If you’re running Spamassassin on Debian or Ubuntu, have you enabled automatic rule updates? If not, why not? If possible, you should enable this feature. It should be as simple as setting "CRON=1" in /etc/default/spamassassin. If you choose not to enable this feature, I’d really like to hear why. In particular, I’m thinking about changing the default behavior of the Spamassassin packages such that automatic rule updates are enabled, and I’d like to know if (and why) anybody opposes this.

Today is the first time I’ve taken an interstate train trip in something like 15 years. A few things about the trip were pleasantly surprising. Most of these will come as no surprise: Less time wasted in security theater at the station prior to departure. On-time departure More comfortable seats than a plane or bus. Quiet. Permissive free wifi Wifi was the biggest surprise. Not that it existed, since we’re living in the future and wifi is expected everywhere.

Infusing an old bike with new life I bought this early/mid 1990’s Bianchi Brava from my officemate at MIT in 2005 or 2006. For some time before I bought it, it had been sitting unused in our office and had fallen in to disrepair. When I bought it, I promptly converted it to a singlespeed with the help of Tyler from Paramount Bicycle Repair in Somerville. I rode in that configuration for a couple years, then bought bull-horn bars, scrapped the brakes, and converted it to a fixed-gear, which I rode for another couple of years.

I’ve aborted several attempts recently to get something of interest posted. For whatever reason, none of that stuck. So here’s something with fewer expectation attached to it: A collection of random updates. Debian packaging Spamassassin The Spamassassin project released version 3.4.0, a major update over the 3.3.2 branch, after nearly two-and-a-half years in development. 3.4.0-1 is currently in unstable and testing, and seems to be working reasonably well for me.

“Netiquette” is an ancient term, dating back to the earliest days on the internet. These days, one might argue that it’s no longer relevant, or that there are so many different definitions that it’s been rendered meaningless. However, one particular aspect of it endures: “Don’t feed the trolls!” A recent thread on the debian-security mailing list provided an amazingly effective demonstration of the effectiveness of this approach. A certain pseudonymous individual made multiple posts in this thread that exhibited classic troll behavior (no meaningful contribution to the discussion, inflamatory comments, etc).

I’m not much of an electronics guy. If I was exposed to it as a kid, I might have gotten into it, but there wasn’t much going on back in those days. Certainly not in central Maine, anyway. By the time I was really exposed to it in college, much of my curiosity and excitement for such things had been crushed, so I avoided the opportunity to learn when I could have.

Linux Fest Northwest has been going on for 14 years. For most of those years, I’ve lived in the wrong timezone for it to be worth attending. A couple weeks ago somebody posted to a Seattle area Linux forum asking if anybody else was going to this year’s edition, taking place on the last weekend in April. My memory was jarred, and my excitement kindled. I used to make it to conferences with some regularity, but it’s been several years.

Ok, so importing the existing posts from posterous worked smoothly. That’s nice. I’ve signed up for a disqus account and enabled comments. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I don’t like generating “footprints” across a bunch of third-party sites as I navigate the web, and I take steps in my browser to avoid doing so. So requiring readers of my blog (all 3 of them) to download from a third-party in order to see my blog, let alone actually comment on it, seems really hypocritical.

Day one with Octopress was fairly productive. Or at least, I didn’t punt. There are a couple of things I’ve yet to figure out. Most glaringly is comments. I don’t really want to rely on disqus or another third party for comments, but that appears to be the accepted way of implementing commenting on Octopress blogs. And I need to start coming up with my own layout/skin.

Since posterous is shutting down, I need to work out some new blogging platform. Le sigh This is a first attempt at using Octopress and Jekyll. The philosophy of the tools seems to mesh with my expectations, so it’s a promising start.