Blog entries from May, 2006

Four of the five items that I mentioned a few days ago are currently taking up floor space. I picked up the three mac’s last night and the Sun was waiting for me on the doorstep when I arrived home.

I am currently uploading some more photos to flickr but my (possibly optimistic) plan is to sort through the items by next weekend…

Over the past two days I have lined up five more items for my computer collection:

A co-worker offered me (for nothing) a SGI Indy with 17″ monitor that has been sitting in their office (logically as physically their office has been in six spaces across three buildings) since it was obtained a few years ago. Earlier in the week I spotted a SUN SPARCclassic on eBay for a starting price of AU$10. I was the winning bidder last night for the grand sun of AU$21.50. The other three items are a Macintosh Classic (with carry bag!), a Macintosh Plus and a Macintosh LCIII that were together in another eBay listing that ended this morning in my favour for AU$41.

Now I need to wait for the SPARCclassic to arrive in the post and to organise pickup of the other items.

A few days ago I decided that I would use Flickr for my photos instead of continuing my manual system or installing an existing package such as Gallery. Although I don’t have as much control over what I can do with sharing the photos there is the advantage of now have to worry about any bandwidth usage but more importantly there is a greater chance that people will see and possibly comment on my photos.

Since then I have moved the sets that I had already made available over to flickr and added some rudimentary integration by automatically showing the thumbnails in their place. My next step is to go through all of my photos and add them as well…

Three months ago I talked about the first step I was making to move from a default permit strategy to a default deny strategy for dealing with spam. Instead of having messages to any address at my domain ending up in my inbox I setup forwarders so only messages to a hundred or so addresses (based on non-spam emails that I had kept) ended up in my inbox with the remainder ended up in my (previously unused) gmail account.

So what have I found over the past three months?

• between fifty to five hundred messages were delivered to my gmail account every day
• of these at most ten per day were not identified as spam
• I identified two addresses that I then added to my list of valid addresses
• only eight of the addresses in my list have received spam
• of these there is one that receives the majority of the spam, almost two thousand in the last two weeks

This evening I changed the catch-all so the default action for my domain is now to reject messages and removed the forwarder rule for the spammed address so messages to that address will also be rejected. My next action is to go through my list of addresses and change the ones that I don’t think I need anymore to forward to my gmail account. A few months after that I will remove them if they are actually no longer used.

At work this afternoon we had a real evacuation involving alarms, leaving the building and attendance by the fire brigade. Fortunately for us it wasn’t raining during half hour interruption but unfortunately for Monash an alarm set off by burnt toast is classified as a false alarm which is charged for.

On a side note I wonder if the false alarm could have been prevented from escalating if the building didn’t contain two separate fire systems, one of which wasn’t completely installed (the red phone at the panel in the foyer doesn’t have a counterpart and is only for a quarter of the building anyway so who knows what else is missing) during our renovations…