Category: obscure pursuits

Things have been a little flaky today: MySQL may have been down from 9-12 AM today, and snmpd went offline over the same span (how do you know what happens when your monitoring tools die?).

And then I decided to upgrade MySQL from 3.23.58 to 4.x and for some reason, it took more than an hour for me to figure which of the various shims and enhancements needed to be rebuilt (I thought I did them all, and I know I did some of them more than once).

The list of packages/ports that got touched in the process:

• php4-snmp-4.3.10_1
• rc_subr-1.31
• png-1.2.8
• pkgconfig-0.15.0_1
• freetype2-2.1.7_4
• php4-zlib-4.3.10_1
• php4-xmlrpc-4.3.10_1
• perl-5.8.5
• openssl-0.9.7e_1
• mod_php4-4.3.10_1,1
• libiconv-1.9.2_1
• expat-1.95.8
• apache-2.0.52_4
• php4-xml-4.3.10_1
• php4-tokenizer-4.3.10_1
• php4-session-4.3.10_1
• php4-posix-4.3.10_1
• php4-pcre-4.3.10_1
• php4-overload-4.3.10_1
• php4-mysql-4.3.10_1
• mysql-client-4.0.23a
• gettext-0.14.1
• fontconfig-2.2.3,1
• t1lib-5.0.1,1
• php4-gettext-4.3.10_1
• php4-ctype-4.3.10_1
• php4-calendar-4.3.10_1
• php4-bz2-4.3.10_1
• jpeg-6b_3
• XFree86-libraries-4.4.0_3
• php4-gd-4.3.10_1
• php4-bcmath-4.3.10_1
• php4-extensions-1.0

Not all of them seem relevant but dependencies can be an ugly business.

A popular Indian dish, consisting mostly of homemade cheese and spinach. Serve with rice or a rice and pea pilau, and naan/pita bread or chapatis if you have them.

Paneer (the cheese):
48 – 64 oz milk
1/4 cup vinegar

Heat the milk to just short of boiling (when bubbles form around the edge of the pot): as it comes to boil, add the vinegar (lemon juice works as well, but it adds a lemony flavor that may not work for you). Turn off the heat, and let the milk separate: you should have a green-yellow liquid with fluffy white chunks floating around in it (whey and curds, respectively).

Once it’s separated, strain it through a cheesecloth in a colander or strainer: keep the whey if you have a use for it, but I never do. Fold the cheesecloth over the curds, put a plate over it, and add some weight (a jar or pan of water is fine). You want the curds to drain but not be pressed too hard. If you do it the day before, you can skip the weight and just hang the whole mess up over the sink to drain.

Open the cheesecloth, dice the paneer (not to small: 1 inch is fine), and put aside.

Saag (seasoned spinach):
2 10 oz boxes of frozen spinach or 1 lb fresh
1 tbsp olive oil
garam masala
salt

Cook the spinach if frozen: I just do it in the microwave. If you have fresh, just add it a medium-high pan and wilt it, then put it aside.

Add the oil to your skillet, and fry the cubed paneer until brown, then put aside. Season it with garam masala and salt.

Add the cooked spinach to your skillet, and heat it up for a minute or so, then add the paneer, and cook them together, covered for 5 minutes.

Uncover, stir it around, making sure everything is heated through, serve with rice or pilau.

Spam Stopgap Extreme: New Version – Elliott Back:

I’ve just finished testing Spam Stopgap Extreme version 1.4. Special thanks to Matt Mullenweg, who cleaned up some things in a fork called WP Hashcash, C.S., who complained about code predictability, John F., who suggested that I not send google to spammers and include documentation, and Matt Warden who thought that logging should check for fopen and other file functions, which can often be disabled on the server.

With no further ado, I present Spam Stopgap Extreme v1.4. You can download the .zip and install it into your plugins directory, for improved spam protection today!

Is this possible? One recent comment suggests not, but one CS student at Cornell claims otherwise.

I found and removed close to 400 spams today (only three were posted) so I took a look at this problem again.

The holy grail/silver bullet seems to be the use of some kind of a Turing test to make this crummy activity harder or more expensive to automate: spam’s big appeal is that its costs approach zero, so any return is gravy. If some kind of non-trivial requirement for interaction (CAPTCHA graphics) can be introduced, it raises their costs and makes only unprotected sites vulnerable. As the number of vulnerable sites declines, and as the usual arms race rages — spammers find a loophole, the white hats find a new solution — perhaps it becomes unprofitable.

Now playing: Swing ’48 by Django Reinhardt from the album “Verve Jazz Masters 38: Django Reinhardt”

I’m coming around to seeing Cory is right to be as indignant as he is.

Cory responds to Wired Editor on DRM:

I would be sure that every single review of a DRM device carried the following notice: WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

It’s clear that the media cartels are as bad as he claims — the whole idea of “giving away” PVRs that will erase programming you recorded, unbeknownst to you, is amazingly bold. I have been soft on Apple and iTMS for no better reason than that I like it and have been taking the admittedly wobbly middle ground that if Steve can snooker the RIAA into DRM that’s as weak as it is — ignoring the “updates” that remove features for a minute — I think it is a kind of progress.

My fear is that without the wobbly middle way, all we have is the cartels claiming “piracy” and a lot of energy being spent on lawsuits and incredibly lame DRM (shift key or magic marker, anyone?). I think stuff like iTMS has the potential of showing the cartels that there is some way to open up to digital distribution. I realize some smaller companies get it already: there are labels that refuse to even consider DRM and some bands who openly endorse P2P sharing.

I guess I’m just wobbly.

Buy Generously:

So Belle and I are donating the humble proceeds from our Amazon Associates Account for the quarter. So far that comes to almost exactly $100. A nice round number to pony up for starters. Given that I have resolved to donate x, where x = my commisions, you might consider buying some Amazon products through my Associates account. Hint, hint.

Prof. Holbo’s idea is worth following: my associates account is empty (at least it was last I checked), but I can extend the same offer for the next quarter. Anything that gets credited to my associated account until March 31, 2005, will go to Southeast Asian tsunami relief (the Red Cross/Red Crescent). I just made the text red so you can see it better. And don’t feel compelled or even obligated to consider the displayed products: once you get to Amazon.com from here, everything Amazon shares with me goes to the relief effort.

Surely there’s something you didn’t get this holiday season that you want?

Tim Bray points out you can give directly through Amazon: do that if it moves you.

So how would one go about getting the iTMS URI for an iMix?

<never mind> move along, citizen, nothing more to see here. iTMS sends the URL when the iMix gets published (oh, I’m supposed to read those emails?)

[IP] Teaching the Constitution:

Sen. Robert C. Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat and the Senate’s
unofficial constitutional scholar, has inserted language into the
final $388-billion spending bill for 2005 requiring that any
educational institution that receives federal aid offer its students
an instructional program on the U.S. Constitution each September 17,
the anniversary of its signing.

Back in the last century when I went to school, we were required to take a unit on “Americanism vs Communism” as part of American History (taken in one’s junior year). I suppose with the end of the Cold War (ten years after I fulfilled the requirement) this has fallen by the website.

I wish Senator Byrd luck in this: I think it’s a worthy effort when the very notion of a secular republic of laws is under attack.