by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 31, 2004 | Usefull Things
Via RootPrompt I found a nice article titled Fine-Tuning SpamAssassin. It covers quite a bit of detail about SpamAssassin and is well worth a read.
Over time, however, many of the spammers have figured out how to fine tune their spam and bypass the default ruleset. I find the default setup still picks up at least half the spam, maybe two thirds on a good day, but too much leaks through. If the spammers are tuning their messages, I guess the only thing to do is to tune my scoring. There are at least 8 possible ways of improving SpamAssassin’s hit rate.
1. Blacklisting known offenders
2. DNS Blocklists
3. Enable Bayesian filtering
4. Reduce the point threshold for spam
5. Increase the scores on existing rulesets
6. Upgrade SpamAssassin to the latest version
7. Install more rulesets
8. Write your own rulesets
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 30, 2004 | Photography
I have been looking for an opportunity to test out my new Nikon SB-800 Speedlight. The Funfair came to Blackheath again for the long weekend and this was the perfect opportunity to freeze some action on fast moving subjects.
The results of my outing can be seen in this collection of 8 photos, some cliche’d spinning wheels of color here and some nice shots of people having fun on the rides.
The SB-800 is a fantastic flash with full remote mode, can command a whole lot of other flashes and is very very powerful. It was designed for the D70, along with its smaller sister product the SB-600 it makes a very good addition to the D70.
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 28, 2004 | Code
I have been using a bit of code I wrote for some of the small photo albums I uploaded here and decided I will polish it up a bit and make it available for download if anyone else is interested. This is not a big system for managing 100s of photos, it is designed to be ideal for showing up to 30 or so images in a nice clean manner.
You basically untar the distribution into the directory of your choice, copy your images into the img/ subdirectory. Create a list of files to display with something as simple as “cd img ; ls > list.txt” and add individual captions for photos by editing photo.jpg.txt. More info in the README file.
It supports themes and I think it is quite easy to create your own using the two provided in the tarball as a starting point. It can also work along with mod_rewrite to make nice looking URL’s but you can configure it to work without mod_rewrite as well.
Written in PHP and only needs your basic PHP, nothing fancy. Two samples exist of installations one using the provided black theme and one using the white theme both of these samples use mod_rewrite.
Version 1.0 is available for download: http://www.devco.net/code/spb/spb-1.0.tgz
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 24, 2004 | Usefull Things
I am again spending some time figuring out the workings of IPSec, this time I was interested in how to get it all going on PIX machines. While looking for information I came across 2 great articles about IPSec. They provide a simple introduction and were written by Dr. Peter J. Welcher.
IPsec phobia is caused by confusion. To cure that, we need some background information and terminology. Believe me, with a little orientation, this stuff makes a whole lot more sense! By the way, there’s lots of mathematics theory behind all this, but you won’t see it here. After all, you don’t need to know any of that to use IPsec.
It is split across 2 articles: IPSec Simplified and IPSec Simplified – Part 2.
The authors site has a large number of security and network related articles that seem of a very high quality and well worth checking out.
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 24, 2004 | Usefull Things
Newsforge is running an article titled Be your own CA that covers the process for building your own CA as well as giving some background information on how it all sticks together, it is well worth a read if you are unsure how certificates, revocation and so forth works.
I usually use a guide and files found at http://sial.org/howto/openssl/ca/, it includes some make files to automate some of the work and to minimize user error, the two sites compliment each other nicely.
