I went with some friends to see Bruno (err, Brüno) today. Borat ranked among the most hilarious movies I’ve ever seen, so I had high expectations for Bruno, a movie about a flamboyant fashion reporter from Austria.

A coworker, in describing the movie a few days ago, compared it to a trainwreck: there were parts that were really, really bad, and yet you couldn’t walk away. Borat had some parts that were so offensive and so utterly over the top that it hurt to laugh, yet at the same time, you felt a little offended. I thought Bruno often flipped that: it was a little funny and quite offensive.

Most sexual scenes are blurred out, but there is a bit of, err, graphic male nudity, that was, regretably, not blurred in any way. Much like the other over-the-top scenes, it reached the point of hilarity, but then kept going until it became disturbing, offensive, and not funny.

The movie definitely had parts that were laugh-out-loud funny, and that left me in pain from laughing so hard. But many other parts seem to have horribly offended gay rights groups, while thoroughly disgusting heterosexuals. There were several points in the movie in which I truly thought that Bruno was in danger of being killed, including one in which he travels to the Middle East and dresses in traditional Orthodox Jew attire, except he adds his flamboyant flair, and is chased by many outraged people. He meets with a terrorist while in the Middle East and does nothing but offend him. He goes hunting with conservative hunters and starts hitting on them, at one point stripping nude in the middle of the night and trying to enter someone else’s tent.

The movie somewhat followed the formulaic plot of Borat, which left the movie a bit predictable, and which I didn’t think really made much sense to duplicate. Overall, I’d say that the movie had moments of sheer hilarity, but could have been condensed to about 20 minutes, with the removed 60 minutes being comprised of about 10 minutes of filler between the funny parts, and 50 minutes of stuff that went too far and became offensive, or which was really much more graphic than was needed. Everyone who saw the movie with me seems to have drawn the same conclusion: funny at times, but I really wouldn’t recommend it.

And, dear God, to the mother who brought her early-teens son to the movie and sat in front of us: what in God’s name were you thinking?

A while back, Internet advertising was incredibly obnoxious. Sites would draw you in, and then they seemed to care more about ad impressions than their content, so you would be barraged with advertisements. Popups, popunders, flashing ads, ads covering content, ads playing sound, ads trying to install software, ads resizing windows…

Switching to Firefox prevented the egregious stuff that should never be allowed (like popup ads resizing windows and installing software), but it was still a nuisance. One day I discovered AdBlock Plus, and I basically never saw any ads again. For a really long time, life was great.

Over time, my conscience got to me. (The fact that my paycheck comes from an ad-supported site might help, too.) Whilst certainly not legally-binding, I came to see a lot of Internet sites as having a tacit agreement in place: you can access our content for free, as long as you view our ads. It’s kind of like commercials: there’s no expectation that I’ll sit glued to the television and watch every second of them, nor is it expected that I’ll do business solely with companies that advertise on TV. But commercials are the only reason I can watch TV for free, just as ads are the only reason many of the sites I enjoy are free.

So I turned off AdBlock Plus, and started viewing the web the way a lot of other people saw it. And I felt good about myself. Even if it’s only a few pennies at a time, I was helping to support the sites I frequent. Every now and then I’d find an ad that was actually interesting or relevant, and I’d click on it.

But then I had another revelation. A lot of Internet ads aren’t at all like commercials. It’s like a gang of mobsters leaping out of my televisions at commercial breaks, holding me on the couch and performing annoying charades while showing me graphic photographs of how well their male enhancement products work, all the while making an awful racket and getting in my way. And it’s like commercials that pop up in the middle of a suspense-packed action screen, completely obscuring whatever is going on. In the few years when I didn’t  view advertisements online, it seems that advertisers have had to become even more obnoxious to cope.

And for that reason, I have reenabled AdBlock Plus. I sometimes think I should allow it to display advertisements on some sites that I frequent that display only tasteful ads, but other times, noticing just how obnoxious ads are, I think it’s not worth my time.

What I feel worst about isn’t a sort of “soft theft of service,” but the fact that I may unknowingly link friends, coworkers, or blog readers to sites with popups and obnoxious ads, because I don’t ever see them. It’s a cruel world out there.

I’ve been getting slammed with spam lately. It’s all to a handful of spamtraps on a few domains I have, so it’s actually wonderful that it’s happening, because none of it hits my inbox; spammers are just adding themselves to a blacklist.

I’ve been watching logs and connections, and noticed that a lot of clients are sending bizarre HELO strings in all upper-case with random letters. The pattern seems vaguely familiar, and “Windows workgroups” is coming to mind. Do these hostnames look like that? If not, anyone have a clue what is generating these?

• helo=
• helo=
• helo=
• helo=
• helo=
• helo=
• helo=
• helo=
• helo=
• helo=
• helo=
• helo=
• helo=

Incidentally, this argues towards the use of the reject_non_fqdn_helo_hostnames parameter, except that in my case, it would just block them from hitting a spamtrap. (Although really, a very small minority of good mailservers are thought to be misconfigured and identify themselves without an FQDN HELO, so this isn’t 100% safe.)

When I get around to it, I think I want to set my new server up with a little FreeBSD virtual machine and use spamd to torture spammers by talking to them at 1 byte/sec.

I’m yet to see who has purchased Pocket Ref give it anything but a 5-star review.

The concept is repeated in various niches, too (from different authors): AutoRef focuses on car, Pocket PC Ref for computers, Handyman In-Your-Pocket for… handyman stuff…?, and even Pocket Partner meant for cops, but with a lot of reviews from people who find it useful for dealing with Hazmat stuff.

I think I’m going to have to pick some of these up. They’re pretty slick.

For someone providing e-mail services, allowing spam through is bad. Go0d mailserver admins get their spam rejection rate as high as they can.

But for someone providing e-mail services, flagging good e-mail as spam, known as a false positive, is really bad. Good mailserver admins have a false positive rate of 0%.

Looking through e-mail bounces from a (legitimate, opt-in) bulk e-mail sender, I’ve discovered a few things that are done wrong. For one, people are just using really bad lists. The five-ten-sg.com blacklist is a notorious example. It took me a long time to get unlisted from them, because someone else in the same datacenter had sent them spam once upon a time. They’re far from the only blacklist doing this, but the point is the same: look into the blacklists you use before you reject mail because of them!

Another thing, though: don’t reject mail because one blacklist says it’s bad. When I get around to setting up a new mailserver, my plan is to score IPs based on how many blacklists they have, weighing more accurate blacklists more heavily. Tools like SpamAssassin do this already. (My plan is to delete from the graylist table when IPs show up in numerous trustworthy blacklists; my area of interest is in the ability to reject mail before they even deliver the message body.)

In other news, my table of IPs that have delivered mail to various spamtraps in the past week have been in overdrive. Just over 2,000 hosts; the most recent 100 all came in within the past 8 hours. The month’s graph is pretty surprising:

The list is available here, but heed my warning above: don’t trust it alone.

Any time I’ve worked with performance tuning, I’ve found that caching gives the highest rewards with the least work. It’s entirely possible to see thousand-fold increases if you employ caching in the right places. My WordPress install used to run complex SQL queries on every page, and I benchmarked it at 4 pages/second under ideal conditions. I now do some trivial caching of the results of those queries and can push over 400 pages/second. Your OS caches files in unused memory since it’s so much faster than disk, and your browser caches static assets on a site so your browser doesn’t have to download them again for every page view.

But here’s what I’m actually posting about: What is it with people and cleaning out their caches all the time? It’s like caches are some sort of gunk that builds up and clogs up the works. It’d be like me being distraught to find that money is clogging up my bank account and trying to find a way to purge all the money so I had more room in the bank. This is one of those things that’s slightly amusing and only slightly irritating, until you talk to the tenth user in a row who talks about clearing their caches to try to make their computer faster. Why?! What is going through their heads?

One thing I’ve found with computers is that most people only learn the basics of many of the tools they use daily. Articles like My top 8 time-saving Firefox shortcuts are great ways to quickly pick up on the little things I never knew about (Ctrl+K to jump to the search bar, and Ctrl+L to jump to the URL bar!).

Today I found myself with a badly-formatted CSV file. Many of the last columns had newlines in them, which isn’t something a CSV should have. I fired up vim, and after a couple minutes, found out the regular expression to find any line that doesn’t end with a quotation mark: /[^”]$/ will do that. (Aside: regular expressions are giant pains, but I don’t know of any easier way to do what they do. I could write code to iterate over every line, but then I’ve got 15 lines of code instead of five obscure characters.)

Pressing “n” jumps to the next pattern matching that, and “J” pulls up the previous line to the current line. “n” again to the next match, and then “.” (easier than Shift+j for an uppercase) repeats the J. I soon realized that there were more instances than I thought, though. The ideal way would be have a regular expression to do the replacement, too, but I couldn’t find an easy way, so I did the next best thing and defined a macro. “qr” defined a macro named “r”, and pressing “n” and then “J”, the two steps from above, recorded them as a macro. “q” again stopped recording, and then “@r” ran the macro. Of course, “@r” (@@ does the same thing) wasn’t much easier to type than “n.n.n.n.n.n.n.” over and over.

So I ran “100@r” to run the macro 100 times. I realized that there were way more cases than I thought, and “10000@r” finished it off.

I was left noticing a few things. One is that many of these things were really obscure. To a UNIX power-user, it’s perhaps cake, but to a more average user, it’s black magic. I decided a while ago to make an effort to really learn vi. I’m only a small fraction of the way to mastery, but I’ve found that the time I invested in learning the lesser-known features has been well worth it.

Another thing I wonder about is how I could have done this more effectively. It seems like there ought to be a way to run a vim command for every spot that a regular expression matches. And putting a huge number in front of a macro to run it as many times as needed seems like a hack. At the same time, I know that using a heavyweight text editor was a no-go. This was an enormous file and text editors were dying under the load of trying to deal with the whole document. vim doesn’t mind a gigantic file.

I’ve learned some handy shell tricks and more about MySQL in the past year, too, and both have gotten me far. It sometimes doesn’t seem worth the time, but every time I’ve made an effort to really master all the nuances of a tool, I’ve recouped my time investment many times over.

A few good deals I’ve run into today:

• VMware Fusion 1.0, $19.99 after rebate. Who would want Fusion 1.0 when 2.0 was out? Perhaps anyone who noticed that Fusion 1.0 owners get a free upgrade to 2.0
• 22″ Dell LCD, 1920×1080, $139.99 with free shipping. I have two monitors at this resolution (sadly, not a pair: one’s at work, one’s at home), and got steals on both of them — and yet they cost more than this one. If you’re in the market for a new monitor, you’d be insane to get anything with a lower resolution.
• Kingston V-Series 128 GB SSD, $249.99. It is supposedly one of the more recent drives where people stopped designing SSDs for raw throughput, and started working on eliminating the “stutter” problem where drives would periodically take a few seconds to write out a tiny block of data, bringing things to a screeching halt. It still claims 80-100MB/sec., but without the awful stutter that drives with faster throughput claim. (That said, I haven’t tested this, since I’m yet to buy one.)

A while back I asked on Twitter if people had found that A+ or CCNA certifications were worthwhile if you already know the stuff. I took the A+ course in high school but never got the certification. I’ve dabbled with Cisco at work, but am surely far short of CCNA. So I wondered if it was worthwhile.

No one answered me, but I did have several people whose profiles were devoted to Cisco, CCNA, and Cisco training follow me almost immediately. I was slightly amused and slightly annoyed.

I just asked a question about SEO. Not even expressing an interest in SEO, but asking whether the people who try binding huge blocks of IPs to their servers to “enhance SEO” were as full of hot air as I think they are. Now I have two new followers, both SEO enthusiasts.

What other terms should I mention to acquire some more hollow traffic on Twitter? 😉

I just had one of those experiences where a lot of little things conspire to paint a big, scary picture.

The other day I was driving to work and passed a Pontiac with this bumper sticker: “Toyota: From the fine folks that brought you Pearl Harbor Day.” Whoa. I didn’t really consider it blatantly racist, largely because the driver looked really old and he had a Navy bumper sticker, too. Maybe he was there. Not that I love it, but racism from war veterans seems less offensive to me, like John McCain continuing to use the racial slur “gooks” to refer to his captors.

That same night, I was watching the tall ships as a Chinese junk sailed in. I didn’t get the whole context of what they were saying, but someone nearby said something about how it was probably bringing lots of diseases into our country.

I’ve long thought that the immigration issue is being exploited by racists. There are plenty of non-racists who are really bothered by illegal immigration, surely, but I’ve also heard enough discussions about illegal immigration turn into racial slurs describing Mexicans to know that racism is alive and well.

Obama’s election brought out the Ku Klux Klan, a group that I had assumed died off sometime around the 60s. It seems that they’re alive and well, and that their ranks have surged with a black President. And it’s not just some strange people that none of us will ever meet. I’ve heard people express their disgust that we would elect an N-word to govern ourselves.

I also tend to think the same thing about Islamophobia. One’s religion now informs stereotypes about whether or not the person is a terrorist. There are all the people who didn’t vote for Obama because he was a Muslim. Besides the fact that it’s not even true, it’s disturbing. A while back I brushed up against someone calling for Obama’s assassination because he was a Muslim. (And yes, it was reported to the FBI.)

Now there’s a growing concern about growing size of the Ku Klux Klan and other openly-racist, often-violent white surpremacist groups, and the fact that they’re infiltrating our military. The media loves alarmist stories, but really, “Violent supremacist groups are joining the armed forces in record numbers” is about as good a cause for alarm as it gets.