Some of us were talking at work about something I’ve thought for a long time: spam just doesn’t make sense.

A coworker tried clicking on some spam a while ago. He was on a Mac and made sure the link wasn’t anything that contained unique identifiers. And none of the links worked. And then our site was inundated with spammers linking to nonexistent domains. I look up the domains, a long string of random characters: no whois record. And a lot of the spam that actually contains working links consists mostly of utter nonsense to try to slip past Bayesian filters.

And yet spam is presumably profitable, even though it seems that the majority of it leaves you unable to buy their products even if you wanted to.

Oh, here’s another fun one. We’ve been testing a new e-mail providers, which means that we’ve sent out tens of thousands of e-mails from a different IP than is listed in our SPF records. We’ve had just shy of 100% deliverability, suggesting that almost no one uses SPF.

FDCServers is having a huge promotion on colocation; you can send them a 1U rackmount box for $39/month, or a 2U for $59/month. And they’ve got very generous bandwidth allocations included.

Now here’s something else that’s interested me for a while: there’s a constant flood of decommissioned and off-lease servers hitting eBay. For under $400 (but plus hefty shipping), I’ve got a dual Xeon, 6GB RAM, with 6x 73GB SCSI disks (15K RPM) coming my way. If you do the same, do pay attention to shipping; $50 is par the course, but I’ve seen a few that are considerably more.

It’s actually temping to pick up a few of the $200-range machines and rent them out hosted, making a handsome profit, but I think a lot of others are thinking the same, and that I really don’t want to be involved in support.

If you’ve got access to some IDE drives, these have had my eye for a while. They seem to have a lot.

Of course, if you’re looking for a (Linux-based) virtual server (VPS/VDS), I’ll have some extra room soon! 🙂

I couldn’t sleep, so I figured I’d work on purging some old e-mail from my Inbox.

I wound up with something like 30,000 messages in my Trash folder on our Exchange server. When I went to empty the folder, Thunderbird seemed to want to download each message first. Argh!

I decided to use Ruby’s Net::IMAP, but sending an expunge command to the trash does nothing. The folder still had 30,000 messages. I remembered some weirdness where things weren’t actually getting deleted off the server until I disconnected, so I gave that a try, too. I reconnected and they’re still there.

Anyone have any thoughts? I don’t know where the problem lies. Is it an IMAP thing in general that you can’t “expunge” the trash folder, but must do something special (like iteratively delete each message)? An Exchange oddity? Or a limitation of Net::IMAP?

Toying with Net::IMAP has got me thinking that IMAP is a pretty weird protocol, by the way. Who knew that searching was done server-side, for example? I suppose it kind of makes sense (saves bandwidth from keeping the client from having to get each message), but it also seems like a single person with a big inbox could search and bring the whole server to its knees. Shows why your mailservers need to be beefy machines, I guess. A lot of the simple tasks you perform in a mail client are more complicated than I’d have thought, too. You don’t delete mail, for example. You modify the message and set a “DELETED” attribute. And then you expunge the mailbox.

Some time when it’s not 3am, I think I want to brush up the Net::IMAP code fragments I have and whip up something that will walk through some of the folders I have and delete anything older than 14 days. A horrible idea on some folders, but on automated status e-mails and error e-mails, it’s more than generous. I probably have something like 500-1000 e-mails sent to me by scripts that need regular deletion. I was surprised to find that there’s no Thunderbird extension for this, but I think I may prefer to have it be a cron job that runs overnight, since mail clients can lag out when tens of thousands of messages disappear from folders.

The Washington Post today has an article about Dick Cheney’s support for gay marriage. The article goes on to say that this “appears to place him to the left of President Obama,” who seems to have angered many by stating that he opposes gay marriage but supports civil unions.

The more I hear about gay marriage, the more bothered I become: why would anyone oppose it? Yes, some religions consider homosexuality an “abomination.” No, the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t wish to marry someone of the same sex. But, in my mind, none of that amounts to a reason to try to use the law to preclude same-sex marriage.

Years ago I had the idea to start a site where people would build a database of their books, and users could request to borrow each other’s books. There could be a feedback mechanism so you’d know if a person was trustworthy.

I never did anything with it, partially because it seemed like it would be hard to do, and partially because I realized that I really didn’t want to share my books with strangers.

I just noticed ISBNdb, a free database of ISBN numbers and associated data. It’s gathered in a neat way, too — it apparently has spidered libraries across the world and built up a very sizable database. They provide a fairly simple API as well, making it easy to fold into an application.

I’m interested in picking up a cheap barcode reader. I’m curious how they work, but I think that at least some essentially pretend to be a USB “keyboard,” which means it would work nicely with a web app: just make sure your cursor is in a textbox, scan, and viola. I think that would greatly improve the usability, since no one wants to manually key in every ISBN.

I’m still not sure what I think about this book sharing thing, but I’m attracted to the basic concept anyway. Another neat one would just be reviews — scan a book you’ve read and review it.

Is anyone familiar with sites like this already? (Aside from, of course, Amazon.com…)

There are some rumors out about Apple’s WWDC on Monday. It’s widely believed that the next iteration of the iPhone will be unveiled, along with the iPhone 3.0 software (free upgrade for 2.0 users), and Snow Leopard, the 10.6-branch of OS X in which Apple focused most of their resources on improving speed and efficiency, but apparently managed to include native Exchange support. There are also rumors of a tablet computer priced between the iPhone and entry-level MacBook laptops, designed to compete with netbooks, but most agree that it won’t be released until next year.

I’m excited, if only for copy-and-paste. Enthusiasts have already jailbroken the 3.0 software, by the way, so when it comes out, it shouldn’t be long at all until people have successfully jailbroken them.

I don’t remember how it came up, but I was at a baseball game tonight and was reminded of this (text from Wikipedia):

In a freak accident on March 24, 2001, during the 7th inning of a spring training game against the San Francisco Giants, Johnson threw a fastball that struck and killed a dove. The unlucky bird swooped across the infield just as Johnson was releasing the ball. After being struck by the pitch, the bird landed dead amid a “sea of feathers.” The official call was “no pitch.”

My Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens, the “Nifty Fifty,” fell apart for no apparent reason a week or two ago. The rigors of sitting in my bag, unmoved, were apparently too much. For the price, it was hard to beat. 50mm is the “standard lens,” something in the bag of most any photographer. The wide f/1.8 aperture lets in tons of light, allowing a pleasantly shallow depth of field and use in dim light when other lenses won’t get the shot. 18 months of use out of a $100 lens, so I feel like I got value.

But it had a few cons against it. One is that it always felt cheaply made. I shoot a “prosumer” plastic camera, so a lens with a flimsy-plastic exterior didn’t bother me too much, but it didn’t feel like anything top-of-the-line. This is something that a lot of reviewers complain about. And it turns out that the “the front of my lens just fell right out and can’t be reattached” problem is fairly common on the f/1.8 lens. By contrast, the f/1.4 feels a lot nicer. It’s still plastic, but I suspect that if I were to, say, bang it into my knee, I might injure my knee, not break the lens in half.

The other thing the f/1.8 had was that it wasn’t perfect. For someone who’s used to a budget zoom lens, a prime lens with an f/1.8 aperture is amazing. But the f/1.4 has a “special something” that the f/1.8 doesn’t. I think bokeh is part of it. I always thought the people who talked about the quality of bokeh were like the people who pretend they can “hear” the difference in audio that you get if you upgrade to pure-silver cables, or who are connoiseurs of various commodities. But there’s something special about this.

One thing that throws me is that the lens has an ultrasonic motor, so focus is essentially silent. There’s a very faint noise caused by the lens moving, but you don’t hear a motor whirring. It’s taking me some getting used to, because I’m used to hearing the motor focusing the lens and knowing that it’s still trying to focus.

Probably a couple years ago now, I was discussing whether it was possible to plant the seeds inside a lemon and get fruit. So I stuck a few seeds in a small pot, and a few weeks later, two small plants germinated.

They spent about a year being 6″ tall, before I finally figured out that it’s because they were too cramped in their pots. I took them out to transplant and it seemed that there was more of a maze of root than there was soil. I put them each in five-gallon pots so that they’ll have plenty of room to grow, and they’ve been taking off, with lots of new growth.

So I did some more research. For one, the plants will produce fruit, but it often takes years, and it’s not necessarily something most people do, because the trees will grow to about 20 feet, produce copious thorns, and need to be outside to become pollinated, and yet they can’t handle New Hampshire winters.

But here’s something that fascinates me. I read an allusion to it but didn’t believe it until today. I’ve had them on our enclosed sunporch for a few weeks, and it’s just now that the new growth is really taking off, with small, glossy leaves. And I kept smelling a pleasant fragrance on the porch.

So I felt one of the top leaves that was glossiest. And my hands smelled like lemon.

I’m really not sure what my long-term plan is going to be. I hate thorny plants, and I’m not sure what to do when the tree is many feet tall, since it seems that it would merrily grow through the ceiling. But short-term, I’m thinking that growing lemon trees was an even neater idea than I thought.

I have some strange fascination with statistics. I have as long as I can remember, and I doubt I’ll ever not be intrigued by them. So it’s perhaps no surprise that I’d really like the ability to compel millions of Americans to complete questionnaires. Unfortunately, I don’t have that power, so we’ll go with an unmeasurable trend.

Well here’s an unrelated one: I’ve noticed lots of pickup trucks with McCain-Palin stickers, some with “NObama” stickers, but not a single one for Obama. I suspect confirmation bias plays a role, but I’m also pretty confident that people who drive trucks are significantly more likely to have supported McCain than Obama. I’m fascinated by this, and would really like to explore the demographics of it.

But now to the titular observation: on September 12, 2001, I think an overwhelming majority of Americans thought that The Taliban was “the enemy,” and that they were a lunatic fringe group of Muslims. I was younger and less politically-astute then, so perhaps this isn’t the case. But these days, I see a frightening amount of people who think that “the enemy” is Islam, and that all Muslims are bad people: most are terrorists (in their mind), and the rest are just backwards people who hate freedom and Jesus.

I’m really curious if there have been opinion polls of the perception of Muslims. Has it, in fact, gotten progressively worse in the past years? I’ve read a surprising number of rants by far-right authors who truly believe that Obama is a Muslim, by the way, and that he’s deliberately trying to destroy America. I thought Bush was among the worst Presidents*, but never thought that he was on a deliberate quest to sabotage America, nor did anyone else I know.

I suppose it’s true that many of the parties we’re warring, or just enemies of, happen to be Muslim. But I don’t understand where the perception that Islam as a whole is our enemy comes from.

* But given that Clinton is the only other one I can actually remember, my experience is pretty limited