RavenBlog - Covered in Scorpions

Friday 22 May 2009

I just accidentally discovered a feature in Windows Vista. If you run an administrator command prompt (right-clicking the command-prompt thing and select run as administrator and click OK on the permission request), then kill explorer with task manager, then re-run explorer from that administrative command prompt, you get special administrative explorer in which everything you do has administrator privileges.

I noticed this when selecting 'run' to type 'cmd' as I usually do, it gave me a command prompt marked administrator, as it usually doesn't. Then I noticed that the 'run' dialog box says "this task will be created with administrative privileges", which it also usually doesn't.

So if you're someone who is annoyed by all those security confirmation dialogs (or if you're reinstalling everything on your computer so you're going to be getting one every 3 seconds), this is a way to get around them. Nothing asks for confirmation in this state. [12:59] [0 comments]

Saturday 16 May 2009

Last night I got 100 identical Rolex spams that should obviously have been caught by my spam filter. Some investigation revealed that SpamAssassin running in daemon mode simply ignores any message bigger than 50K. More and more spam is having giant image attachments, which puts them over that boundary, which SpamAssassin has been blindly delivering.

Large messages being delivered regardless of their spammity is obviously not appropriate behaviour. I asked the internet about it, to no avail. The script 'ifspamh' that links qmail and spamc is partly responsible for the behaviour, so I modified it - I didn't want my spam folder filling up with a million giant files either, so I rewrote the script to just silently drop large messages identified (by their first 50 lines) as spam. A small risk - I've not ever missed a message I was expecting, so the spam filter seems pretty safe. I rarely even look at contents of the spam folder, I just empty it.

Mostly I'm just blogging this so that if someone else has the same annoyance, they can use my ifspamh to fix it. I think I've used all the words I was googling for, so anyone with the same issue should find this.

I also recommend spamdyke if your server, like mine, is trying to receive a spam every 2 to 5 seconds. Spamdyke drops about 95% of my spam before the server even finishes receiving it, which reduces the load on resource-hungry SpamAssassin. [11:20] [1 comment]

Sunday 10 May 2009

Recently I have been snorkelling, waterskiing, travelling 45mph on an inflated tube-thing, driving a monstery truck, and adventurously changing the adventurously exploded tyre on said monstery truck (Jessica was driving when it exploded so I didn't get a driving trial-by-fire.)

Changing the tyre involved purchasing a jack, finding that jack couldn't possibly lift the truck enough, researching a lot, and finding a tractor jack that does the job wonderfully and is what I expect a jack to be instead of being a stupid hydraulic bottle thing which wouldn't fit under a short car and can't lift high enough for a truck with monstery wheels. Also hitting a cross-shaped lug-wrench repeatedly with a brick.

In other news, comically unpleasant spam:

Subject: Energy to tear her ham wallet

For carnal victories!

[14:48] [0 comments]

Thursday 30 April 2009

For the first time ever, I have had to reinstall an operating system in order to get a machine to work. How did this come about?

Windows update being awful where .NET is involved. (Failing after 10 minutes 'installing', with "an unknown error occurred".)
After internet-based solutions failed, foolishly asking MS tech support.
At the direction of tech support person, running the recommended 'cleanup' program which promptly made all my programming environment unusable (as in "wouldn't start up") and also didn't fix the problem.
Running another Microsoft fix tool, which put the machine into an infinite loop of rebooting before letting me do anything.
Trying to use a system restore point, to no avail, "there are no system restore points" (then what were you doing every time you told me you were creating a system restore point?)
Using a system recovery thing "automatically make a back up of your data and restore the operating system to factory defaults".
Discover that "make a back up of your data" means "make a back up of your user directories that you have never used for anything, and totally wipe all your actual data without warning". Also the system still doesn't work anyway.
Go with "format and reinstall to factory defaults" since it already destroyed all my data anyway. PROBLEM SOLVED!
Be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, because all my preferred email clients and things that I've been transferring from machine to machine since about 1996 or so no longer exist, new Trillian sucks, configuring older compilers to work with new DirectX was a nightmare anyway, etc.
Hate it, because all the newer stuff is a bag of shit with a horrible user interface that eg. lets spam emails do HTML formatting and has a stupid preview window and asks me to confirm every time I delete an email even though it's only going to move it to a deleted folder so it's not like I couldn't undo it if I made a mistake. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO AN EASILY UNDONE ACTION? ARE YOU SURE YOU WANTED TO CLICK YES? REALLY? GRAGHAGHRGHH. Also I lost recent bits and pieces of my programming that weren't added to the backup storage, and all my graphical stuff, and all my music. Thanks tech support. I didn't even want the .NET update, I just wanted it to stop bothering me. [08:22] [8 comments]