Matt's Blog

I’ve noticed that “PM Spam” seems to be the new thing. A spammer signs up and sends private messages to lots of people. They’re usually not terribly obviously-spammy, either. On one site, where I basically never used my account and never uploaded any info at all to my profile, I just got this private message: [...]

Quite some time ago, I came to realize that the best ‘teachers’ of a subject (not necessarily academics, but real-world) were the people who had to learn something the hard way. For example, I absolutely, positively cannot explain third normal form for databases, simply because it’s intuitively “right” to me, whereas 1NF and 2NF are [...]

It seems that everything is up and running. I fully expect something, somewhere to be massively broken, I’m just not sure what is broken or where. Let me know as oddities pop up.

Are we back online!? =-O

I’ve kicked off the backup to my home machine… The server’s under heavy load, so things may be slow for a bit. (Yes, I could ‘nice’ it down… But I want this to complete quickly.)

Let me start by saying that there have definitely been some “bad” court rulings, both recently and throughout history. But there are two points I’d like to make about “activist judges,” both of which are things people seem to overlook and that drive me crazy. “Activist judges” has become a lot like “special interest groups,” [...]

I just came across a reference to Intel’s E5440 processor. I’ve frankly kind of been annoyed with the multi-care phenomenon: it’s a great idea, but for the longest time, we were seeing things like 2x 1.6 GHz, which weren’t any better than the 1x 3.2 GHz you could buy a few years ago. Not even [...]

My old (and current) server will start the next billing period on the 23rd. I need to give two day’s notice to cancel, which means, as I understand it, today (Thursday the 21st) is the last opportunity for me put in a cancellation notice. I intend to do so in the afternoon. The plan is [...]

Open-Xchange is exactly what the name might suggest: an open-source competitor to Exchange. It’s one of the businesses that has both a free (GPL) version and a proprietary, expensive version. Note that the free stuff doesn’t work with Outlook, meaning that it’ll be a great web-based groupware solution (e-mail, contacts, calendar, to-do lists, and even [...]

I stumbled across two things I didn’t know existed before. The Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy (ASSP) is exactly what the name suggests. It sits in front of your existing mailserver and runs various anti-spam measures. Linux users already have MailScanner which seems to bring various technologies together, but there’s something neat about being able to ‘drop [...]