Daley Ponderings

So, I wonder if there is going to be one of those statistics published: "Facebook down for X minutes - office productivity improved 500%"...

I had gotten some rather blank emails in my spam folder recently (and some not in the spam folder), so I thought I'd check into it further.  I couldn't figure out why they were wasting their time, as it just contained a bunch of fairly blank HTML, with some tables, and background colors.  When I opened the email in an email client that understands HTML, it all became clear.

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From disturbed.org

I added a new link on the sidebar, and wanted folks to see it.  If you use gmail's reader, and are a "friend" of mine (defined by using gtalk/chat/email with me), it will show up in your reader automatically.  For the rest of you, (which is most of you, since I don't use gmail all that much) you can check out the link, or subscribe to that RSS feed, which will contain posts of other people that I don't really have much to comment on (and unlike the rest of the blogging world, don't feel the need to make my own post about it...) but think they are worth reading.

As long as you can turn off the sound, it looks pretty neat! 

(From GeekDad) 

I woke up this morning to find Taiwan's Yahoo server rejecting emails that were supposedly sent using my server.  I originally figured it was the regular old spammer trick of using invalid return addresses until I noticed that it was one of my servers who was reporting the failure, rather than an external machine. (More)

Someone on the postgrey list (Matthew, who apparently likes drinking coffee, as that is part of his email address) sent a script that he uses to report on his mail/spam. 

I modified it to work on my systems (and included it below), and here is the output for the last five days:

Rejected by RBL: 21147
Rejected by greylisting: 9917
Rejected by bad sender/receiver information: 959
Tagged as spam: 1457
Real email: 6278

So, ~4000 (50%) are rejected every day simply by being on a known blacklist, ~2000 (25%) are slowed down by greylisting (maybe are retried, maybe aren't), ~200 (2%) due to the spammers faking from or to addresses (or real people mistyping addresses), ~300 (4%) ending up in spam folders, and ~1200 (16%) actually ending up in inboxes.

Taking the inverse of the inbox mail, that means that 84% of email coming into my server is being thrown away one way or another.  I'm glad I have lots of filters to block almost all of it. (More)

For some reason, Verizon thought it would be a good idea to reconfigure their network early morning Christmas Eve (or late the night before, I am not sure which).  Unfortunately, they transferred me to a broken gateway, which has 3 minutes outages every fifteen minutes or so. (More)

I somehow missed when Street View (and for that matter - Terrain) showed up on Google Maps.  I am not sure when that happened.  Actually, now that I look at the demo video, I did see the demo before, but I hadn't seen when it came to our house.  You can't quite see how ripe our hot peppers are.  Pretty nifty!  If you go down the street along Liberty Avenue, it is pretty interesting to watch the traffic, and wonder if the folks knew they were getting photographed.

So - where can I buy one of these?

This game would be better if it were random, but still kind of fun.  I think 17 seconds was my high score on my desktop, and I just it again before posting on my laptop, and I only got to 11 seconds.  Perhaps I am just more tired, or else it might be showing the difference between a mouse and touchpad.

I got a couple spams through my Lime Daley contact form the last couple days, so I took another look at the script that I was using.  I wrote it a year or two ago, and was my first attempt at writing an anti-spam tool that was designed to have a 0% false negative rate (ie. humans can't possibly fail - as opposed to the image recognizer thing, which I fail about 20% of the time, so I imagine less technical people people must fail and/or give up more often than that).

The one on the Lime Daley page isn't as good as the one I wrote for this blog, but I took a look at the statistics this morning, and it blocked 544 spams last month, only allowing three through. (More)

I read that Harry Potter invented electricity, and that it wasn't Benjam Jam, so it must be true.

Source for the answer: unasked.com

Original source for the question: ADustyFrame.

My voice has a problem with not being able to be understood by most auto-voice phone systems, and you can only say "Tech Support" so many times before you wish you hadn't ever called in the first place.

Here is the answer to that problem - a list of how to get to a real human when talking to a computer for lots of different companies. 

I have been meaning to get around to putting at least some of these in my "Links" panel on the right, though I suspect that it would be too long to place all of them there.  But, anyway, here are the blogs that I read regularly.  (The RSS feed reader makes it possible to manage, and the fact that I read quickly) (More)