Phasor Burn

Don’t break the mail at an ISP.

At least it was a Friday night, and mail wasn’t really being dropped. Fiddling with adding a new greylisting policy daemon for postfix and went live with it after a fair bit of testing.

Thing was, the new greylisting service was letting some mail thru. It just wasn’t allowing new tuples to validate, and thus previously unseen ip/sender/recipient to get thru after the quarantine time period.

Oops.

I was notified around 9pm. Unfortunately I wasn’t near a keyboard at the time. I did have a look at it around 0030 Saturday and I figured nobody of consequence could be wanting their mail at that time of night, spent the next three hours dinking with the new policy daemon’s code.

The code was a little convoluted and unclear in spots, and my suffering from lack of sleep didn’t help either. I ended up reverting to the previous postfix configuration which just had the cranky old gps 0.92 on sqlite which craps out on db connections about 30% of the time when the system is under heavy load.

That’s the thing I’m trying to replace. Guess I’ll just have to swing the cat at it from another angle this week.

Something I stumbled upon while idly surfing over to a former employers web site :

Mr. X
Development Team Lead

Mr. X has extensive experience in the Information Systems industry. For 18 years he has been involved in various stages of the development life cycle including requirement analysis, systems development, quality assurance testing and user training. He is a strong believer of RAD (Rapid Application Development) methodology. At Company Inc., Mr. X works closely with Management and Operations to ensure projects are in line with the company vision and to direct developers to achieve the company common goals.

They forgot to include that this supposed experienced information systems professional bought a new notebook last year, installed XP Pro instead of the XP Home or whatever came with it, and then hooked it up to a raw internet connection to download updates from Microsoft.

What’s wrong with that? Well, he brought the machine into the office the next morning, plugged into the network, and took down the office for a day. While his notebook was on the raw internet connection getting updates, it got owned by a worm or three. Which of course tried to take over every machine they could see when it was booted up onto the corporate lan.

The poor file server fell over. Antivirus program on it couldn’t keep up with the repair/quarantine of thousands of files per minute being infected.

If this wasn’t a flogging offense, I don’t know what is. I don’t know why he wasn’t fired on the spot or at least given a written warning. This is just unacceptable reckless endangerment of corporate data.

My wife recently got a Mac Mini to play with. Nominally it is to see if she can get everything she needs running on there before her Dell notebook lease is up … and if so, well, a powerbook is likely in her future.

I was a little bit sceptical at first, being that it is a Windows dominated world, even though she does deal with J2EE stuff on Sun boxes and so forth. All her day to day tools though are Windows oriented. Office, Email, Web browsing, JBuilder.

OK, she’s not so dyed-in-the-wool stuck-with-microsoft as some people are. She’s actually using Netscape for email, and Office tends to be sometimes MS-Office, sometimes StarOffice or OpenOffice. JBuilder is a java app and Mac OS X is now officially supported, so maybe it won’t be too difficult to switch.

Since OS X is based on BSD and has Samba in the guts, it came up and played nicely with the Linux based domain controller we have down in the server rack. (A 3rd-generation Net Integrator Mark I running Nitix).

Other things seemed to mostly “just work” out of the box with minimum fuss. I kept hearing oohs and ahhs and “It can’t be that simple?” emanating from behind her monitors on the other side of the office.

I couldn’t get near the Mac Mini for a while as Lori was busy fiddling with it and then I got busy on the first few weeks of my new contract. Just a few days ago we both got back to poking at the mini and fixed the lefty-mouse issue as well as discovered that OS X with NeoOffice/J is actually more capable than OpenOffice on SUSE 9.2 when it comes to dealing with files on a samba share. Sweet.

Yesterday I sat down at Lori’s desk for an hour or two and just played, installed some random stuff, uninstalled it all, installed and played with the iLife’05, and just got used to how the Mac OS X drives as compared to Windows and KDE.

I’ll have to admit, I’m awfully tempted. So much so that I’m pretty sure that my 4 year old notebook is going to be replaced by a powerbook later this year. When my Shuttle SN41G2 gets a bit longer in the tooth (about 2 years old now?) it might go away as well.

I think I’m starting to slip down that slippery slope of Mac Cult. Happened to me way back when with the Amiga too. How can you help it when it just works and the eye candy and user experience is smooth as silk when compared to the usual sludge.

I need to examine this in more detail - how to get things done. Apparently it’s a good time management system that could help with information overload and paralysis.

I was reading an article in the paper today, about the perils of smart phones being the next target for malware. Unfortunately the Calgary Herald has some idiotic thing about making people pay for access to their articles online. Even making a big deal about giving a discount for people who buy physical paper subscriptions. Excuse me? If anything, the online version should be free to those who get a physical dead tree delivered to their doorstep…

Anyways, the article was by Scott Canon who was writing for the Knight Ridder Newspapers, so it is syndicated or whatever and I found a copy of it elsewhere.

Now, the information in the article is more or less on target, but there is one bit where the author really got my hackles up. OK two areas.

First is the use of the term Hackers in the bad sense. These guys are more properly known as Crackers. Educating the public and newspaper hacks of the proper terminology for this particular set of terms is nearly a complete waste of time. They’ve corrupted the terms for so long now that most of the hacker set have resigned themselves to this misuse.

The other hackles-raising bit in the article is where Scott says

Smart cellphones have yet to settle into a mostly Microsoft world where virtually every smart handset — really a smallish computer — employs the same operating system. Instead, scores of proprietary Apple-style systems still compete for market share. None of the most popular cellphone operating systems in the world has more than a sliver of the 1.6 billion global market.

Now, this statement is on it’s face mostly factual. Part of what he was getting at is that the diverse set of operating systems on the smartphones out there makes it difficult for malware writers to target more than a small percentage of the handsets. Cross platform code just doesn’t happen, especially with the poorly written stuff that is common of script kiddies.

More to the point, the near universal monoculture of Microsoft Operating Systems on the desktop is one of the main factors for why there are so many virii out there that cause no end of trouble for end users and administrators alike.

However, there’s another word misuse here. I emphasized the word in question in the quote above. Proprietary. Let’s review the dictionary definition for that, shall we?

Proprietary

pro·pri·e·tar·y Audio pronunciation of “proprietary” ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pr-pr-tr)
adj.

1. Of, relating to, or suggestive of a proprietor or to proprietors as a group: had proprietary rights; behaved with a proprietary air in his friend’s house.
2. Exclusively owned; private: a proprietary hospital.
3. Owned by a private individual or corporation under a trademark or patent: a proprietary drug.

No question that Apple has a proprietary operating system. At least, the bits layered on top of the BSD core are mostly proprietary. Scott Canon was completely missing that Microsoft Windows (any of the bazillion versions, from Win9x thru XP and all others that came before and after thus far) is Proprietary as could possible be by any stretch of the definition.

However, correcting this misunderstanding of the term proprietary when talking about Microsoft etc is likely to be a losing battle as well. This really pisses me off. Lunkheads.

Almost irks me as much as the billions of dollars wasted on bandwidth, server resources, etc in combatting spam. But that is another story for another time.