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Paul's Time Sink

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My Rules Du Jour

Paul Westbrook | 31 May, 2004 18:47

My Rules Du Jour is a cool tool that automatically updates certain spamassassin rules. This automatically downloads new 3rd party spamassassin rules runs the test, and then restarts spamd or amavisd

http://www.exit0.us/index.php/MyRulesDuJour

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yum for RedHat 9

Paul Westbrook | 27 May, 2004 12:15

With the latest security advisory with apache. I have wanted to upgrade my Red Hat 9 box up to Fedora Core 2, since Red Hat has declared Red Hat 9 end of life, and have stopped their up2date functionality.

Fedora Core uses the yum mechanism developed in Yellow Dog Linux, and it works very well since there can be any number of yum repositories.

I just haven't had the time to update my Red Hat 9 box yet, so in the mean time I wanted to come up with a solution that would allow be to get security patches for Red Hat 9. I then found the Fedora Legacy Project. They maintain a yum repository for older versions of Red Hat linux, with newer software. Their instructions worked well for me.


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Content Management systems

Paul Westbrook | 22 May, 2004 20:09

I decided to create a web site for our Home Owners Association, but I didn't want to be stuck maintaing it by myself. I want to create the site, where other people in our complex could update the site themselves. I thought that this could be accomplished with a Wiki or a CMS (Content Management System).

When I looked into Wiki systems, I liked the fact that it was easy to set up. The one thing that I didn't like about it is that the user needs to use special syntax to create links. Also I am not sure if there is a way to upload images when creating a page

I decided to use a CMS. There are two of them that I looked at: Post-nuke and php-nuke. They have pretty much the same feature sets.

I decided to go with postnuke, since there are supposedly some security holes with phpNuke.

There are some other cool features of postNuke. forums, News, faqs and comments. (More)

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Movable Type and free alternatives

Paul Westbrook | 16 May, 2004 18:11

Over the past couple of days, I have been looking through blog rings, and looking at people’s blogs. One topic that seems to be on a lot pf people’s mind is that Six Apart changed their license agreement for Movable Type 3.0. I guess the free version does not have as many features as the previous free version.

I think that Six Apart has every right to change their licensing terms, but I also think that consumers have every right to vote with thier wallet. There is a lot of free blog software. I use plog, and it is a great open source software. I is a php/mysql application for blogs.

The url for plog is http://www.plogworld.org/

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SMTP with t-mobile

Paul Westbrook | 16 May, 2004 12:31

Today I had to wait while I had a tire repaired, so I decided to wait at a Starbucks. I firgured that I would bring my laptop and use it to get some stuff done with the t-mobile 802.11b,

When I tried to send an email, my mail client stated that the mail server did not use authentication (The mail server that I use requires authentication). After a little digging, it looks like t-mobile intercepts all outgoing connections to port 25, and then sends it to their smtp server.

That seems like it could be a possible security concern. If I sent a message using the smtp server in my mail client (in general a isp or company’s server), and it actually goes to a different server, I don’t like that. I think that it would be better if they just blocked outgoing connections to port 25. Then the user should have to explicitly set up their smtp server in order to send outgoing messages.

I didn’t read the terms of service that closely, but this might be listed there.

Today, what I did was to tunnel the smpt connection through my ssh connection to the mail server. With doing that, I could guarantee the privacy of my email.

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Stormtroopers are bad shots

Paul Westbrook | 11 May, 2004 18:27

This was pretty funny. I just I just never paid much attention to it, but it is true. Jeremy Zawodny states that Stormtroopers have bad aim.

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Google's Blog

Paul Westbrook | 11 May, 2004 12:11

It looks like Google has setup a blog. I think that this is the first time that a company has a blog. I wonder what type of information is going to be put in this blog. It could be used just as another mechanism to release press releases, but hopfully there will be different content listed on this blog.

http://www.google.com/googleblog/

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Similar Minds

Paul Westbrook | 07 May, 2004 17:22

I found a link to a pretty cool and accurate personality test, at Similar Minds. Here are my results:

Conscious self
Overall self
Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

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TechTV staff fired

Paul Westbrook | 06 May, 2004 18:57

I know that this really isn't software related, but I thought it was interesting. It looks like the staff at TechTV have been fired. It sounds like they are relocating to LA, but not all of the positions are going to move. Here is a link to the story.

 (More)

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DSPAM

Paul Westbrook | 06 May, 2004 09:04

DSPAM looks like it is a promising way to stop spam. The website states that it uses Statistical Hybrid Filter, which they claim to be a better technology than the current spam blocking mechanisms. I have not installed it myself, so I can't really speak about how it actually works.

The main reason that I haven't installed it yet is because it looks like mail is filtered at deliver time. I actually want to have mail scanned at the time that it is received.

Here is the url: http://www.nuclearelephant.com/projects/dspam/index.html
 (More)

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