Older blog entries for RoUS (starting at number 32)

morning, EST

autoresponder
Added the ability to ignore messages according to subject patterns to autoresponder. Replaced --no-reply-to (still present but deprecated) with --ignore-from. Makes it easier to ignore bounces and spam.

conplan
Fly to Massachusetts on Wednesday for FreeNIX planning, then California for ApacheCon planning. Did I already say that? One thing that sucks about not living near an airline hub: miles end up being spread across a dozen airlines instead of only a couple. Still got thousands of miles on TWA from when I lived in St Louis; who knows what'll happen to 'em if AA buys TWA. Bah.

early afternoon, EST

deekayen says:

RoUS: I appreciate the fact that you certified me. In fact, I think I had certified you at one point. ... However, just because you certified me doesn't mean I'm going to certify you. ... I don't know you, you're a master already, so you will have to excuse me if I don't ever certify you... not even for apprentice. I should hope that the others listed don't certify you just because you finger pointed either.

Um, I wasn't pointing any fingers, and I too hope none of the people I named certify me simply because I named them. Certainly it's not a uniformly symmetrical arrangement, and I don't expect people to certify me 'just because' I certified them. I suspect you're overlooking one of the derivative effects, too: I'm sure I'm not the only one who checks out the distance+n relationships. That is, if I know Heather, and Heather certifies me, if I notice that Heather has also certified Chris I'll have some little inclination to check out Chris' contributions (possibly resulting in a certification of Chris) because I respect Heather's judgement.

Am I monumentally insane to feel a compulsion to find out more about people in an n-way trust network who have expressed trust in me?

For example, I don't expect Alan to ever certify me; he doesn't know me nor my work from Chthulu. However, it seems to me that there should be some degree of reciprocity in closer relationships (like co-developers). A symmetrical network won't grow, but a collection of solely one-way paths can't be trusted.

evening, EST

People who have certified me about whom I need to find out more so I can evaluate returning the compliment:
(It's a moral imperative.)
Cardinal, davidw, dneighbors, jLoki, lerdsuwa, mjs, sh, steveh, superant, suso, voltron.

People whom I have certified who have not returned the compliment:
(Not all of them know me, so some of these are entirely reasonable. Others.. well, in a voluntary system it's hard to say it's 'unreasonable,' but it rather seems that way in some cases.)
alan, andi, ben, bhyde, cananian, daniel, deekayen, dirkx, fanf, fc, grisha, jg, jkh, jmbarry, kfogel, lpd, manoj, mjcox, rasmus, rbb, rse, shaneowenby, shields, ssb, stefano, stoddard, thies, twleung.

late afternoon/early evening EST

Conference thingies
Next week I go to New England for USENIX/FREENIX planning. There's an Apache board concall scheduled for the time I expect to be travelling to the airport/waiting at the gate. Coming back Saturday night, I leave Sunday morning for ApacheCon planning in California. Cathy's going with me to New England so she can see friends and relatives while I'm busy with the planning. She's not coming to California. All in all, I'll be gone a bit more than a week, with a few-hour bounce off the home base.

Whee.

Who is we, anyways?
Heh. I finally converted the GDBM database of free-source participation survey responses into a MySQL database, using mod_php instead of a Perl CGI to display & manage it. You can view the results at

• <URL:http://Sourcery.Org/os-survey.html>

The main Sourcery page hasn't been changed to point to this document yet because it's still not finished; for instance, there's currently no way for someone new to take the survey, nor for someone who did to change their responses.

One new thing, though, is the availability of the anonymised responses in CSV format. Several people wanted to use the information in their research, so I created a dump, and will update it semi-regularly.

early afternoon, EST

ApacheCon
Well, we've got a couple of superstar speakers for keynotes in Santa Clara: maddog and David Brin (s-f author of Earth and Uplift fame). Woo-hoo!

Other Open stuff
Got more Perl-to-PHP and GDBM-to-MySQL conversion work done on my top-secret-crap project at the week-end. When it's fully converted I'll list it here.

Advogacy
There are now n people who have certified me about whom I need to find out more so I can conditionally return the favour.. And there are m whom I have certified who have not returned it unto me.

early post meridian, EST

ApacheCon
The Big Feather finally arrived from the UK, after sitting in US Customs because no-one could figure out how to supply an invoice for it. Customs was threatening to destroy it soon, so I faked one up with MS Word. {sigh} Bureau-rats.. It got broken on the way to the UK, but the return trip didn't make it any worse. A little white glue, some bamboo skewers, black marker.. It's about 2-3kg; excellently crafted firmfoam.

Some interesting news may soon be forthcoming on the ApacheCon front; it'll be announced on the announcement list if all works out.

Perl and DBI and..
I finally got off my arse long enough to finish scripting something to convert data in a GDBM file into MySQL. All praise DBI! Now the Web access stuff needs to be converted, Perl -> PHP. Then I'll give more details here for the insanely lifeless. :-)

Advogacy
{sigh} I need to find some time to go through the Advogato user list and do some people-research and possibly some certs. More publishers and editors after me to write stuff; there are certainly enough projects being offered me to make writing a full-time job. Now, if only the benefits and pay were as nice as those IBM is currently providing me..

self-improvement
I've pretty much determined to take the plunge and migrate one of my systems to qmail. Now, should I do it to my laptop, or one of my desktops? If I do it to the laptop, it'll force me to use it -- but it may also torque me off if a lack of understanding on my part gets in the way of some important mail activity..

evening, EST

diary-ah!
I'm going to swap the ways I use italic/bold in my diary entries; why not?

Lego(R) brainstorm
I received a MindStorms system as a gift this season. After getting semi-hooked on Battlebots, I'm ready to get into this. I haven't investigated very far as yet, but it's an intersting thing -- though old hat to most, I guess. Does this thing have/use variables? Haven't found any yet, but total programming time is less than an hour. It's assembling the thing that takes the time..

open-meat, fresh software
I freshmeated my mod_sequester Apache module. Also, at the suggestion of someone (Peter Simon, I think it was) following that, I updated the packages page to include a link to each package's directory, and included a changelog and tarball for each package.

ApacheCon
I don't think I diaried it, but the ApacheCon site now allows anyone to add an 'account.' Anyone with an 'account' can do additional stuff, like rating proposed sessions according to how interesting they seem. (The proposals, not the people. :-) The rating page is also new. We've received more submissions for this next conference (in Santa Clara in April, 2001) than for either of the previous shows, so we need all the help we can get to figure out which sessions are appropriate to schedule.

morning, EST

spam harvesters
I experimented with two different approaches to blocking the spam harvesters, who keep hitting my mail servers with hundreds of 'RCPT To: plausible-address' tests. The first took advantage of the fact that they seem to be using a small set of usernames (from dozens of ever-changing domains) to originate the probes, but it resulted in blocking mail from legitimate people I know named 'mike', 'chris', and such. The second attempt (in place now) rejects any messages aimed at those plausible addresses (at least the ones that aren't valid for my servers).

The scary thing is that I was able to write the sendmail rewrite rules without having to refer much to any documentation. I feel so funky..

late morning, EST

obAdvogacy
I've done a little snooping, and it appears that non-reciprocal certs are very common. I got curious when I noticed that a bunch of people I certed didn't return the favour. (I'm talking about people who know me, so that's no excuse. :-) I guess there are a lot of people who get on here and either bail shortly thereafter, or else just don't keep up. An interesting sociological phenomenon worthy of further study.. by someone else. :-)

obApacheCon
Finished tweaking the account system so that anyone can get an account on the ApacheCon system, and it's no longer limited to just speakers and delegates. This was needed because we want feedback from both past and potential future delegates about which of the proposed sessions they'd attend if they were scheduled.

The deadline for proposals ended last night at 17h30 EST. 156 proposals were submitted, not including a handful sent by email by people who just missed the wire. Pretty cool, and all the more reason to get feedback from people about which ones they like.

We're having Jon maddog Hall for our 'Guru Keynoter.' There may be another significant announcement on the 'special stuff at ApacheCon' front in a couple of days.

obOpen
Brian Behlendorf pointed out some misassumptions I was making in my autoresponder script, so I've fixed that and a couple of wee bugs as well. It's on Freshmeat now and listed here at Advogato.

ack-emma, EST

weather (you know, that stuff the elements do when they're not forming compounds and stuff?)
Yikes, what a night. Major atmospheric disturbances in North Carolina, with tornado warnings all over the place. But let's not go there; suffice it to say that three terrified cats, two sleeping bags, and a 3m x 3m walk-in closet fulla stuff were involved.

obOpen
I put my simple-minded little email autoresponder script up on my packages page. It works quite well -- except that MIME::Parser keeps leaving droppings behind from its dissection of the inbound message. Stas indicates that this may be fixed in the latest version of the module, but I've got something not quite so recent and it isn't housebroken.

speedy needs
DSL simply rocks. I've had to reboot the gateway a couple of times, especially last night during the storms, but it fixes itself very quickly. Combined with wireless, it's just wicked cool.

spam probes
I've been noticing a lot of spam harvesters trolling my domains for addresses.. lots of sendmail foo@bar.com: User unknown messages in the logs. The big culprits seem to call themselves chris and mike at various fairly reasonable-sounding domains. I put together a script that adds to /etc/mail/deny any origin that results in two or more such 'user unknown' messages. It's simple, and it's reactive, and it's manual, and it may not do much good (they seem to rarely reuse the same origins), but it made me feel better.