The Problem

Dealing with spam that went unrecognized has been more of a manual process. Every once in a while, I’d have to segregate all of my useful mail from the spam and run “sa-learn” on my the leftovers. This isn’t horrible, because I tend to shell into my server fairly frequently, but I really prefer to have menial tasks like this automated.

A solution

First of all, I created a folder in my mailbox called “Unrecognized Spam”. The name isn’t important, really. It just needs to be a place to file away all of those messages that SpamAssassin didn’t catch on the way in.

Once that was done, I wrote a very simple little script, which I dropped in /etc/cron.daily/:

#!/bin/bash
 
SPAM_DIR="/home/bshacklett/Maildir/Unrecognized Spam/cur"
 
cd "$SPAM_DIR"
sa-learn --spam .;
rm *

Nasty, I know, but it did the job. All I had to do when I got spam that went unnoticed by SpamAssassin was drag it into my “Unrecognized Spam folder” and it would be learned and gone within 24 hours. Of course, I was also getting mail from the cron daemon complaining when there weren’t any emails to learn from or delete.

Improvements

So, this morning I had a little spare time, so I decided to improve on the script a bit:

#!/bin/bash
 
# Constants
SPAM_PATH="Maildir/.Unrecognized Spam/cur";
 
# Find all of the directories directly under /home/
homeDirectories=(`find /home/ -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d`);
 
# Loop through the found directories and check for spam
for homeDirectory in ${homeDirectories[*]}
do
    fullSpamPath=${homeDirectory}|>/${SPAM_PATH}|>;
 
    #Check if the spam directory exists under this home directory
    if [ -d  "${fullSpamPath}" ]; then
 
        # Check if there is mail under the spam directory
        if [ "$( ls -A "${fullSpamPath}|>" )" ]; then
            sa-learn --spam "$fullSpamPath";
            rm "${fullSpammPath}/"*;
        fi
    fi
 
done

Now I know I’m not a great shell scripter, but this is working pretty well. It basically scans all of the home directories and looks for the “Unrecognized Spam” directory under each one. If it finds it, it will test to make sure that there are emails in the folder, then learn them and remove them.

Caveats

• This isn’t going to scale all that well. I’m guessing it would be fine for 200 users or less, as it runs at night, but it would need some tweaking for anything more.
• As it is, this requires that your mail be stored in the Maildir format. I know that sa-learn can work with mBox stores, but I’m not sure how you’d target it effectively.

Changes

One large change I made to my configuration is using Dovecot’s sasl authentication for Postfix rather than Cyrus. Dovecot really seems to be making headway in the mail server market. I strongly reccomend it to anyone looking for a decent IMAP server.

I’ve also upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 and a later version of Roundcube for webmail. Unfortunately, Ubuntu seems to be holding Roundcube back a bit in their package repository. I’m not sure what the holdup is, but they’re at least one version behind at the time I’m writing this. For that matter, Wordpress is a couple of releases behind as well. I guess that happens with an LTS release.

Todo

I’m still having a bit of trouble getting Wordpress’ permalinks working correctly, so you’ll probably notice that some of the links aren’t working properly on the blog. I remember having this problem in the past, but, for the life of me, I can’t remember what I did to solve it.

Update: Got the permalink issue taken care of. Apache must be told, with the “AllowOverride” parameter, to allow .htaccess files. If this isn’t done, they will be ignored.

The good:

• Obviously, the holding capability
• The cost — At $600.00 shipped with rails, it’s very economical for a racing seat.
• The look (I got black to match my black interior).
• The weight (It feels about 2/3rds the weight of the stock seat, including the rails).

The questionable:

• The width: I got the normal seat instead of the wide and I’m a little worried about comfort. I’m a size 32 waist, but it’s still very tight on the rib cage. I’m hoping this is something I will get used to, but I’m also braced to spend the money on a wider model. I still have the rails, so I wouldn’t be paying the full price again
• The height: It definitely sits higher than stock, but somehow this doesn’t seem to be a problem. The way I have it mounted is with the rear angled down a bit, so my head doesn’t come any closer to the ceiling. Also, I actually seem to be in a bit better driving position. My left knee used to hit the steering wheel from time to time when clutching, but that’s not happening now.

The bad:

• It comes with absolutely no instructions. I’m not looking for a detailed walkthrough, but best practices for mounting, or at least the size of the bolts (not included) should be documented. (M8 1.25, by the way)
• The rails scratch up the seat. This is really unavoidable given the materials used. I guess you could put some sort of rubber mat in-between, but that doesn’t seem like a great option given the way the weight is transmitted to the rails.
• The automatic seat belts in an s13 don’t like the seat very much. The lap belt just barely fits and the shoulder belt snags on the seat, making it hard to move sometimes. This isn’t necessarily the seat’s fault, though, just a conflict with the s13’s auto belts. I’m guessing it would happen with any decent racing seat.

All in all, I’ll have to give it a while to see how the fitment goes, but I’m very happy that I can pay attention to driving, now, instead of holding myself in place. I’ll try to get some pics up when I can, but I promise nothing.

A couple of weeks ago I was able to secure a Wii from a GameStop about 4 miles away. I’ve got to say it’s the best purchase I’ve made since my Macbook Pro. Everyone in the house has been having a ton of fun with it. The cat’s even gotten in on the action by chewing up the wire to the sensor bar which was replaced by a wireless model from Nyko.One great thing about the Wii is that you’re not just limited to titles that are made specifically for the platform. Aside from the Virtual Console functionality, the Wii can handle GameCube games as well. Unfortunately, this means buying a GC controller, which is really my biggest gripe about the system.

My TV is about 10 feet back from the couch. This is not a good situation for wired controllers, and Wavebirds are overly expensive and hard to find. That basically leaves me with the option of a third party controller, which is something I always try to avoid. Rare is a third party controller that feels anything but hollow and cheap. I will admit that I haven’t gotten a chance to try many of the controllers available for the GameCube, but even in the best case scenario, I’m left with a big receiver sticking out of the side of my console for each controller I add.

Why? The Wii’s controller has an expansion port which the classic controller plugs into for an elegant wireless solution. This is perfectly suited to wireless play of GC games as well. I guess in the end, though, Nintendo just doesn’t want to deal with supporting that many peripherals.

Hosting is costing me $20.00 a month for a full virtual colocated server running my linux distribution of choice (Ubuntu) and easy access to all of the tools that I need to manage it. I’m paying $20.00 a year for a DNS solution from DynDNS. Linode.com could do it all for me, but I have a server at my house that needs dynamic DNS updates and DynDNS was the best option for me.

So, for anyone curious, I’m running Apache2 with PHP5 and MySQL plus Apache Tomcat for Java support. On the mail side of things, I’ve got Postfix handling my SMTP needs and Dovecot serving up IMAP (POP will soon be disabled). I’m running Postgrey for spam controls which, coupled with slightly paranoid settings in Postfix, is keeping spam level at a very good level. Definitely not as low as when I was using boxtrapper, but for an automatic solution that is less vulnerable to exploits I can hardly complain. I will, however, be looking into some active blacklists soon as well. I have RoundCube installed for web access to my emails and of course WordPress which you’re reading from right now.

Please bear with me on the default WordPress theme for the time being. I’ve got some ideas for a new design, but I haven’t had the time to implement them. I’ll be working on it as soon as I’m finished with a few more pressing projects.

My commute is about 5 miles, but LA traffic makes that about 30 minutes on a good day. My drive home Thursday night was an hour and 15 minutes. I still love it here, though. For what I gain living here, a slightly longer commute to work is a small price to pay.
We’ll be moving in about a month and a half into a house, hopefully. We’re currently looking around Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley and around West LA. I can’t wait to get my own room. I’ll finally be able to put up all of my books on a bookshelf and take the rest of my belongings out of my car.

I’ve been getting used to the area pretty well. Traffic is interesting, but it’s not really any worse than route one in Rockland in the summer; it just goes farther. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews and I’ve got a couple jobs that I should be hearing back on tomorrow. Both of them would get me earning about $40,000 a year and they both have great benefits. One is farther away, but the scenery is really beautiful, so I don’t think the drive would be that much of a problem. Either way, I should be doing pretty well fairly soon.

That’s about it for the moment. Hopefully I’ll have some good news to post about tomorrow.

We’ve also been doing some apartment searching, but it’s 2 months before we head out, so it hasn’t been very productive yet. We’re getting to know the different areas and price ranges, but that’s about all we can do for a while now.

For now, I’ll just have to take it as it comes and see what happens next.

P.S. I saw Alec Baldwin in an Apple store the other day, complaining about an iPod.

Anyway, tomorrow, my path should take me, first, to the Grand Canyon, then to Needles, California. The next day I should arrive at my final destination in Los Angeles. I’m feeling mixed about it. It’s been a great trip and I really would love to see more, but I’m also really looking forward to putting down some roots and beginning the next chapter of my life. The rest of the world will just have to wait for me.