Thursday October 21, 2004 Setting up virus/spam free e-mail at home
By the fact that you're reading blogs.sun.com (note the arrogant assumption that someone might actually be reading this blog), you're probably an enlightened person who run an OS that's less vulnerable (or, at least, less targetted) to viruses. But, how do you handle spam? What do you do, if, like me, your other half runs Windows and uses Outlook - and their company policy (ok, it's a school, she's a teacher) is only to upgrade virus defs every now and then?Well, obviously you could go down the line of setting up SunONE Mail Server, but that's overkill for home, surely? (Especially on my poor little Ultra 5 with only 64Mb RAM) Well, how about just using a standard sendmail installation?
I've got an Ultra 5 sat in the loft (but this could apply equally to Linux), which sucks down mail from all her accounts, and all my accounts (not Sun, obviously!) via fetchmail, runs it through 2 virus checkers, and spamassassin, then delivers to our relevant mailboxes - in her case, local to the Ultra 5 (served via IMAP), for me, to gmail.com. All this is done by using a little bit of perl, called MailScanner, developed originally by Julian Field of Southampton University.
MailScanner works very simply - it's a perl binary that sits and scans your mail queue dir (you set sendmail to queue only), picks up each mail and scans it through whatever progs you configure, then delivers the mail. I've chosen to use clamav and f-prot virus scanners - each of them updating thrice daily out of cron - and spamassassin.
Since I installed this about 12 months ago, we've not had (touch wood) a single virus - the system is rejecting about 10 a day, largely because Rosie gives out her e-mail address to some students, who, presumably, have virus infected machines. The amount of spam that I get has gone down from around 50 per day to 2-3 a day.
Well worth trying.
Posted by ajt [General] ( October 21, 2004 11:08 AM ) Permalink
I'm a die hard film user. Not because I think it's better, just because I
enjoy it. I have a medium format camera (Mamiya 645 Super), and love
shooting with a massive viewfinder, developing and printing my own films,
etc, etc.
But, and keep this very quiet, I have a confession to make. I took out Rosie's DSLR (Canon 300D) at the weekend. And, despite finding the viewfinder incredibly small (I was using the Mamiya at the sametime), quite enjoyed it, and got some reasonably good results with it.
Blasphemy! I feel somehow dirty,tainted.
Perhaps I'd best go take a shower.
Posted by ajt [Photography] ( October 21, 2004 12:58 AM ) Permalink Comments [2]
But, and keep this very quiet, I have a confession to make. I took out Rosie's DSLR (Canon 300D) at the weekend. And, despite finding the viewfinder incredibly small (I was using the Mamiya at the sametime), quite enjoyed it, and got some reasonably good results with it.
Blasphemy! I feel somehow dirty,tainted.
Perhaps I'd best go take a shower.
Posted by ajt [Photography] ( October 21, 2004 12:58 AM ) Permalink Comments [2]
I'm a Mac user - I expect everything to just work. So I get frustrated when it doesn't.
The default browser on the Mac is Safari, which is great. Except it's very keen on caching, or seems to be. Which, when you're doing web page development, is a pain in the thing you sit on (no, not the chair!).
So I decided to try out other browsers. Camino, from the Mozilla folks. Great browser, happy with this. Until I notice a random extra flashing cursor in all my pages. That can't be right... So I've tracked this down to a text input field "showing through" from a different tab - if, say, I'm composing a mail in google mail, and switch to a new tab, the wretched flashing cursor from the compose box is still showing in this new tab!
So, next stop, Firefox, being a Mozilla fan. Now, Firefox doesn't, unlike every other Mac browser, understand about the location based proxy settings that MacOS X has - it expects you to set your own proxy settings. A pain, when you're moving between work and home.
Opera? Doesn't work with gmail.
Omniweb? Doesn't work with gmail.
So I find myself in this limbo state of constantly switching between 3 different browsers - I really want to use Camino, but this flashing cursor just irritates the hell out of me :-(
Posted by ajt [Mac] ( October 21, 2004 12:53 AM ) Permalink | Comments [2]
The default browser on the Mac is Safari, which is great. Except it's very keen on caching, or seems to be. Which, when you're doing web page development, is a pain in the thing you sit on (no, not the chair!).
So I decided to try out other browsers. Camino, from the Mozilla folks. Great browser, happy with this. Until I notice a random extra flashing cursor in all my pages. That can't be right... So I've tracked this down to a text input field "showing through" from a different tab - if, say, I'm composing a mail in google mail, and switch to a new tab, the wretched flashing cursor from the compose box is still showing in this new tab!
So, next stop, Firefox, being a Mozilla fan. Now, Firefox doesn't, unlike every other Mac browser, understand about the location based proxy settings that MacOS X has - it expects you to set your own proxy settings. A pain, when you're moving between work and home.
Opera? Doesn't work with gmail.
Omniweb? Doesn't work with gmail.
So I find myself in this limbo state of constantly switching between 3 different browsers - I really want to use Camino, but this flashing cursor just irritates the hell out of me :-(
Posted by ajt [Mac] ( October 21, 2004 12:53 AM ) Permalink | Comments [2]
I'm working on a database/PHP project right now and need to get a
prototype up and running pretty fast, as we're already late with the pilot
implementation.
I've been hunting round on the net for quick and easy ways to knock up a prototype DB and data entry system.
I've stumbled across DBDesigner4 for Windows/Linux, from FabForce, which is excellent for doing the relational database bit, and JaneBuilder for the Mac, which features something that is randomly called AutoJane - for some reason I think of Austin Powers style FemmeBots at this point, but that's a whole other story that I probably shouldn't tell anyone.
The Auto-Janes (femmebots, go away!) basically go like this:1. Select : New Record Auto-Jane
2. Connect to DB
3. Select table you want to populate.
4. Select fields you want to populate and setup what sort of HTML inputs you want for them.
5. Click generate
And out pops a bunch of HTML and PHP for you, all very nice and quick. And nice clean HTML/PHP too - I just tacked on a one line include to pull in my site template/css, and in the space of about 30 seconds, I'd got most of my prototype written.
I heartily recommend JaneBuilder - I hope it stays free! DBDesigner 4 gets an 8/10 : great tool, doesn't run on the Mac :-(
Posted by ajt [General] ( October 21, 2004 12:46 AM ) Permalink |
I've been hunting round on the net for quick and easy ways to knock up a prototype DB and data entry system.
I've stumbled across DBDesigner4 for Windows/Linux, from FabForce, which is excellent for doing the relational database bit, and JaneBuilder for the Mac, which features something that is randomly called AutoJane - for some reason I think of Austin Powers style FemmeBots at this point, but that's a whole other story that I probably shouldn't tell anyone.
The Auto-Janes (femmebots, go away!) basically go like this:1. Select : New Record Auto-Jane
2. Connect to DB
3. Select table you want to populate.
4. Select fields you want to populate and setup what sort of HTML inputs you want for them.
5. Click generate
And out pops a bunch of HTML and PHP for you, all very nice and quick. And nice clean HTML/PHP too - I just tacked on a one line include to pull in my site template/css, and in the space of about 30 seconds, I'd got most of my prototype written.
I heartily recommend JaneBuilder - I hope it stays free! DBDesigner 4 gets an 8/10 : great tool, doesn't run on the Mac :-(
Posted by ajt [General] ( October 21, 2004 12:46 AM ) Permalink |
