Archive for the 'meta' Category

Honeymoon Time

Posted in meta, OpenLayers, Social on June 29th, 2007 at 06:18:57

As of 5PM today, I will be unavailable on the web until July 9th. I’m going on a honeymoon, and I’m leaving my computer offline for the entire trip. (Yes, I am a workaholic. Heck, I committed to OpenLayers less than 2 hours before my wedding.) So, although I will be at home slightly more than that, you should not expect to hear from me until July 9th. If you have something that requires my urgent attention, please get it to me today 🙂

My actual honeymoon will include a stay at the Mount Washington Hotel, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Not to pat myself on the back too much, but I think I’ve earned it 🙂

Don’t break anything while I’m gone!

House Cleaning

Posted in meta on June 18th, 2007 at 08:07:32

Did some website house cleaning today/yesterday. Realized that I haven’t done much that I’ve published on this website in the past year — most of my stuff has taken place under the guise of MetaCarta Labs or OpenLayers or other stuff like that. I should do something about that, but I’m not sure what. 🙂

Anyway, I’ve cleaned up the homepage, and added a couple links to things that had been sitting around unlinked, as well as removed some links I haven’t updated in years. It’s hard to imagine that I’ve maintained crschmidt.net for as long as I have.

Gmail: Inbox Despamming

Posted in default, meta on February 3rd, 2007 at 19:33:49

Ever since I had some problems with my server and Crucial Paradigm, I’ve been having too much spam in my inbox. I thought I had the exact same spamassasin config, but either I missed something, or the settings have just gotten less effective.

This morning, when I woke up to check the mail on expired domains from www.spamzilla.io, I finally got fed up and decided it was time to do something about the fact that my inbox was about 90% junk mail which was hiding the essential mails.

I’ve had a Gmail account since around August 2004, but I never use it. However, I do know that Google has better spam prevention than I do: something about having hundreds or thousands of humans acting as bayesian filters helps them. (Mm, scale.) After having recently implement Akismet for spam checking on the MetaCarta Labs weblog — with the result being that about 98% of the 3000 spams it gets every week are now gettin caught — I decided it was time to do something about my inbox spam.

So, I set up crschmidt@crschmidt.net to act as a forward to Gmail, and then set up my fetchmail to fetch from Gmail instead of from localhost.

Results so far are extremely positive:  Of the 85 emails that made it past my local spamassasin filter and into Gmail, 75 of them were spam. Gmail caught all but two. So, instead of 85 messages in my inbox, 10 real, I ended up with 12, and 10 of them were real.

If this stays true, my personal email address may actually become a reasonable way to contact me again. Sorting through the 200 spam I get every day and finding the wheat was becoming an almost impossible task, and this may have at least given me a leg up temporarily.

Commenting and Spam

Posted in meta on January 31st, 2007 at 10:32:29

Upgraded WordPress so that I can use Akimset for spam prevention. This means I may actually be more diligent about approving comments now…