At last an admin we can all hate

As a half admin/half dev i always like to take the other persons point of view (which is even a good view for life), but this bloke takes the biscuit and in fact has made my and a number of other peoples life hell, this gentle man is the head of the http://www.five-ten-sg.com, and his view of spam is draconian by even the most deranged point of view, if he catches a spammer on a ISP network, he blacklists all IP address on that network, ALL IP’S!!!, WTF!!,
It turns out that someone who is hosted by fasthosts.com, has performed a “misc” offence against his spamming rules, and now all my domains have been black listed because i have the affrontory to share the same hosting provider as them, to add to this you cant request your ip address to be removed like other blacklists (there is rumours that you can with cash but i don’t have anything other than forum notes to substantiate this), and there are no contact details on the site (have to get them from whois), thankfully not many Spam agencies use his company, but enough for me to get complaints,

I thought i must be going daft but a quick goggling shows that i am by no means alone, so if you are an admin, please stop using this loonies black list (quite a lot of the black list monitors don’t even list his sites as they are classed and “unreliable and unreasonable”, but as a crowning example i give this in which he has used his position as a black list controller to black list the whole ip range of a magazine company (all associated and innocent companies included {some 127 publications}) who have phoned him up twice in 6 months to sell him their magazine.

There are levels in the fight against Spam, people, you don’t nuke a town to get one killer, you don’t ban an ISP to get one spammer.

Dirty Treachery and Notes Linux Beta 2

Being the dirty traitor i am, i have spent the day coding ASP web sites (Microsoft Visual Developer 2008 free version), i know, i know, but yah got to earn a living, i have to say that Microsoft basic methodology and layout style have not changed (its been 3 years since i last did .Net stuff), and quite frankly that’s a good thing, im reskinning someone else’s site, so i don’t get to take advantage of the famous Microsoft wizards, but one thing i have noticed, Microsoft development environment still throws the same hissy fit when you step out the box and start fiddling, it is however very very polished and give you a good reminder of why it so popular.

Nearer home, the Domino Beta 2 client on Linux has improved in both speed and functions (we now have spell checker back, along with some strange graphical glitches), Soooo want the Dev client.

UKLUG the Good and the bad

Well UKlug has finished and i really enjoyed it, learnt a lot and took home some great things, but to put it all in bullet points

Good:
1) Some real big guns there and some fantastic speakers
2) Very well organised and venue was perfect.
3) Very good vendor turn out and we went away with a couple of them we will use.
4) Cutting edge (well as far as notes can be).

Bad:
1) I completely screwed up my session (very poor proof reading, under ran, projector was max 640×480, which was to low for my content but i had not thought to check before, overly nervy), though got more people coming up to me afterwards for thanks, questions and requests than the last one (perhaps it was out of pity)
2) I think that keeping a big gun talk for last session, would stop people like me slopping of to the pub and staying there on a warm Friday afternoon.

Neutral:
1) Faced the double edge sword of London being the venue, on the plus side its very easy for a lot of people to get too and so the official
attendance is high, but on the down side, people don’t commit to it and so drop out as work finds it easy to cancel/call back people, but what can you do about that

Another 2 windows app down

Another 2 Windows apps bite the dust and i shuffle over to linux, this time its windows remote control, down to rdesktop,
It has lots of nice and expected options, i use the following in a taskbar icon

“rdesktop -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD -0 SERVERNAME:3389”

the “-0” is the same as “/console”

And also “super cat” down to “Removable media catalog management”, does what it says on the tin, no further details needed (i use if for keeping a list of the files i have on my NAS)

Frightening Conversation Number 1


You ‘re there writing a web site and behind you, you hear your dearest say “If you wanted to kill someone and get rid of the body, Argos has every thing you would want, flat pack incinerators and power tools at very reasonable prices, They even have a patio extension with built in hand rail to cover the crime scene”,

I’m sleeping in the toilet tonight!!!