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Ahead Nero 7

by | Dec 1, 2006 | Customer Service, Uncategorized

I’ve been using Nero for about seven years to burn CDs and more recently DVDs.

I upgraded online to Nero 7 on Sunday; I paid by PayPal. I expected a serial number ‘within 24 hours’ – sadly disappointed.

I emailed the support line – nothing. The US support – nothing.

I’ve watched the spam filters like a hawk – nothing so far.

I eventually called into the US sales line – with a 15 minute hold – and eventually got the serial number mailed to me from the sales person.

Not good service this time around. The reason given was ‘we are busy’.

DirecTV, Tivo and HD

by | Nov 19, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Technology, Uncategorized

We bought a splendid HD TV a week or so ago – a Sony – very pleased with the quality.

I did the cable magic and got the DirecTV up to speed as well. I decided to go with the ‘old’ HR10-250 Tivo based DVR, rather than the newer MPEG4 non-Tivo DVR. Call it Tivo loyalty.

Nice to know that rather than the $400 we estimated for getting the work done; it cost me around $15 for the extra LNB for the satellite dish and about $20 for the good quality coax. Good job I can still crimp cables 😉

Middle is the new LNB Nice coax

Bayes learning, SpamAssassin, Novell NetMail and Copfilter

by | Nov 17, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Linux, Technology, Uncategorized

 

I use IPcop and Copfilter as my firewall/spam/email filtering gateway. Free and easy. Scales well.

I’ve had problems with Copfilter running the Bayesian learning for spam assassin; in short copfilter runs a wrapper script to call into sa-learn.pl.

I found that the IMAP->message_to_file was just sitting waiting for input from the NetMail server I run. Simple fix; add a timeout to IMAP reads and increase the IMAP buffer size. This should let me get all of the body text for learning, and timeout on massive inline images.

I logged a bug and posted a fix to the DMZS-sa-learn.pl script

my $imap = Mail::IMAPClient->new(
Server => ‘foo.com:143’,
User => ‘spamtrainer’,
Password => ‘longpassword’,
Debug => ‘1’,
#ezs edits
Timeout => ‘5’,
Buffer => ‘65536’,
);

Spam training is working perfectly now – Copfilter is eating its way through 3600 spam and about 6000 ham (non spam) messages.

The World is Flat

by | Nov 1, 2006 | Customer Service, Technology, Uncategorized

I read The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman a while ago. In it he describes how technology and supply chain improvements are changing the world.

Here’s my example.

Yesterday I ordered a red iPod Nano, with personalised engraving from Apple. It’s a present for Grania.

Today it has been shipped. From Shenzhen in China:

FedEx and Apple delivering my iPod within days. Now that would not have happened ten years ago.