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Archive May 2009
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] [5 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]