by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 9, 2004 | Code
I handle mail for about 40 domains on my servers at the moment, some are secondary and some are primary, they all get spam.
I have been keeping close track of all emails in and out of my machine. I keep lots of meta information about these emails including to, from, sender hostname, subject, attachments, time spent processing, is it spam or not etc. I do this partly because there are certain legal requirements for this to be done in the EU and because i like the kind of stats I can pull out of this.
It has now been a year since I started keeping this stats and my SpamAssassin has tagged 55 000 emails as spam. I religiously check my own spam folder for false positives and do not get much, but I am aware of some html newsletters that gets tagged as spam when it shouldn’t be. Overall though I believe that my tagging is fairly accurate.
What follows in the extended entry is a bit of analysis I did on this data to find out what ISP’s, Countries and so forth are to blame for this plague.
It is important to note that I am not setting out to have a hugely scientific approach to this or even a highly accurate one. If there were a very accurate way to identify spam we would not have a problem with it, this is merely interesting observations made on a small system.
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by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 8, 2004 | Uncategorized
In many large cities there are train, bus, underground and sometimes water based public transport systems, these can be very confusing and you can spend hours a month staring at various maps to figure out the best route from A to B. Enter Mรฉtro a tool for your Palm, PocketPC or Smartphone that will calculate the quickest route or route with the fewest changes for any of these systems. It currently covers over 250 Cities and amazingly is also freeware.
A full overview with plenty of screenshots are available here so I will not be posting any screenshots here, but this is an essential tool for anyone living or traveling to a large city.
Important features include:
- More than 250 cities covered
- Interface available in more than 30 languages
- Compute routes based on Place of Interest, Station Name, Contact details for some stops.
- Contact list with address/station associations in order to do route computes based on contact name
- Full display of stops on individual lines
- Auto-completion of inputs
This is definetely an essential tool, one that I have been using since about 2000 on my Palm based PDA’s
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 7, 2004 | Front Page
I use Power PHLogger to do my visitor tracking, it works by running a bit of java script on the client browser each time a visitor loads a page. This means that the majority of browsers gets counted and aggregators etc does not. This is ideal for me as it shows me actual users viewing the pages, their click streams etc. I also use Webalizer to do general stats.
PPHLogger counts unique visitors as those who are unique in 30 minute intervals, so far from examining my logs it seems some installs of Konqueror does not always load my bit of javascript, the rest are fine. The site owner can set a cookie that will skip his own browsing on the site, so my own hits never gets counted.
Today I received my 1,000th visitor using a real browser on this site since I started tracking it, 6th of September 2003, which was very shortly after it was launched in this format.
The lucky browser was from ntli.net and was searching google for “best freeware” that took him to my post about 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 7, 2004 | Uncategorized
Since the iPaq I got has both bluetooth and wifi it is very useful in a networked environment and so the obvious requirement is a networking tool that can do the usual diagnostics work. I found a excellent freeware tool called vxUtil from Cambridge Computer Corporation.
Features:
- DNS Audit
- DNS Lookup
- Finger
- Get HTML
- Network Interface Info like ifconfig or ipconfig
- IP Subnet Calculator
- Password Generator
- Ping and Ping Sweeper
- Port Scanner
- Quote
- Time Service client
- Traceroute
- whois
All round excellent tool one that I often use, view the extended entry to see screenshots of it in action.
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by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 7, 2004 | Usefull Things
A co-worker mentioned the RIAA Radar, it helps you quickly and easily discover if you are sponsoring RIAA or if you are targeting your ripping at the right people. Nice.
From their frontpage they have a quick overview of how it works:
When you run the RIAA Radar, it uses Amazon Web Services to get the album information. It then checks the record label data given by Amazon against a local database based on the official list of RIAA members (but heavily added to beyond that), and returns the result based on a match.
