Getting Ready for New Spam Filters

September 21, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I've been doing some backend eThreads work lately in preparation for again changing up my spam blocking solution. I'm fed up with false positives in lists like the DSBL (a dynamic IP that had an open SOCKS proxy in 2003 likely doesn't now). Heavy handed blocking has made my stats a lot cleaner, but it's also led to legit people getting blocked and spam's starting to sneak around anyway.

I wanted to put this code into eThreads as plugins and keep the core code cleaner, but to do so I needed a way for plugins to hook into the posting process. That's now in the code, so it's time for the actual plugin development. Hopefully I'll have that up and going within the next few days.

All of this has made me realize that someday I should release a new version. eThreads 1.2 came out in 2000. The whole codebase has been torn down, rewritten, torn down, and rewritten again since then.

Fun With Batteries

September 19, 2005 by Eric Richardson

My laptop battery appears to be giving up on life. It properly runs from 100% to 50% or so, and then just instantly drops to 2% capacity. So basically I'm getting just a bit over an hour out of it. Very odd. I've got another one back at the apartment. I may have to switch it in.

USC Football's Popularity Showing Major Deficiencies in Event Planning

September 18, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Yesterday USC opened its 2005 home football schedule at the Coliseum against Arkansas. The game itself was a blow-out; USC won 70-17. That makes 24 straight victories, and 22 straight at home.

This is my fifth year at USC, just as it is Pete Carroll's. The team went 6-6 his (and my) first season, and has progressed rapidly since then. That's certainly made the games a lot more fun, but it's also made them a lot more crowded. Perhaps the place you feel that most is in the student section, where it's now increasingly hard to find a good seat and can almost be dangerous trying to get in when the gates open. — Continue Reading...

Wrong Way? More Like Wrong Code

September 16, 2005 by Eric Richardson

So on my way to Long Beach this morning I got a ticket. It was an MTA Sheriff's officer (I guess... the ticket has MTA on it), and I was on my bike pulling into the San Pedro Blue Line station.

Now it doesn't surprise me overly much to get a ticket while biking. Some of the things I do on a bike probably aren't 100% legal, though I'm a very safe rider and would never do anything crazy. But in the course of the day there are things you do, like making a left turn onto a crosswalk when transitioning from riding as a vehicle to riding as a pedestrian, that are perfectly safe but probably violate some law. — Continue Reading...

Someone Think of the Colorless

September 12, 2005 by Eric Richardson

In high school they had "Computers" classes where they taught you how to use things like Word and Excel. I never took those classes. I did "independent study computers" and built the school web site.

But tonight some of that might have come in useful. I've been trying to make some charts in gnumeric, to lay out financial info for tomorrow's DLANC meeting. I've successfully figured out how to make the charts, but it would appear that gnumeric has zero support for choosing sensible colors that will show up in grayscale. Does Excel handle that better? How hard can it be to have a "I'm printing in grayscale option" in the properties that alters the behaviour of the code that picks colors?

I was able to manually set bar elements to different gray levels, but pie charts appear to only let you say "Automatic", in which case half of what it picks just shows up as white when run through my laser printer.

I refuse to touch Open Office's oocalc app. I've messed with it before and despise its UI much as I do that of OO's word processor. I also installed kchart (can't find a working website for that one) and couldn't handle (or understand) the UI. gnumeric feels very nice, but pie charts where half the elements come out white aren't very useful to me.