B10[m|g] http://menno.b10m.net/blog/blosxom// Yet another non-informative, useless blog B10[m|g] http://menno.b10m.net/blog/blosxom/ http://static.flickr.com/123/buddyicons/86182275@N00.jpg Ministry Gig http://menno.b10m.net/blog/blosxom/metal/ministry-gig.html Last Sunday I went to 013, Tilburg to see Ministry in concert. Joffie was kind enough to accompany me and like predicted. It was awesome!

I tried to smuggle my Canon IXUS in there, but since they have fairly strict rules banning cameras (and they search anyone going in), I left it in the car and had to use my Nokia N95 instead.

The pictures are up at Flickr and I even had a chance to take two clips (crappy quality):

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]]> Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:03:00 GMT Bad taste http://menno.b10m.net/blog/blosxom/personal/bad-taste.html I like Y! movies' recommendation system, for it usually turns out quite ok. If they say I like a certain movie, a lot of times, it's true. But ermm, either their system is way off here, or I have a seriously bad taste.

52 people have rated this movie with an average of "dreadful", yet Yahoo happily informs me that I'll probably like this movie. Yay!

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]]> Sat, 14 Jun 2008 23:57:00 GMT WWW::Mechanize::Plugin::Web::Scraper http://menno.b10m.net/blog/blosxom/perl/www-mechanize-plugin-web-scraper.html Joffie asked me if Web::Scraper could handle authentication while retrieving the website in question. A good question and after digging in Tatsuhiko's code, I noticed that you can simply dump HTML in the scrape function, instead of just the documented URI object.

I remembered Tatsuhiko mentioning integration with WWW::Mechanize somewhere but I couldn't find anything yet. So I decided to write the little Mechanize plugin. Shockingly, and completely surprising, it now carries the name WWW::Mechanize::Plugin::Web::Scraper.

Scrape the planet!

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]]> Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:31:00 GMT Tank Man http://menno.b10m.net/blog/blosxom/personal/tank-man.html Today, 19 years ago, one of my favorite pictures of all time was taken

tank man

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]]> Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:54:00 GMT Hotmail doesn't like b10m.net http://menno.b10m.net/blog/blosxom/web/hotmail-doesnt-like-b10m.html 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.

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