Mental Hygiene » administrivia

i’m a spammer?

option8 — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:40:25 +0000

apparently i’m being accused of “backscatter”, or at least my mail server is. the complaint comes from the practice of testing incoming mail to see if its sender is a real address. my server sends a callout to the apparent sending server of an incoming message to see if joeSpammer@domain.spoofed is a real sender, and if not, rejects the message.

my bad. it’s abuseable and causes undue traffic on a domain that’s been spoofed.

oh well – it was working as a pretty good spam blocking resource for me. blocked a metric shitload of spam every day with that one method.

so, now i have to wait to get delisted by backscatterer.org, or else pay 50 euro to get it “expedited”

now, who’s making money off spam?

ten years blogging

option8 — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:11:10 +0000

astonishing, even to me, is that this month marks the tenth year this site has been online. amazing.

i was “blogging” even before i knew it was a verb. here’s proof:

archive from February 1999.

back in those days, i had ambitions that i would open up the “rants” to other writers and guests. the whole engine was custom built on a PowerMac 7600 running WebStar and FileMaker Pro, with Lasso as the language holding it all together. that worked for a surprisingly long time – with the help of several new hard drives, a pile of RAM chips and a G3 upgrade card.

then came the linux server, and WordPress.

and still, here i am, not capitalizing my shit.

misc bits

option8 — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 22:27:29 +0000

for those of you that have requested the pattern for the ipod cozy – i’m working on writing it up. i’ve never written a pattern before, at least not one for other people to try and follow, so i’m enlisting the help of my knitting sensei and the craftiest woman i know, ebeth. i’ll have something posted, and maybe a PDF to download in the next week or so.

and, probably some time after the server stops smoking and is cool to the touch again, i’ll have to write up something about how the post-it elvis mosaic has turned into a little meme, and just how much traffic this site is now getting as a result.

a sample: the average day in may, i had 64 visitors. two days ago, i had 107,201.

wtf?

option8 — Thu, 12 May 2005 20:14:26 +0000

you know, the whole advantage of running the latest high availability, super-stable stable and svelte operating system on this site is somewhat negated when the UPS it’s hooked to goes tits up.

sigh.

new server

option8 — Fri, 06 May 2005 14:39:15 +0000

after some small strife and gnashing of teeth, the new and improved (?) mentalhygiene is now working.

it is:
running on the option8 linux server now instead of the mac server
powered by php, mysql and wordpress instead of lasso and filemaker
considerably easier to maintain
considerably easier to comment on posts
considerably faster

share and enjoy.

i’ll continue to make more adjustments to the templates and add back some updated content from the old site – all the old posts are already here, though unfortunately i haven’t figured out how to get my old comments system imported.