Evil Home Stereo

Today SpamAssassin marked a mail sent by a friend of mine as spam. That was the first false positive for… umm… ages. But it still was unnecessary, because I know her and have her in my addressbook. But my Bayes database didn’t know her because she writes me a mail once in a blue moon. And neither was she in my whitelist because I’m too lazy to keep the list in sync with my addressbook.

But OTOH is my addressbook (managed by KAddressBook) relatively up to date. Alas! KMail 3.2 doesn’t support a filter criteria like “sender is in addressbook”.

I first tried to wrote somthing like this via DCOP but that didn’t work because the DCOP interfaces of the apps involved are still far from perfect. So I needed to parse the stuff myself. (Which wasn’t that hard.)

When I later went to file a wish for the new filter criteria, I found out that I obviously wasn’t the first one who needed a script like this. In the existing wish there was a script by Jörg Brenninkmeyer which had the nifty feature to request the list of addresses you recently wrote to, too. I blatantly stole that feature from him

To cut a long story short, here is my script. To install it, follow the description in the script itself:

This script will read a mail from stdin and query both your KMail list of recent recipients and your KAddressbook for any addresses found in From and Reply-To headers. If an entry was found, a header X-Kmail-Known-Sender with a value of YES or NO is added.

To use this script with KMail, copy this file to ~/bin/kmail-known-sender.sh and create a new filter like this (stuff inside double quotes has to be typed to/chosen from the input fields):

Filter Criteria:

“” “is greater than” “0″

Filter Action:

“pipe through” “~/bin/kmail-known-sender.sh”

Important: Deselect the “If this filter matches, stop processing here”-checkbox.

Now you can check for the X-KMail-Known-Sender where you need it, eg. in a following rule for SpamAssassin:

Filter Criteria:

“X-KMail-Known-Sender” “doesn’t contain” “YES”

Filter Action:

“pipe through” “spamc”

Note: If your kernel tends to oops and kswapd dies away, an easy way to stress it and fill up your mem (and swap) quickly is a cat /dev/zero | sed -eh &. Do this ten times for maximum fun. killall is your friend afterwards. If your box is still alive.

Yesterday at the blogger meeting — some thirty people standing/sitting around at the Marktstube (still owned by Luka Skywalker?), drinking, talking, and stuff. Most of them with some quickly written stickers sticking somewhere, carrying their names. The other few people in the room stealing glances, whispering. Who are those weird people? Participants of a dentist’s seminar on dope? Some weird single meetup at “the one and only anti-German salon“? “No, we are bloggers…” somebody answered. Haha. Hm, that joke’s getting old.

At some point I noticed that there was no list of participants like last year. What a pity. And no blog URLs on the stickers. People not geeky enough? Maybe. Not all blogger are geeks (neither do all geeks blog). That’s old news.

New news to me was that blogging isn’t about what I felt it is about. To me the blog is more or less a notepad where from time to time I scrabble down an idea, some weird thing I experienced, something I stumbled on. A place to express yourself when you feel like it. I mostly read technical English blogs, maybe I read the wrong ones. Or English blogs are different. According to Jörg’s theory they indeed are — Germany is a hamlet; when you blog in German, your audience isn’t that big compared that of USians blogging in English. Whatever it is, at least German blogs aren’t about what I thought they were. They are about community. Knowing each other, discussing stuff. That’s what they told me. Not for lurking, catching new ideas, old news, and stuff. Apropos discussing…

This blog doesn’t feature comments as you might have noticed. I had a great deal of discussions about this yesterday night. First with neezee, Jörg and some other guy whose name I forgot (we’re the four people in the background of this photo, he was the one between neezee and me — if I had comments somebody could tell me who he was). Later with Loïc.

One reason why I don’t have comments is that this blog isn’t much more than a bunch of PHP scripts hacked together in a few hours (yes, neezee, believe it or not, I blog with vim).

But there’re other reasons, one of them I hinted before; if people comment on the stuff you wrote you have to write back. Ok, you dont have to. But I think its rude if you don’t do so.

And this leads to the second reason. The comment function of all blogs I know work like a web forum. And web forums (stupid English plural) simply suck. Their handling on the one side but much more their linear style. Discussions aren’t linear. They become threaded, especially when they get longer. Look at the Usenet. Look at mailinglists. And mind those stupid “@the guy who said something three posts ago:” in web forums. Those are the main reasons why I don’t offer comments.

But there came neezee. And said straight ahead: “Your blog is no blog. A blog is about discussion. Period. What you have is a log or something but no blog.” Uuuhh… that hurled my blog directly into an identity crisis. Is this a blog or not? Do I have to change the headline to “my logged place”? Will anybody respect me? But Nico says it is one. I think.

Comments? Oh… I need comments…

Jim just sent me a mail and told me that the guy on the photo I talked to is kid37. I think he even told me his real name. I have a horrible memory for names. And numbers. And stuff.

I really need to implement some comment functionality. Maybe I can do it via a mail interface. Interesting idea, got to sleep over it…

If I ever have a comment feature, it definitely won’t be like the Blogger.de (or whatever it will be called after it was bought by Google); ie. it won’t force you to create an account…

Will be there. A bunch of other interesting people announced they’ll join, too. Including the Hamburg mafia. Have planned an assault on them. Pssst! Big suprise. Hint: Want to bore them to death with technical stuff. Ideas, you know. Pushing stuff. Actually, nothing really new. Daniel, you know what I’m speaking about. More to come…

Having to hook up my laptop to the TV everytime I want to watch a DVD or SVCD annoyed me so much that I went and bought a real player today. You know, one of those standalone boxes taking even more space in your small living room. But hey, those thingies were insanely cheap, about 30 €, around christmas and I already wanted to get one back then (but forgot it).

I got an SEG DVD 430-II for 60 € from the MakroMarkt store just around the corner. Looks like it was a good choice; all disks I tried till now did work (for some I didn’t try it seems like I need a firmware upgrade) and it is said to support even MP3 discs. And finally: Making it region free was a thing of a couple of seconds:

1. Open the disc drawer.
2. Type 2812 on your remote control.
3. Press the Play button until you got code 9.

Let’s see if I still like it before this week’s (and such the seven days free return time) end