B10[m|g]

Last Friday, I received a call by a friend who invited me to an Endstille gig. He asked me why I didn't reply to his mail. Odd, I thought, for I did reply within 10 minutes after receiving. A day or so later, still no email, so I decided to do a little testing.

I opened up a hotmail test account and just tried to mail it. The hotmail mail server positively told my server that the message was accepted, but the mail was no where to be found. Not in the Inbox, Junk folder or any other place. It simply disappeared.

After a few struggles, I found a way to contact the postmaster(s) and quickly after mailing them my complaints, I received a canned answer back. The sophisticated SmartScreen filtering technology made my messages disappear in thin air. Smart indeed and thanks for not informing the sender of this block.

The fun part of the mail, I'll quote:

I am not able to go into any specific details about what these filters specifically entail, as this would render them useless.

Right! So they're so sophisticated that there's probably an easy way to get around them. Security through obscurity...

The friendly canned mail also suggested I'd use SPF, a technique to specify in DNS records who is allowed to send out emails on behalf of the domain. Great ... but I've been using that for a long time, so it wouldn't help.

Maybe I'm on some RBL? Nope, can't find it. A quick search however turned out that I'm not alone here. And based on the time stamp of that document, this problem exists for over a year already.

So, as of yet, I can't send out mail (or reply) to my friends with a hotmail account. Tough luck. If you want to reach me, use a different Reply-To header.

hotmail, SmartScreen, microsoft, mail, spf

I'm a big fan of Bloglines to keep track of the news and over there, I follow the RSS feed of planet.nl (a Dutch ISP that provides news as well). Today I noticed a headline with a truly bizarre summary of the news article:

The text translates to:

Prostitutes no longer welcome in the player's hotel in Austria

The wives of the soccer players won't come closer than the hotel lobby.

Excuse me? The soccer player's wives are now called prostitutes?

The full article puts the line in perspective:

Translation:

The rules are clear. The players are allowed to meet their wives or girlfriends only every now and then in the lobby. Prostitutes, matter observers and consultants aren't allowed in the hotel at all during the tournament.

Bad bad summary, Planet.nl!

news,, prostitutes,, weird

Perl can be a real mess, yes. Everyone knows it, a few try to disagree, but in the end, you can make Perl code look very cryptic. So maybe this post isn't really fair. Never the less, I'd like to point out an annoyance I have noticed for some time now.

All over the web, websites exist that allows you to dump some code. The website will highlight it accordingly to the chosen language. While this usually works fine, it fails a lot of times on the Perl variable $#. This special variable specifies the last index of a list. As you might guess, most highlighters see the hash and think: comment!

Let's use this code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

my @test = qw(Just another Perl Hacker);
print "Last index of the test list is:", $#test, "\n";
print "Oh, of course ... ", join " ", @test, "\n";

This is fairly easy code to follow, even for a non-Perl programmer, I believe, so it's up to you to figure out what it does ;-)

Now, let's see how a 10 random sites handle this:

Wrong (see the hash as a commenting prefix):

• hashbin.com
• nopaste.info
• paste.linode.com
• paste2.org
• pastebin.ca
• pastebin.osuosl.org
• privatepaste.com
• rafb.net

Correct:

• attachr.com
• pastebin.ubuntu.com

Sad but true ...

perl, pastebin, highlight, code

Recently, my contract with Debitel (a Dutch phone company) ended. Since another company could make me a nice deal (with my Nokia N95 8GB), I decided to switch over to them and to cancel my account with Debitel.

Today I received a call by one of the Debitel telemarketing guys. The slick guy told me my contract was about to end (yeah, duh, I already canceled it) and that he could offer me a really nice deal.

As usual, I let him finish his whole story (which, like usual, was way too long). And to make it more fun, I just didn't reply, making him feel awkward and chatting longer. After his whole speech, he asked me if I was interested. I told him politely that I already canceled the account and moved on to another provider.

"Ok", he said, "than we just have to check the information real quick. Your name is [full name]?". In my privacy paranoia, I asked him "Why do you need my information. I already canceled the account and thus I have nothing to do with you anymore. "Oh?", he replied, "I thought you wanted to accept the new offer". So I believe my privacy paranoia saved me here. If I'd confirm the records they already had on file, he'd probably trick me into accepting the new offer.

... bastards.

debitel,, telemarketing

Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia has seen some name changes over the years. I trust Wikipedia on the dates here, but in history, the names have been Sunda Kalapa (397-1527), Jayakarta (1527-1619), Batavia (1619-1942), Djakarta (1942-1972), and now Jakarta.

Dropping the 'd' in front of the name has to do with the new spelling of the Indonesian language (Bahasa Indonesia). Again, I trust Wikipedia on the dates and history, but since 1972, the "new spelling" mandated that the 'd' was dropped.

So far so good, but recently I noticed that Google has trouble keeping up with this new spelling. On maps.google.com, they tell me the city is called "Djakarta", as you can see here:

Oddly enough, they do write Jayapura correctly. Also Bandung, instead of Bandoeng (which changed in 1947) is written correctly. Other mapping websites all seem to handle the 36 year old name change correctly.

Expedia.com:

Maps.live.com:

Mapquest.com:

NationalGeographic.com:

UN.org:

Maps.yahoo.com:

Since I find this a strange error, I decided to write an email to Google asking them for the reason for this and whether there are plans to update this. I'll keep you posted on the results of that mail (if ever get a reply).

google, maps, indonesia, jakarta, djakarta