dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

Articles


An interesting trip to work

This morning I had a not-so-uneventful road trip to work. Just after leaving the gas station and getting on the highway, I was amused by a BMW passing me by with its bonnet almost entirely unlocked. There surely is a reason for that second lock after all. Not long thereafter …

Comment spam

Sooo, since 2008-04-02 I've gotten about 11487 spam messages on my photolog (which really isn't used all that much; only 57 posts and 2 actual comments), while I have disabled 95 comments on this weblog which is used quite extensively (at least to my standards) with 790 posts and 366 …

Epoch countdown

Currently I'm counting down to Unix Epoch time 1234567890 with a cold glass of beer, irc and some screens of code. Life is good.

FOSDEM 2009

My head still hurts a bit from the lack of sleep last night, but it's worth it. The beer event was just plain awesome (those Belgian people sure know how to brew their beer) and the aftermath -- roaming through the streets of Brussels in search for some great kebab with …

Energy level: critical

Sorry if I sound whiny, but I have to get this out of my system (hey, this is my rantbox remember? :). Currently, I'm feeling like most of my energy has left me; I have to finish an assignment for my study (deadline any time now), spend my time at work …

Happy birthday to me

I'm about to throw a little party at our place for which I invited a lot of family and friends. Some of those people unfortunately suffer from the flu or busy agendas and had to invite themselves another evening, but it seems we will still have quite a lot of …

Russian spam

From: Пирогов Eff Solution 2009 To: Me Subject: Спасительное решение в современных условиях Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:07:58 +0530 Reply-to: perfectionismop3@lycos.com X-Mailer: PHP ___ __ ____! ___ …

Server migration woes and victories

Yesterday evening the server hosting aquariusoft.org's services was scheduled for migration to another machine in another data center. As it is a virtual private server (better known as a virtual machine) on a Xen host, this would mean shutting it down, copying the image over the interconnect to the …

Looking forward to FOSDEM 2009

For the third time in a row I'll be attending FOSDEM in Brussels, first weekend of February. I'm looking forward to it because it's a very rich event with a lot of variety, exposing the diversity of the FOSS communities through lots of presentations given by tons of projects. Finally …

To tweet or not to tweet

Twitter is well known by (weblogging?) online people. It's essentially microblogging, meaning that you update it more often than you would do with a weblog. Now I can see people rolling their eyes: "Oh noes, even more crap about what someone is eating currently or how the final product of …

diginaut.net

I have been looking for a new domain which would work in parallel with aquariusoft.org. People tend to stumble a bit on that domain's name when getting my email address or url, so I wanted something more fool proof (cue Universe inventing a better fool). Anyway, today in my …

Security in 2009

While scrolling through my Bugtraq mail, I came across this tongue-in-cheek mail about the threats of 2009. I hope he doesn't mind me posting it verbatim here, but I thought it was too nice to pass on. To be clear: I didn't write it, Pete Herzog from ISECOM did. Here …

Things I'm going to do in 2009

Things I want^H^H^H^Ham going to do this year: Read more books. Ever since I'm travelling by car to work (the railway connection is aweful), I'm reading a lot less. At home I spend a lot of time reading electronic stuff, but that's mostly news, not fiction …

ScheduleWorld just works

For years I've been wanting to synchronise my Sony Ericsson m600i smartphone with pc software. This would both provide a backup and a comfortable way of editing my agenda, contacts, todo's and whatmore, just like I did before with my Palm devices. I already had tried the Funambol SyncML software …

Happy and healthy 2009

I want to wish everyone a happy, healthy and in respects interesting 2009. You can fill in freely what that means for you personally, as it seems very strict resolutions might be contra-productive (goals not met resulting in a bad self-esteem and such). For me it's going to be an …


Youth and fireworks

Is it just me or do those kids have too much to spend on fireworks? Of course they're free to spend their money on whatever they want, but to have more noise and light shows two days before it's actually the end of the year is a bit overdone in …

More statistics: spam of the past two years

So a few weeks ago I made a graph of the nightly spam-learning events of spamassassin on my Spam folder. I updated it today: Of course the graph is clickable for a large version again. It also contains a trend line. You can see the noticeable drop in spam levels …

Obligatory end-of-year statistics

I did some digging in the logs of this weblog and dumped some page view listings per day. With some gnuplot magic, that's easily turned into a simple graph. So here is the development of the number of page views over the years of dammIT: The weird line from 2006-04-28 …

Same old weblog, different feel

Fear not, this is still the dammIT you know, except that it looks a bit... new. I felt bored a bit and next thing I knew I had restyled it all ;) Kudos go to Bas for providing really useful feedback on colours, layouts and such and even designing the new …