Louisa has written an account of our little holiday in Dumfries in Scotland in July. You can read it here on her blog.
She’s also written loads about our holiday in Russia.
Purple chicken
A chicken in Scotland.
Windows popup spam
Whilst closely watching the traffic to a server here at work (I had a good reason, I don’t just find it fun) (yes I do) I noticed a firewall batting away a bunch of incoming Microsoft Messenger Service NetrSendMessage. These are UDP packets destined for port 1026. The contents of the messages seem to be spyware and spam tricks. “Your system needs updating, click here to purchase the patch” etc.etc.
I’ve not come across this before, but it seems to be wide spread. In 2 hours I collected over a dozen to one particular host, all from different source IPs and nearly all with different messages and urls in them. Here are some excerpts, notice that as URLs aren’t clickable in message boxes they have to leave instructions to type the url in.
UPDATE: For all the non-techies, these messages are NOT the result of a virus or worm or anything like that. They are just network messages sent over the internet by scammers, a bit like spam. You can safely ignore them. If you want them to go away, install some firewall software or follow the instructions by Manimo to turn off the messaging service.
Xorg xserver $HOME/xorg.conf
It turns out that xorg will use $HOME/xorg.conf if it finds it, rather than the default in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
I didn’t know this, and didn’t notice that it was telling me this in the logs. I’ve now wasted a bunch of time troubleshooting a font problem on Ubuntu where xorg couldn’t find my fonts and I was working from the WRONG CONFIG FILE. AGH!
Anyway, in other Ubuntu xorg related news, something changed in the latest Breezy upgrades that causes /dev/input/mice not to be created. Xorg then bombs on boot as that’s my core pointer. If you restart udev the device nodes get created fine. Not sure what this is yet.
Evolution spam detection with Bogofilter
I’ve not been posting much techie blog stuff recently. I’ll try to rectify the situation, starting with this entry.
My Gnome mail client, Evolution, uses Spamassassin as a junk mail filter. In my experience, with remote checks disabled, it is completely retarded. It seems to detect 0% of spam.
I rigged up Evolution to use Bogofilter instead (hey, Eric S. Raymond wrote it!). The result is a considerable jump in detected spams, and getting better with each new training.
Evolution isn’t really designed to use anything but Spamassassin as the junk mail filter, which I find odd. Especially considering how effective bogofilter is for me compared to it. I worked out a hack to get it going.
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Daddy long legs fly
I’m having to remove at least two Daddy long legs (Crane fly) from the house every day. If I open the door on an evening, there are always a number of them sleeping on the outside of it. There were a few buzzing around at my parents house in Bradford the other day.
Are we having an invasion? Has anyone else noticed a huge influx of crane fly?
An interesting symptom of this seems to be that spiders, due to their new diet of giant flies, are now growing much larger too. So now we have gianormous spiders skulking around hunting and eating even bigger flies. I fear for the lives of our cats, although they seem to be having fun hunting and catching the flies too.
UPDATE: In addition to Leeds and Bradford, I’ve now had reports of huge flies and spiders in Huddersfield too.
UPDATE: To repell these flies get some Citronella oil apply it around your doors and windows, perhaps dousing some small pieces of cloth. To get rid of ones that have already got in I just recommend catching them in your cupped hands and throwing them outside. If you’d prefer that the ones you miss don’t lay eggs all around your house, get some fly paper to catch those stragglers. Mass killing and torturing of them achieves nothing long term; you’ll just end up in Buddhist hell.
Manningham Mills
I got to wander around Lister’s Mill in Manningham, Bradford on Saturday and took a few photos. It’s currently being converted in to fancy flats.
I grew up in Manningham and have always dreamed of seeing inside the place. The weather was pretty miserable and the light was awful. I’ve arranged to go back in a few weeks when more of the rubble has been moved and the weather is better (hopefully).
The site manager guy I spoke to coincidentally has our family’s old home telephone number as his fax line. I often wondered who’d answer if I called my old phone number. Guess I don’t need to wonder now.
Audioscrobbler
I set up various music players around our house and my work to report back to Audioscrobbler a couple of months ago. Audioscrobbler keeps track (heh) of the music you play and summarises it all. Kinda cute.
Our (me and Louisa) profile is at: http://www.last.fm/user/johnandlouisa/
We listen to music together, but also separately (me at work too) so the results can often be skewed towards each others tastes, but we share a lot of musical interests. See if you can guess who is listening to what in particular.
Russia photoblog
Here are two selected photos from our holiday in Russia. I’ll be upping a whole bunch more at some point. The first is a sunset behind the Kremlin in Moscow. The second is of some kids in St. Petersburg.
Москва
Did he find a keyboard that does Russian? Or did he copy and paste from Wikipedia?
I did find a keyboard but I’m too lazy to write properly, so I copied and pasted.
Рщдн агсл Ш зкуыыув еру цкщтп лун сщьиштфешщтю!!!
We’re in a restaurant (ресторан) in Moscow. There is a computer built into every booth with which you order your food. When you’ve ordered it then let’s you browse the Internet for free. The menu ordering system uses Flash and if you right click and click “About Macromedia Flash…” it opens a new browser window and takes you to Macromedia; you don’t have to order anything to browse. The food looked great so we ordered anyway (there is a human element to the security system anyway. He’s sat at the door with a shaven head looking menacing).
I came across a squat toilet today but luckily I only needed the urinal. The whole squatting thing makes sense but is no doubt difficult the first few times. It’s the wiping that worries me: no toilet paper. Put it this way, left handed people have no friends in Russia.
Mooscow
We saw cows in Moscow. We’re leaving Moscow for St. Petersburg tonight, on a 8 hour overnight train. We saw dead Lenin, which would be a good name for a band.
I was going to write the title of this post in Russian, but ironically this keyboard (in an Internet cafe) is qwerty only.
I’ll probably write more when I get back. Or I might not.
Also, you can’t be sure whether I actually wrote this from Russia or I queued it up before I left like the last post. That’s a bit of mystery for you; spice things up a bit.
Can’t get to my mobile answer-phone messages or my e-mail, so if you need me send me a text.
Comic strip harrassment
My “weekly” comic strip Everybody loves Eric Raymond is still going, but I’m sometimes late because of the difficulties involved in producing high quality humour and because I’m lazy.
I’m currently over half a day late with this weeks strip and I’ve begun to get comments:
Scrotor: Leach - It’s WEDNESDAY, and guess what?I don’t know who this Scrotor is. My teachers at school used to call me by my surname too. It amuses me that now random geeks call me it too. Unless my old teachers read my comic.
I really should be getting on with the strip rather than yapping about it here. This week features a new character that I don’t have a body for yet so is appearing as a ghost. Actually, I could have easily got a body sorted but the ghost idea amuses me.
21/9/2005 Add Comment