'm guessing I'll probably do that every three months or so. (Note
that you can also use db4.0_dump -r and then db4.0_load to dump and restore
the database, which is the only way to get it to shrink in size even if
you've taken things out of it.)
I should probably stick this all up somewhere more permanent on my web
pages....
2003-06-07: Bookstore haul
My parents and I went to the Stanford Bookstore, and of course I can't walk
into a bookstore without coming away with a bunch of books. So here's the
haul of the day.
Iain M. Banks -- Inversions
Iain M. Banks -- Look to Windward
David Brin -- Infinity's Shore
Orson Scott Card -- Ender's Shadow
Terry Goodkind -- Faith of the Fallen
Joe Haldeman -- The Forever War
Mercedes Lackey -- Take a Thief
Neil Stephenson -- The Big U
Connie Willis -- To Say Nothing of the Dog
I also picked up Unicode Demystified for some non-fiction reading, and the
DVD of Frank Herbert's Dune (which I got a chance to watch earlier this
year and rather liked).
Mmm, more books. Of course, I've not been reading the past few days since
my parents have been in town and we've been busy, but I have quite a lot of
it to get back to.
2003-06-07: Minor layout fiddling
The category of posts is now noted in the footer. Eventually I want to
generate category indices and then link the categories to those, but I'll
save that for another day when I feel like doing more substantial things.
I've also added the recent comments to the sidebar (in a smaller font so
they don't wrap all the time); thanks, piranha, for the idea!
I've also added some notifications; this is in part a test to see how they
look and whether they work properly. :)
2003-06-08: More bogofilter
I'm extremely happy with this. It's performing significantly better than
my old rules were for much less effort. So far, in the days of use I've
put it to, there have been no false positives whatsoever, and only three
false negatives. (Two of which were spam through the Kerberos bug
submission interface, which is going to be a bit harder to train.)
The delay in registering spam with Bogofilter has turned out not to bother
me at all. It's actually kind of fun to think that the system is
accumulating more information about spam and how to detect it.
My only (minor) worry is that I'm not feeding enough legitimate mail
through it. I apply my spam filtering rules so late in the game that the
mail that reaches the filtering is about 90% spam. But at least so far
that doesn't seem to be skewing the results.
2003-06-09: tripwire in Debian
Debian continues to just really impress me. Most times when I install a
package and start looking at how it works, it's clear that someone really
thought about how everything should work together and has it configured so
that the obvious just does the right thing.
I first tried to play with aide, since I'm not very fond of the Tripwire
people, but aide is ugly and just doesn't do what I want. It could
probably be made to do what I want, but it's just not worth the hassle. So
on to Tripwire.
Tripwire has apparently now put together a mechanism where even if you
store your databases on local disk, there's some degree of security.
It looks like it generates a key pair and uses that to sign the
configuration and policy file and also prevent modifications to the
database. Of course, someone could always just replace the whole database
and all its keys, but then the next time I went to update Tripwire, I'd
notice that the password was different. (And if they did that, they could
just replace the Tripwire binary itself, of course.)
It looks like the old -update mode is gone, which I do miss, and which
means that the new version of Tripwire is probably not suitable for
widespread use on our servers. However, the new -interactive mode (which
is now --check --interactive) is really cool. It gives you the list of
files that have changed in a "ballot" format in an editor and lets you
review them there and delete the x in front of the ones that you don't want
to update. Extremely convenient to use.
One thing that I definitely don't like is the report format, though. The
old report was far more readable and convenient. I suppose it's GPL'd
software and I could fix that if it continues bothering me, though. (This
new one would be much harder to process automatically, plus one has to page
down just to see if there are any inconsistencies.)
But overall, it just works, with some minor tweaking to the policy file.
2003-06-10: spin 1.30 released
Today was a great day. I ended up spending most of it working on adopting
my web page generation software so that we can use it with the ITSS web
page templates. I made a ton of progress, too; I've already started to
convert the pubsw web pages.
Anyway, after fixing up a few minor things that I needed to add to spin, I
took a break to add basic table support to it. You can get the latest
version from my web page
generation tools page.
Tomorrow, back to converting the pubsw pages (and figuring out what to do
about the automatically generated ones).
2003-06-13: Latest haul
My Amazon order came in today (went with them instead of Powells, since I
wanted to get some DVDs and some of the stuff I wanted wasn't available
from Powells for some reason). The results:
Kim Stanley Robinson -- The Years of Rice and Salt
China Miéville -- The Scar
C.S. Lewis -- Til We Have Faces
C.S. Lewis -- Chronicles of Narnia
C.S. Lewis -- The Signature Collection
The last is the standard set of five (Miracles, Mere Christianity, The
Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and The Problem of Pain) plus A Grief
Observed.
I also picked up DVDs, namely the Sports Night complete set and the first
season of Buffy.
2003-06-19: Sports Night
Sabre got me hooked on this show, and I'm still grateful. After watching
the first DVD from Sabre's copy, I ordered the complete collection, and I'm
currently through the first four discs.
For those who haven't heard of it, Sports Night is the show that Aaron
Sorkin did before West Wing. Marketed as a comedy, it isn't really. It's
more a slice of life drama inhabited by lots of snarky people who are
extremely good at banter (rather like West Wing, but with less important
things going on in the background). It's extremely good. It has the same
sort of cast magic that West Wing has, is frequently hilarious, and is
always highly entertaining. And is good training in banter to boot.
It only ran two seasons, which means that the complete collection of every
episode is rather inexpensive. Highly, highly recommended.
2003-06-19: postfaq 1.11
I've released a new version of
postfaq that supports
posting via an external program. I needed that in order to sign FAQs using
PGPMoose for groups where all articles are signed.
I thought about adding PGPMoose support to postfaq directly, but it looked
too annoying and complicated to do, given that postfaq doesn't already use
News::Article.
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