Older blog entries for iDunno (starting at number 58)

W00t! Well, went back to my dad's for the weekend, played lots of pool with my brother friday night, spent *far* too much money on beer, but never mind :) Saturday went in to town with dad, went into WHSmith and purchased Finding Nemo, fantastic film :) Sat night was spent mostly at another pub, where I spent very very little, random people bought me drinks most of the night, damned good it was too :)

Sunday, went to the ALUG meeting, much random talking, more beer, all good :)

Monday so far: work, work, work, compile old subversion on a FreeBSD box to recover the archive, now restored in to the new version on that box (rah). Just working out what to do with the rest of the evening, ho hum.

*ARGH* I *WISH* sandisk would make up their minds about the SD WiFi support for PalmOS devices, it appears to disappear at random from their site, it was due last year, then they removed anything relating to it from the website, it was then due again in the first quarter of this year, guess what, it's lost all mention again. This is silly. Very silly. If one *did* come out, and it *did* work in my Palm Tungsten E, I might even be tempted to buy one, and then convert home to wireless notworking, but while they're still umming and ahhing, there's just no real convincing stance on it all.

Right - back to the working thing again.

OK - completely random post having seen yet another BT advert...

"Why are so many people coming back to BT?" well, it's like this here, most of them are after broadband, they can't get ADSL without a bloody BT line (yay for monopolies), NTL doesn't get everywhere, or even anywhere near the coverage that BT has, is it any suprise people are going to BT? They've got a locked userbase.

Right - sorry, just had to get that out of my system, it's been bugging me since seeing the first one of those damned adverts.

Back to the telly and the film.

Coo - something I did appears to be working quite well. Last night we sent an e-mail out to our customers telling them of a new service we had set up called "Cle@nMail", basically this uses SpamAssassin and ClamAV to filter the users e-mail in to 2 seperate boxes, .spam and .non-spam, the bit I wrote is the front end (currently in php, planning to do a rewrite elsewhere in python sometime) which allows the user to log in to the website and view the .spam and .non-spam mailboxes, and use sa-train to train SpamAssassin. Our customers appear to have wanted this for a while, we've setup a few today already, we weren't actually going to launch it till the 1st March, but hey, it's there, it works, now just to get the customer feed back :)

It uses clammailfilter.pl to do the virus scanning, it seems to work quite well (it's a smallish perl script I cobbled together, still needs working on, but doesn't everything?), and it seems to have stopped me from getting any crap :)

All in all, it's not been a bad day, and we're stil getting calls from people after our service :)

On a different note, now that the panicing is over, I'll be playing with my bloggy code on sommitrealweird some more, so that I can (eventually) actually have something nice and usable and light to aggegrate other feeds :)

Right - that's it for now - I'm going back to working on the signup for Cle@nMail, it needs to be in place for monday ;)

Finally fixed my blog to be XHTML compliant using the mx.Tidy python module (thanks for the pointers thom.)

Now, to stop it from downloading the rss feed when it doesn't need to... hrm... I'm hoping I can get away with messing with just checking headers, but I'm not sure yet. Currently it just processes my advogato stream, but I expect to add another stream for less technical stuff RSN (just as soon as I get round to writing something to do it :)

Discovered a problem with the ClamMailFilter tar ball I created yesterday, apparently, when creating these type things on BSD, be careful and use the --portability flag for tar, or you end up with a POSIX tar file that 90% of the world can't use ;)

Right - time for bed, me thinks.

pphaneuf: It might be worth taking a look at PgAccess, which will connect to postgres and give you all the fun of forms, and a front end. Hope that helps.

Released a version of ClamMailFilter last night, it's still not completely finished, but it does the job (for me at any rate). It does appear to sometimes not clean up after itself which I'm currently working on, and should be fixed in the coming week or so.

Currently still working on the spam management system for work, will probably do a complete rewrite in python when that's working, and publish that version instead (current version is php4, which although it works, isn't the most pretty code in the world to work with).

Anyways - back to writing the subscription front end for the spam management so that our customers can sign up at the beginning of next month (nothing like tight deadlines, is there ;). I think that it'll be a mostly manual setup for now, but that shouldn't be too bad.

SpamManagement is now almost completed, did a few tweaks to make it actually display stuff almost correctly. It needs a few more options, but otherwise it's working quite nicely.

The next thing to do is to write a quick script that goes through the users file for it and cleans the mailbox to only contain the last 7 days e-mail (otherwise it'll get stupidly big very quickly). Then there's writting some documentation for it, that'll be around sometime soon, I hope.

Also been playing with python and rss, have currently got my Advogato stream rendering nicely on http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/python/cgi-bin/blog.py and am working towards making that more efficient (oh, and XHTML compliant, soon, I hope ;).

Right - that's it for this morning

Crikey, long time no post here, well, what's been happening? Mostly work, currently hacking together a spamassassin front end for work, it's looking quite good now, a few more tweaks and I'll be really quite happy with it.

Also wrote a small perl script to play with emails and clamav (as the --mbox flag has always been discouraged), that also works quite nicely, but isn't quite finished.

Should rewrite the set of awstats scripts I wrote for work sometime in the next couple of weeks, with a bit of work they might come in handy for other people. Currently they have a simple config file (which tells it where to download the logs from, and where to upload them too, currently FTP only) and a small cron segment that runs them on the first of the month, they work really quite well.

Got a couple other small projects up my sleeve also, but I'm not entirely sure about them yet. We'll see how the next couple weeks go.

Hrm, s'been a while since I last posted anything here, I see. Well, still nowt to report, keep getting home and not fancying working on any of the half started projects, ah well, I'll get to that soon I hope.

Just got a LiveJournal account too, all because I wanted to post a comment on someone elses LJ. *SIGH*. Just incase anyone is interested it's at http://www.livejournal.com/users/sommitrealweird/

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