Select Page

Mail, spam and viruses – update

I experimented several times during the holidays on various configurations of SpamAssassin and the like. I finally settled on something I liked and was easy to manage.

I found an addition to IPcop that added these services in a controllable manner – CopFilter – http://www.copFilter.org.

CopFilter plugs into IPcop and adds (for me) an SMTP proxy, ClamAV, SpamAssassin – as well as giving me a really simple web UI to manage things. Best of all all of the components are GPL.

I’ve trained the anti-spam – and it’s really working better so far than my own manual tweaking on a seperate server. 🙂

So far so good – I’ll keep track of the performance and post the results later.

Audible redux

I rejoined Audible a few months ago.

I first tried it out about three years ago when I got my first iPod (wow! three years!) and found it – somewhat clunky. Audible support was patchy on my old iPod, the software didn’t work too well – and the content was somewhat sparse.

Things have changed dramatically in the last couple of years. I am now listening to several books a month; mainly on plane journeys, also on my commute into the office.

I am currently listening to Michael Palins “Around the World in Eighty Days” – I first read this at University many years ago (1992!). Turns out the whole book is now available online.

Coffee disaster!

We’re down to less than two days worth of coffee beans!

We buy coffee in bulk from a friend.

Not like this:

Illy small tins

but in cases of two 7kg drums. Like the ones your favourite espresso store has.

I’ll take a picture when we get a delivery. Hopefully tomorrow.

On presentations

Following on from my earlier post on presentations – here’s a great site that I culled from Guy Kawasakis blog – presentationzen.com.

There are so many good tips in there – it’s a pleasure to just dive in and look at some of the ideas.

I don’t want to “name and shame” people who give death by PowerPoint – but I will try and adopt some of these ideas in my own work.

The end of an era

I finally threw away hardware that was part of my old test lab – I’ve not had use for this for a long time:

WAN and network emulation:
2x Cisco Catalyst 4500
Fitted with ISDN, FDDI, Ethernet and Serial (X25)

Cross platform testing:
Sun Sparc Enterprise 2
Dual Sparc, 512MB RAM, mirrored 4GB SCSI!

Wow – that was old and crufty.

I also threw out and shredded a lot of old documentation and notes from the late 90s and early 00s.