August, 2003:

I’ve been getting a lot of slack for calling the people where I work stupid. Just look at the comments. It’s getting so bad that I start to think maybe I overreacted. Maybe it was harder than I thought to detect that image as a fraud. Maybe people do read and think before they speak or type. But that was silly of me to give human beings the benefit of the doubt. Just look at what one commenter had to say about my John Mayer tickets. Even after I replied to her telling her to READ my post, she replied back with a lie stating that she did.

Please. Please. Please. READ AND THINK BEFORE YOU SPEAK OR TYPE. It’s not that hard.

This kind of stupidity almost makes me want to disable comments for people coming from Google.

Please tell me that this isn’t a little baby version of those things I hate with the sharp fangs and deadly venom:

Sorry about the poor image quality. It’s dark out so, I can’t really use my telephoto, and I’m not getting any closer to it than I have to. So I’ve cropped that one from a full-framed high-res 6.1MP image. Yes… I was pretty far away. Maybe I’ll take another picture with my flash through the bedroom window, if I can keep the glare down. It’s getting dark out, so I’m not going back outside.

Does any one know what this is? Please tell me it’s not a Cicada. It’s on my porch and I am NOT happy about it. It’s about the size of a nickel, now, but I’m sure it’ll be basketball sized before it’s ready to hunt and kill me.

In order to keep this project from turning out like Inklog (never actually getting finished), I’m making the WebHosting server available to those of you who would like accounts.

The control panel is NOT finsihed. This means that, if you’d like to add an email account, add a domain name, change DNS records, or alter your email aliases… you must contact either myself or Justin. Hopefully, as the users start piling up and the requests for changes thickens considerably, it’ll motiviate me to get the rest of the control panel finished.

Please email either Justin or myself with your domain name and desired username if you are still interested in hosting. If you’d rather wait until the control panel is finished, then hold tight. Hopefully, we’ll have it by this weekend… but I’m not making any promises. Getting my butt in gear to do so much tedious work simply to serve less than a few requests a day is not easy.

Robert said it better than I could:

An eight-year-old boy was killed [...] by a group of people, among them his mother, who were convinced that he was possessed by evil spirits. [...] He died, not once upon a time, but last Friday. Meanwhile, [...] another group of people is fighting to block a[n Old Testament] monument from being removed from a Federal courthouse, [...] and they wonder why someone would be offended [by it]?

Ugh.

The Cabochon, my last apartment complex, is giving me trouble. I got their refund check in the mail yesterday. Unfortunately, it was only about $700. They claim that I only put down $1,025 in deposit plus $175 in non-refundable (why is a deposit non-refundable? where does it go?). They also claim that I didn’t pay a pet deposit. She said their standard pet deposit is $350 ($150, non-refundable). This means that, if I DID pay a deposit, I gave them I whopping total of $1,025 + $175 + $350 = $1,550. She said if I bring her the cancelled check from my bank, they’ll take care of the pet deposit issue. Fuckers. That was a YEAR ago, I don’t have it. I’ll look… but I doubt I do. Which means I have to pay my bank to dig out the check.

Something’s wrong though. Because, I’ve always thought that my deposits were right around $1,200. Maybe I was not counting on the non-refundable parts? The only recollection I can find in my journal of paying it is that, I had to pay $850 MORE than whatever the first amount was because of my credit. Ugh.

I’m looking to implement some sort of SPAM management. I’d like to be able to use the Bayes algorithm in order to determine what is and what isn’t SPAM. This means I’d like to be able to have a folder (MailDir format please) called “caughtspam” or something similar. When a message is considered SPAM, it will go in that folder. All other mail will be delivered normally. If a user finds a piece of mail that is SPAM that wasn’t classified as such, I’d like them to be able to move that message into “caughtspam” and have the SPAM filter analyze it in order to better train itself for the future. I’d also like the SPAM filter to be able to analyze all the other folders a user has to determine what isn’t SPAM, on a nightly, or so, basis. However, I don’t really want to use the INBOX for this as, it might actually contain some SPAM that didn’t get caught. Especially at first. So, it might be beneficial to have a folder for INBOX, a folder for SPAM, and a folder for “maybes” or stuff that was too close to tell. Also, for POP users, I’d like to have the ability to merely FLAG the message as SPAM as opposed to putting it in another folder. In these cases, perhaps some sort of “this-is-spam” email address that they can forward SPAM messages to in order to train the system. Any suggestions?

I’d also like to be able to offer mail confirmation (you know where, if a user gets mail from someone she’s never gotten mail from before, the sender will be asked to reply to confirm that they are indeed human) to users who would prefer even BETTER SPAM protection at the cost of flexibility in their mail system. But this desire is secondary to the above.

Part of the apache module for the control panel is done. It adds a new site and regenerates the apache config file. Now I just need to handle aliases and deletions and reloads. Then apache will be done. Then I’ll move onto mail, followed by mysql, followed by file system management (quotas, directories, etc), followed by the GUI, followed by system account creation, followed by billing, followed by a GUI update, followed by a support request system, followed by another GUI update.

Damn I have a long way to go. And I’m already hating it. Hence my post here. Can you say “procrastination”?

All email, web, and other services for revjim.net have been moved to the new server as of… right now.

Until your DNS servers are updated (2 hours, tops), you will see a redirect occur in your browser to revjim.net.tmp.inklog.net. This is normal, and expected, so do not be alarmed. Email should automatically move to the new server as well.

If you find something that is quirky or doesn’t work… please let me know.

Yesterday, Miette decided that it would be fun to knock over bottles of shampoo, and then lay in the mess she made. Needless to say, this morning she got a bath. If I had to guess, I’d say it lasted about 30 seconds. That might be an overestimate, though. Usually, with enough pressure to the rear-end of a cat, they’ll sit still after a few seconds of fighting to get out of the tub. Then, as long as you keep the pressure there, they wont’ go too far. Miette, however, doesn’t agree with that philosophy. Fortunately, her bath was just long enough to get the sticky, soapy mess off of her belly. I was afraid that she would lick it off and get sick.

She was pissed at me for a few hours. I could see her plotting my demise every time I walked past her hiding under the dining table. But she’s recovered now, or so she’d lead me to believe.

However, because she hated me with every claw on her feet, I was unable to dry her very well. So, she found the one spot in this apartment that still gets sun after 12:00pm and laid in it like an Egyptian Princess. Every few minutes, however, she has to inch closer and closer to the window, because, as she has now learned, the Earth is spinning. After losing most of the sun from one window, she moved on top of a wooden trunk that I have near another window. That worked for a while, until the sun was not long enough to reach the trunk, at which point she flopped onto the ground and scared herself. I guess she didn’t realize that there wasn’t any trunk left to roll on to.

I’ve finally finished setting up Exim and Courier to access MySQL for ALL of it’s data. In case you’re interested in doing the same thing, here are the relevant config files.

• exim.conf
• authmysqlrc
• authdaemonrc
• DBSchema