B10[mg]

Sometimes, advertising companies surprise me by something that makes them different from the rest. Usually, this means that they come up with something very funny, yet this time, it's the technology behind it that I find intriguing.

Opel's latest commercial (or so I believe) asks you for your name and mobile phone number (they claim not to store this information, yet I used an old phone number that I barely check anyways ;-).

Then you will be shown a not so funny video. Half way though, your name is used in the images and you see a guy call. At that moment, your phone starts ringing too, and "you're part of the video". This guy talks to you about a car (well, car ... an Opel ;-).

I've tested it with someone else and it even seems to notice when you actually pick up the phone (looping before that).

This technology might not be rocket science, or extremely new, yet I do find it interesting to see it all combined. And now I'm even blogging it, so yeah, the ad is successful. Too bad I really dislike Opel... ;-)

Opel, commercial

Since I've started blocking comment spam, I am surprised by the effect of just a few "block words". Apparently, I am only targeted by a handful of spammers.

But, since it happens rather often for a blog like mine (in my opinion), I have decided to present you with some statistics and eye-candy (updated hourly).

... you have lies, damned lies, and statistics

comment spam

Since I've started blocking comment spam, I am surprised by the effect of just a few "block words". Apparently, I am only targeted by a handful of spammers.

But, since it happens rather often for a blog like mine (in my opinion), I have decided to present you with some statistics and eye-candy (updated hourly).

... you have lies, damned lies, and statistics

comment spam

Quite a few people keep nagging me for pictures of my ServBoard, so I decided to finally post some info and pictures on this blog for all to see.

First a little history. The ServBoard was originally thought of as a joke. While helping a friend out with moving his stuff to a new house, I had to carry a ironing board and we all joked about it being a surf board. The obvious joke then will be to call it a ServBoard, and the idea was born.

Another friend, who does like hardware (unlike me), thought it would be really funny to create a ServBoard and started throwing together old hardware, and mounted it on the back of the ironing board. When he was done, I was called in to throw some OS on it, and FreeBSD being my favorite server OS, FreeBSD it was going to be.

The server had a little uptime, but no use, so it collected dust in the corner of my old apartment.

Then my "real" server crashed and I needed to upgrade the motherboard. Because it was offline for so long already, I wanted to get it up as soon as possible, and bought a new motherboard. But ... as usually, I bought the wrong hardware, for this motherboard would never fit in the small PC case I had. The only option to get things running, was to dust off the ServBoard, and put the new hardware on there.

Ever since, it didn't fail me (not counting the loose HDD cable).

Here are some specs (yes, it's not a great server, but it works!)

And then, finally, the pictures!

ServBoard

By accident, I stumbled upon a new fun initiative of KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines). They now offer you to create your own luggage labels by uploading a photo of your choice. This is even free (yeah, it is still a partly Dutch company, so I find that "free" part amazing ;-)

Fun!

KLM, luggage labels

Recently I discovered mollie.nl, a site that handles iDEAL payments (online payment system for the major Dutch banks) for reasonable prices.

The participating banks charged a percentage per transaction, €400 signup costs and €50 monthly. Mollie can offer about the same for a mere €0.99 / transaction.

I had to use it for a website, so I created the module Business::iDEAL::Mollie for it. It doesn't do much besides posting to and reading from the HTTP API of Mollie.

Perl, CPAN, iDEAL

For a while I have been trying to get my WiFi network to function properly. My setup is like this.

                             [ SERVER ]
                            /
[ INTERNET ] - [ ROUTER ] -+ 
                            \ 
                             [ DWL-2000AP+ ]
                                   |
                                  / \
                           [ WIRELESS CLIENTS ]

For some obscure reason, all wireless clients were able to access the internet and server, yet there was no way they would talk to each other. Pinging them even failed, yet a tcpdump did show me packets between the internet and other wireless clients.

After many hours of online searching and consulting Joffie, I went to my cousin (RedDevil) who usually knows a lot on Win32 systems, WiFi, Xbox-related stuff and other gadgets. He suggested I'd look for a setting on the D-Link DWL-2000AP+ called "Set AP Isolated". Of course that setting was not available, yet I did find an "undocumented" setting called Client security under Advanced / Performance. Disabling this worked like a charm. Ping requests were answered in no time and everything now works as it's supposed to be (or better: as I like to see it).

D-Link, DWL-2000AP+

To state here that I hate spam is a little overkill I think. I don't believe anyone who will ever read this blog will like the offers of MS Office 2003 Pro, viagra, v14gr4, or penis enlargements (well maybe some of this blog's readers would like that ;-).

I do notice that lately spam has been increasing. Either some awful e-mail address CD is out with a lot of my domains on it, or spammers just try to send more in general.

Luckily, my Postfix MTA can scan a message header and body on suspicious text, before accepting it. Especially the body_checks seem to work out rather well for me. I do like to provide the l-user with a message of what went wrong actually (so a human could try again), where possible.

A small list of my mail-header blocking:

/^Subject:.*[Dd]iscount.*$/
   REJECT BLOCKED: too many spam messages with this subject (we do not need 
                   discounts!).Try a different subject.
/^Subject:.*weightloss.*$/                      
   REJECT BLOCKED: How do you know we need to lose weight? Try a different subject.
/^Subject.*[Vv].?[Ii1l|].?[Aa@].?[Gg].?[Rr].?[Aa@].*?/ 
   REJECT BLOCKED: We really do not need help... the natural way works 
                   perfectly! Try a different subject.  
/^Subject:.*Rolex.*$/i                          
   REJECT BLOCKED: We have enough Rolexes by now. Try a different subject.
/^Subject:.* (lotto|lottery) .*$/i              
   REJECT BLOCKED: Never win with the lotto :( Try a different subject!
/^Subject:.*[o0]em soft.*$/i                    
   REJECT BLOCKED: No thanks, Try a different subject! bye.

And a small list of mail-body blocking

/Protected message is attached!/        
   REJECT Thanks, now goodbye!
/MS Office 2003 Pro/                    
   REJECT We think Open Office is better than MS Office 2003 Pro. Goodbye.
/INSTANT DOWNLOAD!/                     
   REJECT The words INSTANT DOWNLOAD detected in mail body. Try an email without these words.
/Stock Alert for/                       
   REJECT Stock Alert? So what? Bye.
/Don't overpay for Bill Gates's crap!/  
   REJECT Thanks, but we don't use Win32 crap to begin with. Bye.
/Pleasure your partner every time/      
   REJECT Partner is very happy, don't need your help. Bye.

Is it just me or has the spam volume increased again?

spam, postfix

To state here that I hate spam is a little overkill I think. I don't believe anyone who will ever read this blog will like the offers of MS Office 2003 Pro, viagra, v14gr4, or penis enlargements (well maybe some of this blog's readers would like that ;-).

I do notice that lately spam has been increasing. Either some awful e-mail address CD is out with a lot of my domains on it, or spammers just try to send more in general.

Luckily, my Postfix MTA can scan a message header and body on suspicious text, before accepting it. Especially the body_checks seem to work out rather well for me. I do like to provide the l-user with a message of what went wrong actually (so a human could try again), where possible.

A small list of my mail-header blocking:

/^Subject:.*[Dd]iscount.*$/
   REJECT BLOCKED: too many spam messages with this subject (we do not need 
                   discounts!).Try a different subject.
/^Subject:.*weightloss.*$/                      
   REJECT BLOCKED: How do you know we need to lose weight? Try a different subject.
/^Subject.*[Vv].?[Ii1l|].?[Aa@].?[Gg].?[Rr].?[Aa@].*?/ 
   REJECT BLOCKED: We really do not need help... the natural way works 
                   perfectly! Try a different subject.  
/^Subject:.*Rolex.*$/i                          
   REJECT BLOCKED: We have enough Rolexes by now. Try a different subject.
/^Subject:.* (lotto|lottery) .*$/i              
   REJECT BLOCKED: Never win with the lotto :( Try a different subject!
/^Subject:.*[o0]em soft.*$/i                    
   REJECT BLOCKED: No thanks, Try a different subject! bye.

And a small list of mail-body blocking

/Protected message is attached!/        
   REJECT Thanks, now goodbye!
/MS Office 2003 Pro/                    
   REJECT We think Open Office is better than MS Office 2003 Pro. Goodbye.
/INSTANT DOWNLOAD!/                     
   REJECT The words INSTANT DOWNLOAD detected in mail body. Try an email without these words.
/Stock Alert for/                       
   REJECT Stock Alert? So what? Bye.
/Don't overpay for Bill Gates's crap!/  
   REJECT Thanks, but we don't use Win32 crap to begin with. Bye.
/Pleasure your partner every time/      
   REJECT Partner is very happy, don't need your help. Bye.

Is it just me or has the spam volume increased again?

spam, postfix

I have recommended WWW::Mechanize to every Perl scripter I know already, for it's one of the Perl modules I like best. It saves you so much time!

Today I ran into a minor problem with it though. The annoying form "I" had to fill out was using JavaScript to create some needed variables, resulting in a few "No such field 'name' at /blah/WWW/Mechanize.pm".

After some searching, I ran into an interesting thread where Gisle Aas explains a little about the undocumented push_input method of HTML::Form.

So, of course, I used that hack, but I'd still didn't get the results I was looking for. Looking at CPAN for some WWW::Mechanize plugins, I ran into WWW::Mechanize::Sleepy again. I've seen it before and the thought of delaying my input sounded test worthy. And yeah! It was the solution! It turned out the host was not accepting input when the form was submitted in less than 4 seconds after requesting the actual form.

Remember this! It might come in handy when you're banging your head against the wall over WWW::Mechanize scripts ;)

WWW::Mechanize, WWW::Mechanize::Sleepy, HTML::Form

In the past, I didn't care about my home too much. Computers and wires everywhere. But now that I live in my new home, I think it'd be more appropriate to make it all look a little nicer (if only it was to prevent problems with my wife ;-)

So I started out with my WiFi LAN. As usually, I don't pay attention to hardware compatibility and my Linux system and so I ended up with the damned Linksys WRK54G. After that was fixed, I still encountered many problems. It usually happened when I'd be downloading some torrent. The D-Link AP would freak out and needed a reset. Not nice. Maybe my PCI card (D-Link DWL-G520+ using the acx module) was to blame?

Time for a change! And yes, I finally looked at the driver support, and computer stores in my vicinity. After some time of researching, the best I could easily get would be a SMC SMCWPCI-G.

This card contains an atheros chip and is supposed to work decent with the madwifi modules. After installing the card and modules, I got it working quite nice, although my connection wasn't as fast as I hoped it to be. This was easily fixed by the iwconfig command (`iwconfig ath0 rate 54M`).

Yay! Stable, somewhat fast, WLAN!

DWL-G520+, SMCWPCI-G, WLAN, madwifi, acx