Evil Home Stereo

Some friends of mine run a website where they publish photos taken on parties in and around Hamburg.

Sometimes I click (more or less bored) through some of their albums to see if I missed a good party and if it’s worth going there next time

While doing so a few minutes ago, I suddenly stumbled upon a photo which showed myself. Standing around on a party where I wasn’t even at! At least I thought so in the first shocking moment, judging by the thumbnail only. Here is an actual photo of myself which I digged out from somewhere on my harddisk. Ok, on the second glance the resemblance isn’t so apparent anymore, but it was still a weird feeling in the first moment…

I’m handling the postmaster mail for several smaller firms for which I set up their mail infrastructure. So now and then some misdirected mail hits my inbox.

Today I received yet another one from a person (info@ufg-schweizer.de) which I classify as an “Amateur Google Spammer” — some people (often calling themselves as “consultants”) who send out mail to companies with a slightly related background asking for linking. The requests often read like this:

We would like to “link” you from our homepage and ask you to “link” back to our homepage. Both companies would increase their ranking at “Google” and other search engines and thus benefit from this. Additionally would this draw the attention of the visitors of our page to yours.

This sounds too good to be true. And it is. For one is the algorithm used by Google not totally dumb and detects simple cross-linking like this.

Aside from that would I advise anybody against linking to companies or people they don’t know, especially on a business website. What do you know about the people who sent you such a request which is “beneficial for both sides” out of the blue? How do you know how this company behaves against its customers? Or other people? Maybe they found other “benefitial” (and “risk-free”) business plans, like spamming or other fraudulent behaviour? (It seems like translating 419er (eg. from “James Maree“) to German becomes a profitable business, too.)

And suddenly you are associated with this company because you are linked from their page, maybe labeled as a “partner” or even “reference”.

The guys at Heise point to an updated version of NiX-Spam, a bunch of procmail rules which they use at the iX offices.

Most of the pattern rules look like stuff we have implemented in SpamAssassin, too. What sounds interesting is the Fuzzy Checksum part. The tool generates a checksum for each mail it received and completely skips the checks if that mail hits the inboxes again. To aid against trojanned dial-up systems, there’s a Temporary Blackhole List with a TTL of about 48 hours.

Bob Apthorpe wrote:

Use Postfix? Use spamd? Have a small mail log? Ever wonder which hosts are sending the most spam into your system? Wonder no longer - spamsources.sh is here to answer all your questions about who is spamming you. Maybe.

Looks like a nifty little script. Currenty my mail goes through a friend’s qmail powered server but soonish I’ll set up my own system. The first mailserver I ever set up was a Postfix one but in the last few years I tried several other MTAs. And I think my first chioce was the best

Heise reports that T-Mobile Germany announced a coding competition for the Blackberry 7230. It’s for students enrolled at German universities only, the conditions are reasonable.

Now all I need is a brilliant idea and enough time to implement it till June.

A shot of a t-shirt, taken by by TAZL, found via wirres.net. Got to have one of em. Maybe it’s time for a trip to London this year.

Hmmm… a company I administer (weird verb) the network for is currently moving offices and in February/March I’ll work for the NDR Systemservice (again). So I should have enough money for some vacation this summer. Sounds like a good plan…

The release date of the next great version of KDE approaches apace. This weekend the branch for 3.2 was created (which took eleven hours to be finished — maybe KDE should switch to Subversion, too ).

I’ve been using the KDE 3.2 beta for some time now, first via Jeff Paetkau’s binary packages, lately I compile regularly from CVS via Caleb Tennis’ Live CVS KDE ebuilds. Those make updating your KDE a thing of typing emerge kdelibs (or whichever module you want) and is quite fast if you use it together with ccache and distcc.

The ebuilds merge HEAD (ie. the most current development version) per default. To make them use the stable branch (KDE_3_2_BRANCH), all you have to do is setting ECVS_BRANCH appropriately. I wrote a small wrapper script so I don’t have to type those commands again and again. (This script also enables full debugging symbols to make chasing bugs easier.)

“If everybody gave me a penny, I’d be rich.” Geoff Miller wants neither a penny nor to be rich (I’m not sure about the latter one though). He wants 50 pence (about 0.70 €) from 500 people to buy an iPod.

Why should anybody give him 50 pence in the first place? Read yourself, he wrote about the origin of each of the 177 pieces he received till now. Refreshing read. Recommened backround music: 50pence with “In da pub” and “P.I.N.T.” (found via Rod Begbie).

Suddenly this article appeared in my newsticker, fed via Localfeeds: “How to fully enable the Microsoft Multimedia Keyboard in Linux/KDE”. I’ve got a Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro for some years now (never managed to spill any coffee over it like others like to do ) but never got the patience to get those “multimedia keys” working under Linux. So this might be a good guide, I thought, and clicked the link…

And whoops. I know the person running that blog in real life. He studies at my university and hacks on Kopete. Weird (somehow).

Ok, so Britney got married to some childhood friend last Friday. Jason Allen Alexander is his name. Normally I hadn’t really cared if the circumstances weren’t so funny: Both were plastered and came directly from a party when they suddenly decided to marry. They didn’t really date each other before. It’s all just a big joke, the yellow press assumes. Maybe. But I have two other theories:

Theory one: It was Britney’s idea. She always proclaimed she won’t ever have sex before she gets married. I doubt she didn’t till now, but while she can play the naughty girl, officially she can’t talk about sex. That had to change and now she can.

Theory two: It was Jason’s idea, slashdot style:

1. Meet Britney.
2. Make her drunk.
3. Tell her that you want to shag her. (But she says “Nooo, not until we’re married”)
4. Make her even more drunk. (She doesn’t have an alcohol problem, you know.)
5. Ask her to marry you. (She says “Yyyyeess *burp*”)
6. Marry her.
7. Shag her.
8. ?
9. Profit!

Another (relatively old) news: Dick Brave formerly known as Sasha was born in Vancouver, Canada. No, he’s actually from Soest, Germany. But pretending the first is said to be funny.

Is it just me or am I not the only one who doesn’t get Britney’s and Sasha’s sense of humor?