Mon, 26 Apr 2004

saw Aril Brikha play live at Honkytonks nightclub on the 23rd.

He was very good, and it was excellent seeing some of my favourite techno tracks being played live on a small setup (laptop, bassstation, dj mixer and possible a controller or another synth?) close up.

The promotion was a bit misleading however - I was emailed saying I was on the "guest list" and yet we had to pay to get in anyway - evidently being on the guest list honkytonks style means you dont have to run the gauntlet of the fashion nazis at the door. I bet Aril Brikha himself wouldn't have had a hope of getting into that club if he wasn't headlining at it....

Posted at: 15:01 | category: /bleeps | # | 0 comments

Wed, 21 Apr 2004

nerding at glitch

just had to add an entry whilst sitting using the wireless internet at glitch bar, nice to be sitting nerding and sipping lite beer.

Posted at: 21:34 | category: / | # | 0 comments

Tue, 20 Apr 2004

they stole my google juice

not that I had much, or worry too much about it's loss - but why give spammers a free ride? Took out the auto referrer link stuff because of all sorts of wierd links cropping up due to referrer spam

Posted at: 21:14 | category: /rants | # | 0 comments

yet another bandwagon to blindly jump on.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

The book: "Thai for English Speaking Learners: Grammatical and cultural approaches" - by Tipawan Thampusana-Abold

The sentence: "อ a very special alphabet because อ can be both a consonant and a vowel."

(note: this 5th sentence is actually on the next page - does this count?)

Posted at: 21:05 | category: / | # | 0 comments

Sun, 04 Apr 2004

I get A LOT of spam.

Since I have posted to Usenet through the 90s, registered domains and had a range of aliases that point to me published on various web pages I am under a constant onslaught of garbage that would make my email unusable without some kind of anti-spam system in place. I have even attempted to productise in the past some of the solutions used.

Mostly I have been using a combo of Spamassassin and Bogofilter with both server-wide and individual (procmail) filtering in place, but this still let quite a few through, especially now there is the increasing amount of spam that has been crafted to get through spamassassin's ruleset.

Enter Spambayes.. used at my work as it has a clean MS-windows installer and can work very well as a module in outlook, it also works great in command line filter (ala procmail) mode as well, and is more effective in my experience than spamassassin and bogofilter by maybe an order of magnitude. The imap mode seems a bit broken though.. but then I was testing it pointed to an M$ Exchange server which may have had something to do with it. So at work I have my outlook minimised acting as a spam coprocessor while I actual read my email in evolution.

This is an excellent example of how well a GPL, Python application can integrate into the a proprietary desktop environment, while still keeping command line low level flexibility, and run on multiple operating systems.

Posted at: 14:11 | category: / | # | 0 comments