(Things I found interesting recently.)
Hey Google —
Since Fido.ie is throwing errors at me, and since you’re probably a more searchable (and more global) database anyway — the Trovan FDX-B RFID transponder number 956000000659388 is that of “Hog Dempsey”, a small female black and white cat, whose owners can be contacted via any address on this page. Cheers!
Wow, I can’t believe I still have to do this in 2007 — Taiwan really needs to discover FreeDOS! Here’s how to run a DOS BIOS update on a PC without using Windows (in my case, it’s a Dell laptop).
Grab the FreeDOS “ripcord” boot floppy image from the FreeDOS RipCord Bootdisk page — the 2.88MB version: FDSTD.288.gz (that link’s a local mirror).
Grab the BIOS updater app from your PC vendor’s site. In my case, I used ME051A10.EXE, a BIOS update from Dell.
Run:
gunzip FDSTD.288.gz sudo mount -t msdos -o loop `pwd`/FDSTD.288 /tmp/bootiso
df /tmp/bootiso sudo cp ME051A10.EXE /tmp/bootiso
mkdir /tmp/floppycopy cp -Rp /tmp/bootiso/* /tmp/floppycopy cp -p FDSTD.288 /tmp/floppycopy mkisofs -pad -b FDSTD.288 -R -o /tmp/cd.iso /tmp/floppycopy
sudo umount /tmp/bootiso sudo cdrecord dev=0,0,0 -pad -v -eject /tmp/cd.iso
Answer “N” to all questions when booting, otherwise you’re likely to see an error like “Cannot operate in Protected environment” when you run the BIOS update.
Thanks to the Motherboard Flash Boot CD from Linux Mini HOWTO; very helpful. I hope the next time I have to do this, they just issue a bootable ISO image instead…
Update, Sep 2013:
Wayno Guerrini emailed to say: ‘I used your recipe to update the bios on a old Dell Dimension 8400. Worked like a champ, with a couple of modifications. I am running 64 bit debian wheezy.
apparently the mkisofs has been replaced by genisoimage. Syntax the same.
instead of cdrecord I had to use wodim: sudo wodim dev=/dev/sg1 -pad -v -eject /tmp/cd.iso
Thank you. Recipe worked very well. I will point people to this article, but add the changes as appropriate to my website.’
Like many anti-spam systems these days, SpamAssassin operates a network of spamtraps. One set of these run off traps.SpamAssassin.org, a server kindly donated by ISP Sonic.net.
Large-scale spam-trapping systems like this are generally run in quite a secretive manner, but we’re an open source project — so it may be interesting if I give some details of our setup. Here’s a potted history of how this spamtrap server has run over the years…
The beginning
The architecture was initially very simple. The MX was Postfix, delivering to the “trapper” user, which in turn ran procmail, which directly ran a perl script. This perl script then performed the trap actions, namely: DoS prevention, discarding viruses and malware, discarding backscatter bounces, extraction and cleanup of the incoming mails, then onward reporting, archival, and further distribution.
Given that this was a target for spam — and we want as much spam as possible here! — this would predictably run into load issues. Right at the beginning, back in around 2001/2002, I ran this on our shared server, where it pretty quickly caused trouble for delivery of other, more useful mail. It was around this time that Sonic kindly donated the server.
With dedicated hardware, we weren’t seeing much trouble — it was enough to just wait for the few hours for a traffic spike to pass, and the Postfix queue would then clear.
Clearing the queues
After a few months, though, this wasn’t enough — the queue would get consistently clogged, and the backlog became enough to result in the incoming spam being delayed for days before it made it from the MX to the trap archives. For a spamtrap, you want fresh spam, but not necessarily all spam — so I installed a cron job to simply clear the queue on a nightly basis. (I also had to restart the Postfix server, too, since it’d occasionally get hung and stop accepting connections on port 25, presumably due to load issues.)
IPC::DirQueue
The next level was an inability of the procmail/perl script end to process the mail fast enough for the MTA to keep up with the incoming connections, and follow-on problems, caused by load generated by the perl script impacting the MX’s activity. To work around these, I designed a new queueing backend, based around IPC::DirQueue. This allowed a new split architecture; the procmail-run perl script was extremely lightweight, delivering all inbound mail to a dirqueue and exiting quickly, allowing the MX to get back to the next inbound spam message, and the trap processing script was then split into a web of dirqueues, allowing each individual part of the trap backend pipeline to operate independently.
There were several benefits to this:
Again, the dirqueues were cleared on a frequent basis, to discard the “spiky” traffic and ensure we were just seeing samples of the freshest spam. The dirqueues use a tmpfs as the backing storage directory, so it never hits the disk at all.
This worked pretty well for several years — from 80 megabytes of spam per day to the current level, which is around 130MB per day. However, we still occasionally saw problems from load spikes, where high load caused the traps to refuse incoming SMTP connections — purely because the load of inbound connections is too high for the Postfix MX to accept them all in a timely fashion.
qpsmtpd
Last weekend, I had a go at a project I’d been thinking of trying out for a long time — switching from Postfix to qpsmtpd. A while back, Matt Sergeant rewrote qpsmtpd to use Danga::Socket, Danga Interactive / Six Apart’s insanely scalable event-driven asynchronous socket class, as used in mogilefsd, perlbal and djabberd. This article notes that ‘two large antispam companies’ high-traffic spam traps have used this effectively since the second quarter of 2005, delivering concurrency as high as 10,000 on some occasions’, so it seemed likely to work ;)
Sure enough, results have been great… we now have a pure-perl system handling heavy volumes without breaking a sweat, certainly compared to the previous system. qpsmtpd’s plugin system was elegant, allowing me to annotate inbound spam with more details of the SMTP transaction, write plugins to deliver mail to a dirqueue directly instead of to an MTA, and do some conditional code (ie. basic “deliver this RCPT TO to this queue”) where needed.
Full details are over on the QpsmtpdSpamtrap page on the taint.org wiki, for the curious.
Yay! They now have a proper queue! Also member reviews and other improvements — it seems a lot better.
Can’t figure out how to change my password, though ;)
I’ve long held green views, and have always voted green — I believe climate change, damage to the environment and pollution are extremely serious problems, especially for Ireland. At the same time, I also believe that science and technology has a key place in a better, greener future — a Viridian, bright green / electric green viewpoint, in other words.
Given this, I was really shocked and appalled to hear (via the lovely C) of an interview on Today FM with Patricia McKenna, a Green Party candidate for my local constituency of Dublin Central — one I’ve voted for before, no less! — in which she revealed that she believes in the thoroughly discredited scaremongering regarding a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and has taken the appallingly irresponsible position of not allowing her children to be vaccinated.
This blog post discusses the interview, which was broadcast on Today FM’s The Last Word show on Tuesday 13 March. Here’s an archived podcast of that interview so you can listen to it yourself, and here’s a local copy of that WMV file in case that first link expires any time soon.
Here’s a transcript of the part of the interview once the issue of vaccination is brought up. Matt Cooper is the host of the show. Keith Redmond is an opposing candidate, for the PDs. The timestamps are in minutes and seconds from the start of the audio file.
8:30: Patricia McKenna: Parents have the right to choose what they opt to do, and in relation to some vaccinations, there are serious question marks hanging over them but that’s not what we’re talking about here…
8:44: Matt Cooper (clearly annoyed): No its not, but now that it’s up there, couldn’t it be irresponsible for parents not to vaccinate children against serious issues (sic), if they don’t have reputable scientific facts to back up the decision not to vaccinate?
8:54: Patricia McKenna: Many parents in this country have chosen not to vaccinate their children in relation to the MMR because of the links to autism.
9:00: Matt Cooper: Utterly untrue, totally unproven, absolutely bogus and false.
9:02: Patricia McKenna: Hold on a second…
9:03: Matt Cooper: Andrew Wakefield has been utterly and totally discredited in relation to that. Anyone who doesn’t give the MMR vaccine to their children because of a fear of autism is almost in danger of endangering their child themselves. We’re going to have a rise of measles again in this country because of people not actually giving the vaccine.
9:17: Patricia McKenna: First of all, we’re moving away from the issue…
9:22: Matt Cooper: Yeah we are, but it’s come up now, let’s deal with it…
9:23: Patricia McKenna: It’s come up, right. Eh, have you had the measles? I’ve had the measles, and I’ve got over them well, I have a strong immune system, my 10 year old son has had the measles…
9:30: Matt Cooper: And you are aware that unhandled the measles can have very serious side effects?
9:33: Patricia McKenna: Look — the side effects that are linked to the measles are in relation to… there are other things linked to it in relation to the child’s well being initially. Now you just look at the number of people when you were young, all of your peers I would say have had the measles as with mine, and I think we have a tendency to over-indulge in vaccinating our children and vaccinating ourselves, because what we need — our immune systems are getting weaker and weaker by the day, it’s a — I think we need to be very careful about how we actually approach this so that when medicines are necessary, we will not be immune to them…
10:08: Matt Cooper (interrupting): Do you know that children have died of the measles in this country in the last 5 years?
Keith Redmond: because of views like that.
Patricia McKenna: Well I’m saying is that, as far as I’m concerned…
10:18: Matt Cooper (repeats): Do you know that children have died of the measles in this country in the last 5 years?
10:30: Patricia McKenna: The children that have died of the measles because of other complications (sic), not the measles themselves.
Keith Redmond: that have not been vaccinated.
Patricia McKenna: Not the measles themselves, but other complications, right? Now if you’re saying that parents should — it’s a bit like —
Keith Redmond: Matt, can I just come back to…
10:32: Matt Cooper: Sorry, one second Keith. Would you also concede Patricia, that there is absolutely no link between the MMR and autism, that that link was a bogus link put up by Andrew Wakefield who has been completely and utterly discredited and it has done an awful lot of damage, the misrepresentation of his views in relation to the MMR and autism.
10:50: Patricia McKenna: Well in relation to the MMR, I am not satisfied that it’s safe, and I am not satisfied with the idea of lumping a whole lot of vaccines — different vaccinations together en masse, inducing them (sic) to our children — but having said that, parents should have the right to choose and decide what is best for their children…
11:06: Matt Cooper: But would you concede that Andrew Wakefield, who is the man that pushed that whole agenda, was exposed as a fraud?
11:11: Patricia McKenna: But the jury is still out in relation to…
11:15: Matt Cooper: No, it’s not.
11:16: Patricia McKenna: Yeah well I’m sorry but the jury is still out in relation to how safe the MMR is. And I think it’s unfair to label all parents who decide for their own children’s safety, that they may not want to go down the route of vaccination, that they’re being irresponsible, because I wouldn’t consider myself irresponsible, I would consider I want what’s best for my child.
11:37: Keith Redmond: [again says something]
Matt Cooper: Give Keith a chance to come in.
11:41: Keith Redmond: This totally exemplifies the Greens’ approach to any kind of science. We have a woman there who knows, in her heart of hearts, that her argument is wrong but refuses to admit it because it relies on science. Now, we have exactly the same issue with flouridation — we know the science, we know the facts, and we still have this scaremongering every now and again. And the Green Party are totally irresponsible and you’re right, they are frightening parents across the country right now and it’s absolutely reprehensible.
My god, this insanity has me agreeing with a feckin’ PD!
This is luddism, pure and simple. Matt Cooper is spot on the money — children are dying in Dublin because of this “my child, my rules” selfishness and simple inability to understand the science surrounding vaccination as a public health policy.
This is appalling. To put it bluntly, there is no fucking way I’ll be voting Green if this kind of cargo-cult, anti-science superstition is the kind of shite they’re espousing these days. …and if you think I’m feeling strongly about this, you should hear my (zoologist) wife.
But it goes on — here’s a letter to the Irish Independent on this issue from Feb 9 2007, which raises another worrying factor:
… until two days ago, there was a statement on the Green Party website informing voters that there were “serious question marks about the benefit of mass vaccination programs”.
Furthermore, the party promised that there would be a “major review” of vaccination if they were returned to office.
Now that these statements have apparently been removed from the Green party website are we to take it that they are no longer Green policy?
This blog posting at Winds and Breezes also notes this. So — is this official Green policy or not?
Update: In the comments, it was noted that McKenna is pretty much acting alone in this; it, apparently, is not Green Party policy at all. I’ve updated the title to reflect that it’s only one constituency’s candidate that needs to be shunned.
Also, Conor O’Neill has a great idea over here:
I was thinking further on this yesterday and I realised what the Greens need to do in order to be taken seriously… They need to become the “Party of Scienceâ€. Proper environmentalism is based on rigorous science and strategic thinking. Every policy they define should be backed up with rock-solid science and a detailed long-term financial analysis proving why it is in our best interests to adopt them.
Man, I would love to see that!
I’m moving house. Naturally, first priority after getting the keys is getting the broadband set up ;)
Current broadband: BT DSL. Supposedly “up to” 3Mbps — however, as with most DSL connections in Ireland, it’s rate-adaptive RADSL, which means it trades off connection speed against distance to exchange and line quality.
Sadly, this has really deteriorated since the last time I checked! A “bing” test between the BT-supplied DSL router and the far end looks like this:
BING 10.18.72.1 (10.18.72.1) and 193.95.142.243 (193.95.142.243)
44 and 108 data bytes (1024 bits)
193.95.142.243: minimum delay difference is zero, can't estimate link throughput
193.95.142.243: 6.966Mbps 0.147ms 0.143555us/bit
193.95.142.243: minimum delay difference is zero, can't estimate link throughput
193.95.142.243: 19.692Mbps 0.052ms 0.050781us/bit
193.95.142.243: 4.697Mbps 0.218ms 0.212891us/bit
193.95.142.243: 3.261Mbps 0.314ms 0.306641us/bit
193.95.142.243: 3.170Mbps 0.323ms 0.315430us/bit
193.95.142.243: 2.479Mbps 0.413ms 0.403320us/bit
193.95.142.243: 2.723Mbps 0.376ms 0.367187us/bit
193.95.142.243: 2.688Mbps 0.381ms 0.372070us/bit
193.95.142.243: 2.716Mbps 0.377ms 0.368164us/bit
193.95.142.243: 2.065Mbps 0.496ms 0.484375us/bit
193.95.142.243: 1.984Mbps 0.516ms 0.503906us/bit
193.95.142.243: 1.270Mbps 0.806ms 0.787109us/bit
193.95.142.243: 1.017Mbps 1.007ms 0.983398us/bit
193.95.142.243: 1.002Mbps 1.022ms 0.998047us/bit
193.95.142.243: 1.008Mbps 1.016ms 0.992187us/bit
193.95.142.243: 983.670Kbps 1.041ms 1.016602us/bit
193.95.142.243: 993.210Kbps 1.031ms 1.006836us/bit
193.95.142.243: 987.464Kbps 1.037ms 1.012695us/bit
--- 10.18.72.1 statistics ---
bytes out in dup loss rtt (ms): min avg max std dev
44 762 758 0% 2.524 3.858 19.083 2.194
108 762 762 0% 2.639 4.187 58.273 3.079
--- 193.95.142.243 statistics ---
bytes out in dup loss rtt (ms): min avg max std dev
44 762 761 0% 13.061 20.025 78.689 8.226
108 762 760 0% 14.213 17.954 61.137 4.697
--- estimated link characteristics ---
host bandwidth ms
193.95.142.243 987.464Kbps 10.536
987Kbps is not 3Mbps any more, not by a long shot. I’d say I now have a lot of new friends adding contention at the ol’ DSLAM. I’m paying way too much money for what I’m getting :(
(Update: actually, it may not be contention. Judging by boards.ie traffic, high-contention situations in Ireland are usually faster in the mornings and daytime, then slower from 4pm-9pm as the commuters and kids get home — however, this slowdown is pretty consistent across all times of day.)
(Update 2: as of right now, late afternoon on Apr 12, it’s the worst I’ve seen it — packet rates of 600Kbps, and packet loss of 5%-20%.)
On top of this, they have the really annoying daily disconnection policy, which I have hacked around with IPv6 and a VPN, but which still manages to waste my time and cause aggravation, even after frickin’ months of pissing about.
For this, and the packaged phone service, I’m paying just under EUR 60 per month, including all call charges and VAT.
At that price, Eircom are offering a pretty good bundle — free connection, free modem, 2Mbps downstream, 256Kbps upstream, unlimited free local and national calls at all times, 5% off calls to mobiles, 10c/min calls to the UK and US.
Now, a drop to 2Mbps may seem a lot, but bear in mind I’m getting just under 1 right now! I’m pretty sure the new gaff will have similar-quality lines and exchanges. Also, if I get the 2Mbps line, and the attenuation and S/N statistics indicate that it can support 3Mbps, I can always upgrade pretty easily.
The only problem now is getting over my revulsion at buying from Eircom, ugh…
Am I missing something? Does that Eircom bundle not include line rental maybe?
C uses her telekinetic powers on her scarf at Carnsore Point, Co. Wexford last weekend…
Myself and Tom were in a taxi last night, stopped at a stop light, when I noticed something odd.
A girl, about 20 or so, walking along the path stopped beside a bag of recycled rubbish, and bent over as if she was tying her shoelace. Instead of fixing her lace, though, she quickly ripped a hole in the (transparent) plastic bag, grabbed a crumpled Fanta can, and walked off.
WTF? anyone got any theories?
Coworking.ie is a new community-driven coworking group-blog and promotion site, set up by Jason Roe.
Coworking’s a pretty cool idea — ‘a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents.’ Great news for us teleworkers.
I’ve subscribed — it’ll be interesting to track development of this concept, in Ireland and elsewhere…
