William Reardon’s Blog

It seems I’ve finally been busted:

rom: Web@fbi.gov
To: wdr1@pobox.com
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 18:43:10 GMT
Subject: You visit illegal websites

Dear Sir/Madam,

we have logged your IP-address on more than 40 illegal Websites.

Important: Please answer our questions!
The list of questions are attached.

Yours faithfully,
M. John Stellford

++-++ Federal Bureau of Investigation -FBI-
++-++ 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Room 2130
++-++ Washington, DC 20535
++-++ (202) 324-3000

Ah well, I can only look back and call it a really good run. I’m surprised they only got 40 of ‘em too.

(Yes, I know)

I wonder if this is what it’s like in Lisa head.

No, not as good as a school bus full of children pluging into a frozen lake, but it has to be close!

Those last two are kinda cool though…

Without any advance notice, SBC has started blocking port 25.

This royally sucks for those who *gasp* use their own mail server, or something other than what SBC provides.

As they’ve changed the level service offered, I wonder if this is means for canceling the DSL contract with them. If not, I hope to high heaven there is some sort of class action lawsuit.

Jerking your customers around like this is just bad business.

During one of his presentation, I thought I had noticed that Damian Conway had his shell automatically list the contents of a directory after changing to it. A pretty good idea, as my history file confirms that I follow a cd with an ls more than 50% of the time.

The problem? In both bash & zsh, this does what you expect but not what you want:

function cd() { cd $1; ls; }

Instead, you have to use builtin so that the shell knows if you mean the user-defined or builtin version of cd:

function cd() { builtin cd $1; ls; }

If you want extra style points in zsh, you can define the chpwd function:

function chpwd() { ls; }


Testing code that intentionally has random behavior is a complete PITA.

Worse, is when you realize you’ve been a total dumbass for the last 30 minutes chasing a caching bug that’s a bitch to reproduce & happens only on every 7th iteration of the test script, only to realize that, duh, the cache code is fine, and the random part that gets invoked 1/7th of the time is where the problem lies.

Grah.

I had my first, personal, bona-fide celebrity sighting yesterday at the Goove. Chatting outside Borders was Allen Covert. Of course I didn’t know his name. Rather it was more like “hey, there’s one of those guys who in almost every Adam Sandler movie.”

Allegedly, I’ve watched an independent flick just a few rows behind Neil Patrick Harris (”Doogie!”) and ate lunch at a table kitty-corner Philip Hoffman, but I’m doubtful of both. The people I was with on both occasions insist it was the respective actor, but in a “just-imagine-the-face-without-the-hat-and-sunglasses” way. Allen, on the other hand, was just standing there in plain sight, no hat, no dark glasses.

I recently started poking at Hula, the newly
open sourced calendar & mail server. I don’t really know what to make
of it yet, other than what jwz had to say.

The mail server portion isn’t that interesting. With Sendmail, qmail,
postfix, and so on, I think we have more than enough MTAs today. But
there still isn’t a good calendaring server out there. Note that I
didn’t have to limit it to “a good open-source calendaring server”,
because as its users will tell you — in particular its non-Outlook
users — Exchange sucks.

With iCal & Mozzila’s Sunbird, there’s
a lot of progress on the client-side of things. Offered a solid
alternative, I think there’s a chance exchange/outlook’s
dominance might start to wane a bit.

That is a big “if”, however.

Eric Allman, described his creation as
“Sendmail started out being a sledgehammer used to kill a fly, only to
discover that the fly was actually an elephant in the distance.”
Meaning, email is a *lot* harder than it looks. Picking up the Bat Book, you get
just a taste of the millions of things that need to be addressed & can
go around. (I know I never want to deal with it again.)

Having dealt a small bit with calendaring on a project a few years
back, I know calendaring can be the same. But still — a world with
free of Outlook & Exchange… that’d be pretty sweet.

Making good on a promise to Neb there is now a handy “Add to My Yahoo!” icon on my blog.

That’s right, My Yahoo! is big time now.

I suppose it was bound to happen.

According to bloglines, roughly 3x people read my Calvin & Hobbes RSS Feed than my actual blog.

I need a stuffed tiger.