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.