Everyone working at a coffee shop should learn one thing on the very first day – The opening on the coffee lid should be opposite the seam on the coffee cup.

The number of coffee shops that fail to perform this very simple check is staggering. It’s not a complex idea, folks: the seam is imperfect and doesn’t allow a perfect seal with the lid. As such, if someone pours coffee in the direction of the opening, it’ll leak.

I have actually found that many actually (either purposely or without even knowing it) line up the seal and the opening almost perfectly. It’s insane. So what I end up having to do, almost every single time I get a coffee, is rotating the thing back around so that they are opposite each other.

How this issue isn’t common knowledge among coffee shop traning programs is beyond me.

Link: Why Women Have Breasts

This guy has some:

Video: Man In Audience Scolds Bush

Wow, this seems somewhat major: it’s a fish with a ribcage, gills, and bones that resemble hands and feet.

Link: The Missing Link?

A couple of days ago I had a cool idea: since Google seems to be so good at filtering spam for their Gmail offering, why not make use of that functionality for my own personal mail?

The way I see it, spammers have full access to Spamassassin, which makes it almost trivial for a dedicated person to be able to bypass it. Furthermore, since major rule releases come out so infrequently, their work bypassing it has a good lifespan on it.

The Google Difference

The difference with Gmail spam filtering (vs. Spamassassin) is that there is likely a team of engineers working on nothing but spam filtering for Google. They probably use a number of free products stacked in layers, in addition to some highly proprietary code. And best of all, this defense is likely to be quite a bit more nimble than the Spamassassin project — meaning that they can see something innovative that’s getting through the filters and make a change immediately to counter.

So Gmail spam filtering clearly has its advantages. I decided to leverage that against the constant flow of trash that makes it through Spamassassin, starting yesterday. The cool thing about this is that I’m not just “using” Gmail as a spam filtering service. I also use it as the web interface for my main account. Here’s how I set it all up:

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This technique is for people who have their own mail servers and/or have a way to change their settings at the admin level. My personal solution is based on Debian, Postfix, and Courier-IMAP.

Gmail Forwarding

The solution hinges on the ability to forward mail from a Gmail account to another address. All of us can do this; it’s under the POP and Forwarding section of your Gmail settings.

1. Create an alias on your mailserver for your primary email address. So for me, this would be for the daniel account. Point that alias to a Gmail address that you are going to capture spam with. This is also the account that you are going to use for webmail. Don’t forget to run newaliases to get the alias to take effect.
2. Create a new user account on your mailserver. Name it something like spamaccount, or whatever. This is where your Gmail is going to send all of your (now filtered) mail.
3. Copy your Maildir folder (or whatever format you use) from your main account to the newly created account. This is the actual account your IMAP and/or POP client is going to be pulling mail out of from this point on. Delete the old mail folder if you are into being neat.
4. Go into your Gmail account and forward all mail to your newly created email address So if you used the previous example, you’d be forwarding all email to spamaccount @yourdomain.com.

There, now the linking is complete. The way this will break down is like so: mail will come into your main address (you@yourdomain), get aliased to $you@gmail.com, get filtered by Gmail, get forwarded (clean) to your alternate account on your mailserver, and then get picked up via your IMAP or POP client.

Remember, you are not logging into your main account anymore with your mail clients; you’re logging into the alternate “mail/spam” account.

Conclusion

So that’s pretty much it. You now have a fully functioning mail system that benefits from Google’s uber spam filtering prowess. If you’re feeling froggy, however, you should then run all the mail that hits that alternate account through your own Spamassassin implementation. That’s what I do, and it does occassionally catch a few wiley characters that make it through Gmail’s filtering.

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to comment below or contact me directly.:

Here’s a very simple way to see if you’re system is a spam relay:

telnet relay-test.mail-abuse.org

Press enter and watch it go. Do be warned, though; if it turns out that you are a relay, it’ll be noted in the database.

As a consultant, the one thing I really miss is the feeling of owning a network and defending it. In training I’ve attended over the last couple of months I’ve noticed the other students processing all input in reference to that which they are responsible for.

I miss that.

All I have is a home network to defend, and if it goes down (or gets 0wn3d) nobody cares. It’s not even close to being the same as having a live, production network that depends on you.

See, I enjoy the art and science of attacking because I love defense — and it’s because of this fact that I fill somewhat empty without a castle that needs me.

If you’re ever trying to get dhcp to work in Linux, and the package you installed also installed a service file named dhcp at /etc/init.d/dhcp, ignore it.

You start the service not by invoking that script (which will apparently fail every time); you do so by running /usr/bin/dhcpd. Why? I don’t have any earthly idea.

Anyway, I hope to spare someone this anguish that I now know far too well. Skip the silliness and just start dhcpd.

Yes, I think it’s time. As of today, don’t call it a cell phone anymore.

First off, “mobile phone” just sounds cooler than “cell phone“. When I hear “cell” phone I think brick. Brick as in “need a backpack to help you carry it”. Brick as in “can be used as a weapon”. Etc.

Hell, just look at the difference in the pictues pulled up via the two links above. One has supermodels on it (mobile), and the other has lame cartoons (cell).

supermodels > lame cartoons

Plus, the Europeans are already calling it a mobile phone, and everyone knows cool people want to be more like the Europeans.

Anyway, point made — it’s a mobile phone, not a cell phone (if you want to be cool).

Well, it’s been nearly a month now since I received my new MacBookPro. As a few of you may know, I had to return my first unit due to a borked optical drive. I was quite upset about it at the time, but was - and am - ultimately happy with the overall experience due to the way that Apple handled it.

Now that I’ve had a few weeks to gauge the overal performance and sftability of the box, I wanted to document the problems that I’m having with the system in an organized fashion. Hell, I’ll probably forward this post to Apple support to save time.

1. Processor “Whine” : This is the often-complained-about issue where the MBP will make a very annoying sound when not being pushed very hard. It’s almost as if it’s complaining about not being used to its potential. This particular problem I’m willing to wait to have fixed, i.e. I’ll give it a few weeks for things to settle down at Apple with the new release before asking for a solution. No biggie, but I’m damn sure not leaving it this way for the life of the system.
2. Wireless Card Issues : I actually just found out tonight that I have this problem. I can’t stay connected to my Linksys wireless access point. Other Windows and *nix machines work perfectly with the AP, as does my old 12″ PowerBook G4. This is unacceptable. I need this fixed immediately. How could they ship a wireless system that won’t stay connected for more than 5 minutes at a time to the most commonly deployed AP in the country? Bad form indeed.
3. Heat Issues : Well, I wouldn’t call it an issue. The systems are just hot. I mean nuclear hot. As in, “Don’t touch it because it’ll hurt you.” hot. This I’m actually not too worried about. It doesn’t effect performance as far as I can tell, and I am going to just chalk it up to having so much going on in such a thin case. I’ll label this an “almost non-issue”.
4. Sleep Recovery : For some reason, I’ve come out of sleep a few times and been prompted for my password (I’ve set it up to do that), only to be prompted for my password again like 2 seconds into my recovered session. It’s like it didn’t register that I had already re-authenticated or something. Bad form. It’s just an annoyance, to be sure, but it lends support to the whole, “This product’s not quite ready” sentiment. I’d like to see a fix for this in the next month or so. No rush, but I don’t want to live with it forever.

What I’ve Learned

The moral of the story here is very simple — it’s true that version A products are buggy.

Millions of people already knew that, and some of them even tried to warn me, but now I know, based on first-hand experience, that it’s true. Don’t ever doubt it. Some launches may be better than others, but as a whole it’s probably going to be the case.

It’s not that I doubted it either, actually; I understood the logic behind the claim as much as the next guy. But I didn’t think the issues would be this major. I didn’t think I’d be unable to read CDs, or that my wireless would drop connection every five minutes. Those are issues that I would have bet against — and lost money.

Why I’m Still Happy

But I’m still happy. Why? Because in all of my conversations with Apple thus far I’ve heard a consistent, overriding message.

“We’ll get it taken care of. We’ll make sure you’re happy.”

This is precisely what I want to hear, and it’s what I should be hearing. What it means to me as a consumer is that I can worry less about flaws with my system. I can relax, enjoy my computer, and have faith that the company I bought it from will make things right. If it takes a few weeks then that’s cool. If there are a few glitches in the process, then that’s cool too. As long as they don’t say, “Well, you bought the first version so that’s on you.”, I’m ok with having a few problems.

Lessons

Ultimately I’ve learned two things from this ordeal thus far.

1. Be wary of version A products. They really do have issues.
2. You can trust Apple to treat you right — even if you do buy a version A product.

Anyway, I’ll keep this post updated as I work to get these issues resolved. Hopefully everything will go smoothly from here on out, and if you have any similar or related MacBookPro stories I’d love to hear them.: