Yearly Archives: 2002

Updated my Mailman
patch to use some of the newer features in SpamAssassin 2.20.
This includes showing which rules got triggered for
messages that get held (this is the feature that required
the 2.20), and the ability to give messages from list
members a bonus when calculating the message score (so that
they are less likely to get held/discarded). The newer
version is in Mailman’s patch tracker:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=534577&group_id=103&atid=300103

With this patch and SA 2.20, I seem to be getting about
80% less messages to moderate, which is much more
manageable. Adjusting the thresholds a little would
probably improve matters further.

jdub put the original version of my
patch on mail.gnome.org
(with a discard threshold of 20 — mainly to test its
ability to identify spam). It manages to get rid of the
worst of the spam delivered to GNOME lists though.

With this patch, you could almost open a list up to non
subscriber posting again, like most list admins did before
the spam epidemic grew to its current proportions. The SA
mailman filter doesn’t catch everything though, so list
members would have to be slightly tolerant of spam to allow
non subscriber posting again.

Looks like jdub is pushing to get my mailman
patches put up on mail.gnome.org.
It will be interesting to see how they hold up under heavy
volume. It
is coded fairly defensively, so it shouldn’t cause mail lossage
(unless you configure it to lose certain bits of mail), but
I have no
idea whether it has an acceptable CPU overhead.

Saw Rabit Proof Fence on Saturday. A very
good
movie and worth watching. It makes me sad to see how
Aborigines have
been treated.

Going to GUADEC

This is the first time I have travelled internationally since
September 11th and the terrorist paranoia. All the parking
spots
immediately outside the terminal were blocked off (apparently to
prevent terrorists from leaving bombs — like any terrorist
organisation would want to bomb Perth Airport).

When going through xray machines at customs, the ladie in
front of
me got held up for having a nail file in her hand luggage. They
stopped me because I had a laptop. They asked me to take
the laptop
out of the bag, disconnect the battery and then pass them
all through
the xray machine separately.

When we got the meals on the plane, they came with metal
spoon,
metal fork and plastic knife. The forks are probably
sharper than the
metal knives they usually provide with meals.

Travelling by plane sure is a lot less convenient now.

Sevilla

After getting my luggage checked through customs, I found
a bus
outside the airport going into the city. Caught it and got
off some
place that turned out to be two or three kilometers from the
house
docpi organised. I walked the rest of the
way to the
house.

I eventually found the place, and it had 4 buzzers (one
for each
appartment). On the forth try, I got let in (first two were
empty,
and the docpi was in the last one). The appartment looked
great —
marble floors, balconies looking out in two directions, etc.

April 2

In the supermarket, they had really big 6 packs — 6 one
litre
bottles plastic wrapped together. Meandered around the city
for the day, and had a very nice meal at night.

…

Will have to write something about the actual conference.
So far it has been a lot of fun.

Did a bit more mail system hacking, and wrote a filter to
get mailman to talk to SpamAssassin directly:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=534577&group_id=103&atid=300103

This one asks spamd to score each message that
is posted to a list. If the message goes above a particular
score (configurable, default 10), it gets discarded. If it
goes above another threshold (default 5), the message gets
held for moderation. It probably needs a bit more tweaking
to skip posts from listmembers (among other things). I
mainly wrote this patch because the PyGTK
mailing list currently gets more spam than real messages,
which is a bit depressing, and a pain to moderate.

Made new development releases of pygtk and gnome-python
recently. The previous ones didn’t work with the gtk 2.0
release (trivial to fix up). Since the release, I have done
some clean ups to its code generator. I have refactored it
so that the 4 code paths used to generate wrappers for
GObject, GInterface, GBoxed and GPointer type classes are
now merged into one code path. This shortened the file by
500 lines, and should make it easier to add new features.
The previous layout was getting pretty hard to manage.

I have started using Spam Assassin
to tag incomming spam. As we have a mildly unusual mail
setup (postfix with Cyrus IMAP), I ended up writing my own
script to perform the spam checking. The result was a
script that could be called as a “deliver” script by postfix
for local delivery. The script would then pass the message
off to the spamd daemon for spam checking, then
pass the message on to the IMAP server via LMTP. The script
is probably useful for use with other mail servers
supporting LMTP. The script is attached to the following
bug report:

http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=112

This has the benefit of only checking incomming mail, and
allowing postfix to handle outgoing and transit mail at full
speed as before. Next thing to try is adding spam checking
support to Mailman (as the local delivery program doesn’t
get called for messages sent to mailman). It should be
possible to set it up to reject messages above a certain
threshold, and hold messages at a lower threshold.

I wish I started looking at these tools earlier. Spam
volume has gone up sharply in the last 6 months, and shows
no sign of flattening out.

linux.conf.au

Got asked to go on the paper review committee for next
year’s linux.conf.au. This should be interesting. For
people living in Europe, it should cut off about 5 hours
flying time compared to the eastern states, so hopefully we
will get some cool European hackers submitting papers.
Conversely, flights from the US will most likely be longer.

If you have never been to Perth, it is a great
opportunity to come (it is a great place). If you live in
Perth, it will be a great opportunity to meet many
interesting people without > 4 hours flight 🙂.

Also, check out the video on the website if you haven’t yet.

GNOME 2.0

The GNOME release is looking pretty good. Things have
been shaping up quite well. The new stable GTK+ release is
scheduled for Monday. There have been significant speed
improvements to Nautilus (some due to improvements to the UI
handler code in bonobo). Libglade is shaping up well. Guadec is about a month
away as well.

Python

The development pygtk branch
is going well. Most of the infrastructure is in place, and
it is pretty usable (except threading, which is still a
little broken).

I my first patch into python recently. It allows use of
non string types as the __doc__ attribute of new style
classes (eg. unicode strings, or arbitrary descriptors
(which is what I wanted)). It should be going in both the
2.3 and 2.2.1 releases. The gettext module in the standard
library is also partially based on my code (along with the
other gettext wrappers that were around at the time), but
that is really Barry’s work. I should look at the bug about
building libpython as a shared library, as it would be
required to implement a full gnome-vfs wrapper.

raph: hopefully pygtk 2.0 should
be a pretty good choice when it is ready. GTK+ 2.0 should
work on win32, and I have gotten rid of the file naming
issues and global variable referencing issues (MSVC doesn’t
allow referencing variables from other DLLs in global
variable definitions. However, the C++ compiler does. It
is a bit weird) people were having with the stable pygtk.
Also, the Redmond95 windows lookalike theme has been
improved a fair bit.

Mozilla

Looks like the patch to fix font handling for PS printing
(#37685)
is going in to mozilla 0.9.9. This should make printing on
unix mozilla much better. Finally, preformatted text should
finally be displayed in a monospace font. Previously, the
generic font types (sans serif, serif and monospace) were
all being printed as Times.