TyskJohan’s random thoughts

I will be starting with Accenture in Oslo on September 1st.

A big thank you to everyone who helped me while I was on the job hunt!

Update
Check out my RRdtool graphs for qpsmtpd!
/Update

As my first spam statistics graph generated quite some interest, here’s a new one.

You will see that more than half of the connections were booted based on the country they came from. These are mostly connections from China and Romania (very active spamming from Romania over the past few weeks).

Also, a large number of attempts to bogus addresses such as accounting@ followed by a domain name I host. DNSBL are various IP-based blacklists.

My badmailfrom list contains envelope senders of lists that claimed they would respect my unsubscribe wishes, but didn’t. Integrated Mar and friends are another one.

spamhelo is mostly hosts pretending to have the same name as my server as their host name. I also boot connections from hosts named friend and localhost as well as gmail.com.

I’ve stopped using greylisting because the mail volume on my host is too small, I was loosing legitimate mail from Gmail because they have several outgoing servers with a common queue.

Unfortunatelty, GD::Graph doesn’t allow for slices to be pulled from the centre. That would have given you a nicer graph…

Update

I’ve finally pulled together some RRdtool graphs for qpsmtpd.

Someone at 43 Folders has written a good part about writing sensible email messages. I’d hold off on the “functional headers” bit, but the rest is very true.

(Via Weblogs tools collection)

The results of the AD/25/05 concours have been posted. Turns out I made the cut, but not much more.

Your marks are as follows:
Test a): 30 /60 (pass mark 30)
Test b): 13.684 /20 (pass mark 10)
Test c): 33.846 /40 (pass mark 20)
Total: 77.53/ 120

I guess I should actually pick up a book on how the EU works next time…

Here are some other blog posts about the competition: John Worth and Val @ EPA2005. Update John has posted his results too, and has some comments.

I updated my system to 3.9 today. Not as seamless as I would have hoped, but the key systems should be up and running again.

Update

PHP was broken in OpenBSD 3.9, so I had to manually compile and upgrade… which took a full two days. Phew!

I shared the flight from Vienna to Belgrade with a member of the The Corps of Queen’s Messengers, complete with the crown-and-greyhound pin, today.

Apple has a series of very funny new ads on why Macs are just cooler than PCs. Check them out!

Early tomorrow morning, I’m off to Belgrade for the first ESIB alumni meeting. I’m really looking forward too meeting all the old hacks again, and I am just as much looking forward to seeing more of Belgrade than I did on my last trip there.

I haven’t been as good at uploading pictures from our trip as I’d hoped to be. I will try to do so later, and to make sure that they don’t get lost in any new material I might publish, you an access them through the following category links: travel, Buenos Aires, South Africa, Perth and Hong Kong.

…but unfortunately, we were gone and even though we had arranged for our mail to be collected at the local post office, the package was still returned because of non-collection. Pretty lame service from the Norwegian Post Office.

So if anyone reading this sent me a package in the last month, expect to get it back–and send it again, please..