Entries in Life

I’ve been a very busy beaver behind the scenes here. Just when I got the OK to go-ahead at my day-job with a more comprehensive spam-blocking solution (replacing eManager with SpamAssassin), I also got a consulting gig to hook up spam blocking for a couple of other small places. And, while I’m on a role, I’m going to re-implement virus-scanning for the sites hosted on everyhost.com.

The interesting thing is the variety of Mail Transfer Agents used. We have Exim here and will be using amavis-ng and Clam AntiVirus. At my day-job, it is sendmail, mimedefang, and VirusWall. For the consulting gig, it is qmail, qmail-scanner, and RAV AntiVirus. Fun, Fun, Fun! Three completely different ways to solve the same problem!

So, you’re running a program and it hangs. Normally, this isn’t a big deal. Just kill it. But, say its upgrading your mailing lists and you don’t want to kill it for fear that it will leave them in a convoluted mess.

strace to the rescue. Find the PID of the program and run strace -p pid. That will tell you what the program is doing and from there you can figure out how to solve the problem. In my case, it was a bogus lock file, so I removed the file and all was good.

The local Time-Picayunne has finally done a write-up on the Slidell Spammer, Ronnie Scelson.

Re: Full Screen Interfaces. I tend to like them if I don’t have a lot of screen. If my screen is my 800×600 laptop, then my favorite interface is a full-screen terminal window in which I run emacs on the server. Nice.

On the 1600×1200 destop, though, this doesn’t work as nicely. So I like the screen split. Mozilla on the right, emacs on the left.

Rafe’s got some great thoughts about why we are willing to go to war with Iraq and not North Korea. The basic gist: we’ll fight countries with “Weapons of Mass Destruction” as long as those weapons are’t nukes. I think this also has something to do with mobilisation: we’ve already mobilised for war with Iraq and wouldn’t be able to use those troops for war with North Korea.

AKMA observes: what a sorry mess we humans get into when we start deciding whom it’s necessary to kill.

Everyone else in the blog-o-sphere is talking about it, but that is because What Should I Do With My Life? is such a thought-provoking article.

Po Bronson comes up with a stumbling blocks that keep people from properly answering the question. Some thoughts:

• It isn’t about money: People live under the delusion that they have to get enough money before they can do what they want to do. I remember, back when the dot-com bubble was busting, reading about a Microsoft employee who complained that MSFT stock had been hit so hard that he couldn’t quit to go to seminary as he had planned. I couldn’t muster any sympathy for the man. Many people manage to go to seminary without first becoming independently wealthy.
• Intellegence can’t get you there: I went to school with a few hundred National Merit Scholars. These are people who aced the SAT in their region — they scored in the top 0.5% for their region. Still, from what I’ve heard from a few of them, their intellegence did not naturally lead to a fulfilled life. One person ended up dropping out because he became obsessed with a woman who didn’t reciprocate. Another, after graduating, couldn’t manage to hold down anything more compelling than a cashier at a movie-house — and he wasn’t happy with it. Obviously, intellegence isn’t going to automatically make you more capable of answering the question.
• Where you are matters: I’m still digesting this one, but I know that living in a technological backwater like New Orleans has changed my opportunities and outlook.

There is a sidebar at the bottom of the page titled “So what do you do?” and it addresses the queasiness people feel about that question. I admit I don’t mind answering the question because my answer is a big part of who I am. But, I’ve run into a few people who didn’t want to answer the question. They felt that they shouldn’t be defined by what they did. Still, a majority of our waking life is defined by what we do, so to claim that the answer to the question “What do you do?” isn’t as signifigant as “Who are you?” seems disingenuous. As the sidebar points out, if you don’t like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question, maybe it’s partly because you don’t like your answer.

The article is great, but I have to take issue with some of the underlying assumptions. Po Bronson writes: A status system has evolved that values being unique and true even more than it values being financially successful. I would claim that society has always valued uniqueness and veracity to self. But business has never, and probably will never, valued these attributes.

Despite my request and the help of one or two people, the LazyWeb hasn’t produced the xmlrpc:// handler for Mozilla.

I guess I don’t have enough GoogleJuice.