Quote of the Moment

Nicola: People called me s16
Nicola: therefore *I* am server 16!
Seth: hopefully you don't crash much
Nicola: I'll tell you tomorrow after my driving lesson :P -Nicola
(moar?)

While speaking of spam

29
December
1 Comment

I have to say that WP-Hashcash has done the trick. I’ve gotten fewer than 2 dozen spams in the last 2 days, and the log shows almost 1500 blocked attempts… sweet!

So while on the topic of spam, Scotty asked me today about fighting e-mail spam more effectively. Even though I’ve used SpamAssassin for a couple years, I would still get a few hundred spam e-mails a week that made it through the filter. Thunderbird would collect about 90% of those, which meant that I didn’t have to look at a lot of spam… but still far more than I would have liked. Plus, any time I looked at my mail from a webmail interface, I had to sort through a few dozen spams.

I read up a couple months ago on SpamAssassin tweaking. Let me summarize some steps I took that caused the number of spam e-mails I get a week to fall to under 10.

Read the rest of this thought »

Six Degrees of Free Software

11
September
1 Comment

I was messing about before my Data Structures class today when the guy in front of me mentioned to the person next to him that he had written his assignment under Linux and needed to make sure it would compile using Visual Studio in Windows. I (unashamedly) interjected “What distribution of Linux are you using?” “Ubuntu,” he replied, “I installed the base server packages and then put kubuntu-desktop on top of that.” I mentioned that I did some work for Ubuntu, so I was always happy to see someone using it. Then I found out that he was Joshua Gay, who does some work for the FSF, including editing 2 of rms’ last 3 books (for example this one). He’s a graduate student who went to Massachusetts for his undergrad. It was interesting to hear him talk about rms and mako and other big names in the free-software world as people he’d actually met and talked to, rather than seen as screennames on #ubuntu or such.

Having come from out east, where Linux and Free Software are perhaps more common household words, Josh really wanted to increase and encourage free software use here at OU. It would be terribly interesting to get an organization started…

DokuWiki: an Undiscovered Gem

26
March
9 Comments

I finished the soft launch of the ZetaBoards Documentation Project today, and have to say that DokuWiki is hands-down the best wiki software I have ever used, installed, or written with. From MediaWiki to MoinMoin to phpWiki, DokuWiki offers more features, a cleaner setup, and easier use.

I took our new website template and ported it to DokuWiki in a matter of hours. And most of that time was spent redoing part of the header to add more functionality that the website didn’t need. Things worked just by dropping in a few PHP tags here and there. The only other software this easy to skin is WordPress.

There are a few hundred plugins written for DokuWiki, and the syntax is extremely simple should I choose to make more. I picked a couple and installed them on our installation in about 20 minutes. The notes plugin is amazing. The entire codebase is PHP-Doc’d so I can understand what everything does, and make changes where I need them!

The 2005-9 release I was using lacked a little bit on user management, but that’s all been fixed with the 2006-3 release that I just finished upgrading to. I have full control on access permissions, user groups, everything. And the new release also added some great AJAX goodness like an AJAX quicksearch. I also successfully installed aspell to my home directory and now the AJAX spellcheck it features works flawlessly.

There are no databases needed; it’s all flat-file and fast. I can move the directory around and nothing breaks; all that’s needed are some CHMODs. It’s drop-dead simple, gorgeous, well-written, featureful, and fast. How does it get better than this?

If you need a wiki software, this is the one for you.

Jump and Bump!

17
November
1 Comment

Sam and I just played Jump’n'Bump for a whole hour and laughed like little kids the entire time! You should play it too, it’s fun.
Basically you are supposed to hop around as a bunny rabbit and squoosh other bunny rabbits. The sound effects make it hugely hilarious, and it’s multiplayer for up to four players via keyboard or network. Highly recommended!

Sam: Die! Die! Oh wait… no, just go squish. If you died I would just hop around sad and alone. And there would be no fun things to squish.

(Ubuntu users: just open Synaptic and install package jumpnbump and you’re ready to roll!)

Pandora

12
November
6 Comments

Pandora is the best thing I’ve seen in a while. You tell it what kind of music you like, and it picks from 10,000 artists to find music like that. You can set up “stations” with mixes of different genres. You can tell it what you like and don’t like.

And it’s 100% free. Go check it out, now!

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