Category: Uncategorized

  • Arduino lights etc.

    One day I’ll give up on the illusion that I actually might post something useful here. Thanks to MonkeySailor. over Christmas I did had an Arduino and some lights. But there are loads of tutorials for it (like: http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Controlled-LED-Strip-Holiday-Lighting/ ) , so there’s no point in me trying to document it. Perhaps it’s time for…

  • Lazy wordpress updating using wp-cli.phar

    Fed up installing updates to WordPress sites? Stick this in a cron job somewhere, and cross your fingers (a little)….

  • The spam and regular expressions

    I think the spammers need some help with their regular expressions….  

  • spam (policyd-weight + excommunicado)

    1. See http://github.com/palepurple/policyd-weight – I’m trying to make some changes to policyd-weight (something I’ve been using for ages) to make it more configurable and add in a GeoIP patch which I’ve seen floating around. 2. See https://twitter.com/excommunicado and http://blog.hinterlands.org/2013/11/an-update-on-communicado/ – for a DNS Blacklist you might want to use –  using excommunicado.co.uk as a RHSBL has stopped about 700…

  • WordPress 3.6 is here….

    And a new theme. Perhaps one day I’ll fix my twitter sync script. In the mean time, there’s a bit on Solr on Pale Purple’s blog. along with SpamDyke to stop Qmail being overrun by spam.

  • Wanted: Developer with interesting skills…. oh, and it’s for the minimum wage… (Is this a joke?)

    Recently on the Twitter the following (attached) image came up – presumably legit, of a job advert. Highlights below. It’s almost like someone cut and pasted two job postings together. The phone number does appear to be legit … so perhaps the advert itself is?

  • Weird Akismet behaviour with WordPress (incorrect spam identification)

    One of my customers uses Akismet to protect his various blogs from the masses of spam. Oddly torwards the end of last week, Akismet started to identify everything as spam, with no error message being returned on check of spam, and the admin dashboard showing the api key/akismet were happy. I initially thought that perhaps…

  • Stupid NFS (Debian Squeeze / Ubuntu Precise)

    NFS really can be a major PITA. Our office network has been breaking all day. This seemed to coincide with moving more of our computers to gigabit ethernet (removing the 100mbit CISCO 7960 phones which their network had been daisy-chained through – and seemed to cause intermittent packet loss) Here are some tips for others…

  • SpamAssassin ruleset to try and catch India based web development spam

    At work we keep receiving emails from sales-droids in India who are trying to persuade us to outsource PHP/Android/Java/whatever development to them. Here’s my first attempt at a spamassassin rule to neutralise it – in my case, copy into a something.cf file in /etc/spamassassin/mail, and running over a suitably loaded email results in : Content…

  • rsyslog selective logging with multiple postfix instances

    Scenario – one Linux box runs multiple Postfix instances. By default they all log to /var/log/mail.log which makes it difficult to see what’s going on without using grep and so on. The server already uses rsyslog, and Postfix is configured to specify a syslog_name to each instance. i.e /etc/postfix-blah/main.cf contains “syslog_name = postfix-blah” rsyslog allows…