| GMail Spam |
[Apr. 22nd, 2008|08:47 am] |
GMail's anti-spam seems completely ineffective. This is what I woke up to this morning, after 8 hours of sleep:
7 messages I care about (only 1, really, but 6 I'll glance at), and 18 spams.
I was doing better when I was running my own mail server. :( If I look at the headers of these emails, a good number come from home DHCP users. My rule on my mail server, with a few false positives, was that sending email from IPs that reversed as home ISPs just wasn't allowed. Spam went to almost zero.
Also lols on how many of these messages have headers like:
X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true
Good job. I hope that header was faked and not actually IronPort's bragging.
What to do? I really hate mail. |
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| Firefox 3, a little rant |
[Mar. 17th, 2008|09:34 am] |
Dear Firefox,
We've been together now, what, 9 years? Remember back in the M18-ish days in 2000 when you used to shit your image cache? Aww, so cute. Yes, those were fun times.
You were new then, so I could forgive your kinda sucking.
But 8 years later I'd expect you to get your act together. In particular, a slow network operation should not beach-ball the whole goddamn application. Please go back to school and learn some basic networking, perhaps some threading, maybe some state machines. For Chist's sake.
When I visited the Mozilla campus a few months ago and did my little lunchtime presentation on why I'm breaking up with Firefox, this was my number one complaint, but I was happy with your guys' answer:Oh, there are two APIs in OS X to do async networking, and we were using the wrong one in Firefox 1 and 2... the old, wrong one blocks the whole app. In Firefox 3 we're using the correct one! So I temporarily displaced my frustration with Firefox and redirected it at Apple, for whom I'll always have extra capacity for frustration.
I waited patiently.
Then the Firefox 3 betas started to come out. "Holy shit!" I thought, "This stuff's getting pretty impressive. A browser on Linux that doesn't piss me off! Oh cute, they even fixed most the memory leaks!"
So yeah, I'm liking Firefox 3 (currently beta 4).
But you still fucking beach-ball all the time on OS X when the network is slow. That is to say, just about whenever I use my laptop, which is always over WiFi or EVDO.
Please fix.
Lovingly yours,
Brad
P.S. I'd open a bug, but my last bug has been open for 4 years or so now, so I'm not going to waste my time with that anymore. (I even funded a developer to fix the bug I'd opened a ticket for.... twice.)
Update, 2008-02-24: Turns out the problem is PAC files. |
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| PSA: the limit of a MacMini's ripping power |
[Mar. 3rd, 2008|07:34 pm] |
Apparently 90 is the approximate number of CDs one can rip before the MacMini's internal drive dies.
Sad. |
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| "threads r hard. let's go shopping!" |
[Mar. 1st, 2008|03:45 am] |
iTunes struggles ripping a CD, syncing an iPod, and importing a few dozen songs into the library all at the same time.
CPU? Nope, not pegged.
Network? Gigabit, not saturated.
Disk activity on the server? Barely any.
Conclusion: threads r hard.
yay spinny beachballs!
Computers suck. |
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| Digg: worst permalinks ever |
[Feb. 29th, 2008|01:00 am] |
The winner of the worst permalinks ever goes to.... Digg!Another Digg user, David Recordon, has sent you a shout. You can read it at the following URL:
http://digg.com/users/bradfitzpatrick#send-shout
Cheers,
The Digg Team Seriously? |
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| iPhone SDK |
[Feb. 22nd, 2008|10:47 pm] |
Seeing this story that the iPhone SDK might be late made me remember a conversation I had with an Apple employee who I ran into at a bar in San Francisco recently.
I told him ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dan_erat's theory that the Apple SDK won't let you write an AIM/XMPP/Yahoo/whatever IM client, as then it'd cut into SMS revenue.
I said,"So that means either no network access, or no backgrounding running apps." He smiled and said,"Well, you get network access." Sad. |
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| Stuck in garage |
[Feb. 7th, 2008|08:20 pm] |
Omg...
I'm stuck in my garage.
My ADT security system had some fault (radio error contacting tower?) and the house started beeping. Phone call from ADT.... they told me to go into my garage (where the box is) and unhook some phone thing.
Then things are still beeping and they ask me to enter my code on the garage panel and hit # and "Off". Or something. But I forgot my code. He said, "Just try what you think it is." I hit some stuff and then it goes into armed mode.
The guy on the phone freaks out: "OMG What'd you press?".
Me: "I dunno. Some numbers. Maybe a pound or so."
Him: "OMG you armed it. We are now in threat level orange." (or some bullshit)
I give him shit for awhile, bitching that I only have ADT because my home insurance requires it (required over some threshold home value... yay me) and I haven't used it in years and I don't even know my code.
He asks for my secret password. I said I have no f'ing clue. I say it's probably in a file cabinet somewhere. He says to go look. I remind him I'm stuck in my garage and if I enter my house, hurricane sirens of death go off. He says, "Sorry." I ask if I should cut the blue wire or the red wire. He doesn't like my joke. I'm like, "Seriously, though... fuck this system. I don't even use it. Can I just disable it?" He says, "Normally I could help you sir, but not at Threat Level Orange now that you've activated it. That's against protocol." (or some bullshit)
So here I am, still stuck in my garage. Fortunately I have a computer here and can blog about it.
I called dina and she thinks she remembers the password, and it jibes with the password hint (/^\w{6}\d{4}$/) that the phone dude gave me.... so that's promising.
Guess I need to call them back and find my password and put it into Revelation, for next time I'm stuck in the garage.
Fuck ADT. |
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| EVDO rant/question |
[Jan. 3rd, 2008|11:17 am] |
Why does my Verizon EVDO card "disconnect" me on my Mac? Two or three times per hour it drops and I have to "reconnect". Very frustrating, as all TCP (ssh, usually) connections die. (Yes, I use screen... I'm still angry.)
If I lose signal for a second, who cares? Just wait for signal again and then send any queued IP packets. The other side sending me data will notice the lack of ACKs and resend their data. You know... that whole TCP thing. Why does Verizon/Apple or whoever think it's nice to just disconnect the network device and force the whole slow setup process again (DHCP, etc)?
Are these parameters tunable?
Hopefully somebody has some background/explanation for why this sucks like this... it'd make me a little less depressed at least knowing the historical accident which caused this sad state of affairs. |
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| iPhone brokenness |
[Nov. 12th, 2007|10:37 am] |
My iPhone has developed a horizontal band where the touchscreen no longer works.
The row is at the top of the second row of buttons on the homescreen. A bunch of operations are now difficult to impossible.
Guess I get to go to the Apple store and see if they'll replace it? What are the odds of that? Are they dicks about it, or do they happily replace brokenness? |
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| iphone's SMS quota ... wtf? |
[Nov. 3rd, 2007|10:53 am] |
Everytime I use the SMS app on my iphone, I get a stupid little pop-up which says:Your SMS mailbox is almost full. Please delete some messages.
[OK] Except for one thing.... I have 6.96 GB of free space!
And now I find out it's been silently dropping incoming text messages, even though new outgoing ones I write go into my history, which made me think either 1) I haven't hit the limit yet, or 2) they, despite the 7GB of free space I have left, are using a queue for my SMS quota, pushing out old ones.
But no.
Silently dropping incoming texts, and annoying me with an alert box.
In conclusion, my dearest Apple, I'm disappointed. Anybody but you would've got my standard "eat a dick, learn to write some software" answer. |
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| Oh God, no.... |
[Nov. 1st, 2007|08:30 pm] |
Fuck this Snapshots shit I'm seeing on LiveJournal. (example ... however over the links)
Biggest annoyance ever.
Do I not still have a permanent account? Why am I seeing this advertising?
If I see this stuff anywhere on my content, I'm migrating. |
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| RT is so slow |
[Sep. 29th, 2007|12:16 pm] |
Dear Jesse Vincent,
rt.cpan.org is still unusably slow. I don't care the specs of the box, how it's configured, or who runs it. It reflects poorly on your company and your software and I'd be embarrassed if I were you to have rt.cpan.org still running.
Please host this yourself, or buy perl.org a new box for this, and maintain it for them. Or take your name off the front page of rt.cpan.org to distance yourself from it. Either way.
(just grumpy because people are still filing tickets in it, most of which I want to close with WONTFIX or REJECTED, but the system's too slow to even let me do that....)
So note to everybody else: I will ignore your rt.cpan.org tickets and patches. Use the mailing lists. My inbox is my ticketing system.
Lovingly always,
Brad |
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| HTTPOnly cookie support in Firefox... |
[Sep. 5th, 2007|09:09 pm] |
Five Fucking Years
About time. And a bit longer than Ten Fucking Days.
Danga sponsored development of this patch (twice?) many years ago. Glad to see it finalllly go in. |
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| Ubuntu, xorg disappointment |
[Aug. 16th, 2007|10:51 am] |
Ubuntu Edge, Feisty, and Gutsy (Tribe 4 + updates as of yesterday) still cannot detect the native resolution / modelines for my Dell 2405FPW monitor, a monitor which is over 2 years old. (with either "nv" or "nvidia" drivers)
C'mon... seriously? |
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| t-mobile, iphone, etc |
[Aug. 6th, 2007|09:05 pm] |
T-Mobile has one again somehow decided that my phone (Blackberry Pearl) can't receive MMSes, instead sending me a text message to go to a website and login with a username and password to get my pictures.
Except the MMSes I'm getting now (from lisa) aren't even pictures... just plain text (she's sending an MMS instead of SMS?), so I'm getting a text notification to go log in to a website to get a text notification. This feels like MySpace/Friendister/Facebook/Pownce/Vox, etc. "HERE IS A MESSAGE THAT YOU HAVE A MESSAGE! GO LOOK AT OUR ADS!" I hate you so, so much T-Mobile. I paid how much for this phone? Doesn't it advertise itself to your network? I know you know ... when I log in to your website, you show me it as my profile icon.
If I didn't want picture messages (and I don't care much, really, except when they're broken), I'd just get an iPhone. My biggest qualm was lack of Bluetooth modem support, but I guess you can just do an ad-hoc Wifi bridge and SOCKS proxy on the iPhone, and that works?
Gah.
Cancel T-Mobile? Number portability doesn't work across state lines, unless I change my billing address and credit card info to my parents' info for awhile, then port number, then switch back. No way.
Maybe change down to $5-$10/month plan, just for call forwarding to new Cingular plan? Does Cingular suck in San Francisco? (I mean, worse than everything else?)
Then I could just keep my Java-illegal-argument-exception Blackberry (it crashes if I type too fast?) and only use it while traveling abroad? |
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| Large Harddrives from Apple? |
[Jun. 26th, 2007|02:57 pm] |
Dear Apple,
Please tell me where I can purchase some of your 4 TB laptop harddrives. This one is only 100 GB.
Lovingly yours,
Brad |
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| Need a new phone. Treo's dead. |
[Mar. 18th, 2007|07:17 pm] |
5 months after its 1 year warranty expired, my Treo 650 just shat itself for the final time. The keyboard's all whack now, pressing random keys on its own, not responding to other keys, etc.
And given that OpenMoko isn't quite ready yet software-wise, I should buy another phone. So...
Dear Lazyweb,
I need a new phone!
The new phone has the following properties, and you'll tell me what phone it is:
- QWERTY keyboard -- for thumb-killing fast SMS'ing.
- GSM, Quad-band, Unlocked -- gotta use it in Russia and Europe and Japan, and with pre-pay SIM cards not from T-Mobile
- Sufficiently Hackable -- can I put apps from the Internet on it?
- Good IMAP client
- ssh client
- Camera
- Menus and navigation that don't offend me -- I don't want spinny animations and offensive shit common in the slow-ass gimmicky "Java phones"
So, what do I want? |
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| Popular Blogs |
[Jan. 31st, 2007|09:10 am] |
You can always tell when you've found a popular blog ....
 |
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| oracle memory usage; MogileFS database independence |
[Jan. 6th, 2007|05:09 pm] |
# apt-get install oracle-xe-client oracle-xe-universal
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
bc
The following NEW packages will be installed:
bc oracle-xe-client oracle-xe-universal
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 61 not upgraded.
Need to get 288MB of archives.
After unpacking 522MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
Get:1 http://mirrors.kernel.org sarge/main bc 1.06-15 [64.8kB]
Get:2 http://oss.oracle.com unstable/non-free oracle-xe-client 10.2.0.1-1.2 [25.9MB]
Get:3 http://oss.oracle.com unstable/non-free oracle-xe-universal 10.2.0.1-1.1 [262MB]
Fetched 288MB in 5m20s (901kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package bc.
(Reading database ... 38093 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking bc (from .../archives/bc_1.06-15_i386.deb) ...
Selecting previously deselected package oracle-xe-client.
Unpacking oracle-xe-client (from .../oracle-xe-client_10.2.0.1-1.2_i386.deb) ...
This system does not meet the minimum requirements for swap space. Based on
the amount of physical memory available on the system, Oracle Client 10g
Express Edition requires 504 MB of swap space. This system has 0 MB
of swap space. Configure more swap space on the system and retry the installation.
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/oracle-xe-client_10.2.0.1-1.2_i386.deb (--unpack):
subprocess pre-installation script returned error exit status 1
Selecting previously deselected package oracle-xe-universal.
Unpacking oracle-xe-universal (from .../oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.1_i386.deb) ...
This system does not meet the minimum requirements for swap space. Based on
the amount of physical memory available on the system, Oracle Database 10g
Express Edition requires 1008 MB of swap space. This system has 0 MB
of swap space. Configure more swap space on the system and retry the installation.
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.1_i386.deb (--unpack):
subprocess pre-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/oracle-xe-client_10.2.0.1-1.2_i386.deb
/var/cache/apt/archives/oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.1_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 516100 504044 12056 0 0 289268
-/+ buffers/cache: 214776 301324
Swap: 0 0 0
504 MB of swap for a client library? Wow.
In case anybody is curious wtf I'm installing Oracle, it's because I've spent a lot of time the past few weeks making MogileFS database-independent, moving all the SQL/DB work into a MogileFS::Store::* tree of classes, where portable SQL is at the top in MogileFS::Store, and database-specific stuff is in, say, MogileFS::Store::MySQL... then there's a singleton store instantiated based on your config for whatever database type you're using.
So now I'm writing more regression tests for it all, specifically beating up on the Store interface to make sure people implementing the interface implement it correctly, but I want more than one database so I can make MogileFS::Store::Multiplex, testing multiple stores in parallel, and comparing the results, failing if they differ.
Eh... I suppose I could write MogileFS::Store::SQLite a bit easier than installing Oracle. ;-)
I asked on the mailing list as well, but let me know if you want to help on this, making MogileFS work on Postgres or Oracle, or your database of choice. It's easy to get involved... the test suite runs on a single machine. |
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