Sometime back I wrote about comment spam in the blogs and using fake comment pages in order to catch automated spambots and record their IPs. Over the months I clocked up a few thousand spambots and I thought it might be fun to do something with them. Like block them for a while. Read the rest of this entry »

After recently transferring a bunch of mailing lists from Majordomo to Mailman, one of the features that was missed by the users was the ‘–LongSig’ feature of Majordomo. Very useful, but not available in Mailman. Using the ‘–LongSig’ tag in an email meant that anything after that was removed by Mailman and this especially useful if you work in a company that insists on putting 20 lines of boilerplate disclaimers at the end of every email sent. On a mailing list, this can annoy people. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t usually cover software releases on the blog, but some software is so good and well made that when it reaches a final release stage I can’t help shouting YaHoo and cracking a bottle of champers! Timo Sirainen has been working on Dovecot for nearly five years and has taken a perfectionist attitude towards the way it works. He’s spent the last six months refusing to release a final version and we’ve all watched as the release candidate numbering has crept up to hit rc23. A couple of weeks ago he chose Friday 13th to do the final release, and it has happened. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few months my old workhorse desktop computer started to play up and it was clear that it would soon be time to replace it. Or parts of it rather… mainly the graphics card and possibly the mobo. I started looking around for a new barebones setup and decided that I’d go for a Shuttle of some type or another. I ended up with a Shuttle SN25P and here are some PoV on the system as a whole and installing SuSE 10.2 on it. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who runs a blog knows about blog spam (or comment spam). Here on this site I run SpamKarma 2 which keeps out 99% of the spam and puts the other 1% in moderation for me to check. But when the number of spam comments reaches into the hundreds per day, then it starts to skew the logs too much. Flattering though it is at first glance to see hundreds of eager visitors each day, closer inspection shows many of them to be comment spammers. So, I started to look at ways to stop them before they got to leave a comment in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

Yup, I’m going to nominate a Man of the Year (if Time magazine can do it, so can I). And he is: Dr Dave, a card carrying Evil Genius, creator of Spam Karma, the software that protects this blog from spammers and scammers.

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There is an updated version of KdeAm available. This is only a bug fix for situations where the audio is not playing correctly. This was due to a recent change in the sox utils, where the ‘play’ command expected a different style of paramater. Find it on the KdeAm page

Every now and then I get the urge to try a different desktop manager. Normally I use KDE, but it puts a pretty heavy load on my machine, chews up memory and soon runs into ‘swap land’. However, I’ve been using KDE for years, so I’ve got it working how I want it to. But, sometimes the urge strikes to try something else, and this time I went for XFCE4, which is fast approaching V4.4.

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Once someone has registered on your nice new web site, it would be useful if they could then edit and change their own account details. Well, of course, they can if they can find the link to their account. There should really be a link on the menu underneath the Logout link, which can, like the Logout link, be set via the admin menu. Here I’ll describe how to add that link to the menu.

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Xaraya is a Content Management System (CMS) that is available under the GPL, written in PHP, with a MySQL database at the backend.
I’ve just setup a Xaraya system for the ACCU, an association of programmers, and here I’ll provide some notes on what to watch out for and maybe some ideas for getting started.

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