As you probably have noticed, it’s been pretty quiet around here. At least, on the blog, not in that crazy thing called Real Life[tm]. After the last post about BSDCan, I moved from my apartment downtown to a small house in the suburbs, went on a team building trip with my coworkers on Tunø, a small island nearby, and went for the yearly Cisco Live conference, this year in Orlando, Florida, and while I was on that side of the pond anyway, I also spent the week before the conference at Mark Linimons place in Austin, Texas, where I had some time to work on FreeBSD some more and shrink my TODO list a bit, and also go to a James McMurty concert. So please, don’t ask me why I didn’t write anything here.

Somehow I made it to the office this morning before the canteen had opened for breakfast. Rumor has it, they were closed last week because they had found rats in the kitchen. Not a bad week to be away
My body, though, seems to be a bit confused as to where in the world it is right now, which isn’t too surprising after being delayed for about 33 hours, so the whole journey back from Ottawa to Århus lasted from Sunday lunchtime to Tuesday 7pm (both local times). Funny though how random strangers meet when hit by an accident like a cancelled flight and being put in an airport hotel instead. I met a couple of poles studying in Stockholm and a canadian girl on her way to southern Sudan for MSF and we quite enjoyed our time just reading books in the hotel lobby. Certainly refreshing after spending several days being locked up in conference rooms with several hundred computer geeks
Anyway, back to the coffee machine and try to stay awake and maybe even do some work.

BSDCan 2008 is over again. As last year, I spent a few days in Montreal doing some siteseeing. Mark Linimon and Adrian Chadd joined me there, and some miles were walked and some beers were consumed. On Wednesday, we drove off to Ottawa. Somehow, Google Maps managed to send us to the wrong university at the exact opposite side of the city, so we had some more siteseeing there.
For the first two days, we held a FreeBSD DevSummit with talks in the mornings and informal meetings during the afternoons. I managed to corner some people about several issues that are much easier resolved in person (or even over a beer), which was one of my primary reasons of being there. The next two days was the conference itself with several interesting talks. Only a few people turned up for the FreeBSD ports BOF I held, but they did go home with some helpful hints.
After that, it was heading back, but that’s a separate post altogether…
Did I mention there are some pictures as well?

Already the day after returning from a 2 week vacation, Sander and a teammate René dropped by on their motorbikes from Holland. The weather was with us, except for one day with rain and even hail, which was averted by a warm cup of coffee in a local kro. We did some nice driving on some of the smaller country roads outside the city and managed to add over 600km on the counter. Not easy to take picture while driving, so y’all have to manage with this one.

I suddenly remember I still had some chipotle leftovers, so time to put them in a dish I learned from Jan Chrillesen some time ago: Pastel de Choclo (spanish).

Pastel de Choclo is a south american dish based on corn, so far all the recipes agree, after that it can be made in a variety of ways. I use the a variety with lots of beef and chicken. Oh and corn. But the best part of it, as Jan showed me, was to add some chipotle chili. The smoky flavours of the chipotle go well with the corn and the beef. So find yourself a recipe, there are plenty of them ot there, like this one, get some chipotle and enjoy!

PS: don’t forget to mash up the corn like I did this time, it won’t be a nice pie like it’s supposed to, but will still taste great.

No, I’m not referring to the world-famous album by Captain Tractor, and it’s not really a farm. However, I did just become the owner of a huge pile of bricks. So I guess you’ll all know what I’ll be doing the next couple of weeks…

Here’s some pictures from the estate agent:

It’s the details that matter. Yesterday, while flying with NWA from Amsterdam to Memphis, I found out that they changed the airphones plug in the new Airbus A330. No longer the funky two pin plug, but a normal 3,5mm jack plug. Of course, this is probably cheaper as it’s off-the-shelf, but this also means that you can now use your own headphones. So I could enjoy the movies with my nice $99 in-ear earplugs which also shut out all other noise. Thank you very much, Airbus! A fine minor detail that made those 9 hours much more comfortable.

After talking about doing it for a long, long time, last weekend Jens and I finally went on a road trip to Malmö, Sweden, to visit Morgan and Alfred, of course. Friday evening was quite a nice day for this 4 hour drive, but the trip back on Sunday was a bit on the wet side, if not to say that my boots still aren’t dry today, 2 days later. We enjoyed ourselves with some good swedish traditions, such as sausages and “kräftskiva” (wikipedia), with the obligatory snaps (I reall liked the Västerbotten cheese), and of course, it wouldn’t be us without a bit of nerdishness. Hopefully, next time will take less talking and more doing. Great trip all around!

Once upon a time, there was the Internet. The grass was green, the sun was shining, and everybody was happy. Along comes human nature. How much easier is it to make money by tricking people than taking an honest job? Yes, spam comes along. In the early days, mailservers were configured to just accept anything from anyone to anyone. This was quickly abused by spammers to use other peoples resources to send mail, so called open relays.

Next on scene: blacklists. Very effective in the beginning. I was one of the people to start the Open Relay DataBase, ordb.org (now defunct). In fact, some blacklists were so effective that the bad guys went on to use other ways to send their malware, and the ordb blacklist was no longer effective, and shut down.

Spammers have became so good in hiding their tracks, that blacklists aren’t effective anymore. They find a way to mix their rubbish with perfectly valid mail, and just refusing to accept mail from a specific IP-address will surely get you less spam, but you’ll also lose a lot of mail you did want to receive. Lots of other techniques exist to filter out spam from ham. Personally, I use a system based on Bayes’ statistics that “reads” my mails and from a statistical analysis of previous mails, which I told it I did or did not want, determines if it’s something I want. Also, there are a number of scoring techniques that assign a score to several criteria, this can be bayesian statistics or a number of blacklists or any other character of the message, and when that score gets over a certain threshold, the mail is refused or quarantined.

Now, why is SpamCop considered harmful? SpamCop has existed for a long time. It started by a comminity based blackist. Anybody in the community could submit an IP-address for blacklisting. This community is everybody with an internet connection. Do I trust everybody on the whole internet? Do I trust them to be knowledgeble enough on the techinical aspects of email filtering to determine which address should be listed? Most certainly not! SpamCop should never be used to refuse email. Maybe one might use it for scoring, but never should a SpamCop listing be used to refuse mail.

Today, I found out that SpamCop also added spamtraps. Even more, they are secret. A message to a friend of my got denied because of it and further examination showed that my “System has sent mail to SpamCop spam traps in the past week (spam traps are secret, no reports or evidence are provided by SpamCop)”. Aha! Evil me! But where is the evidence? Where did I go wrong? How do I fix it? Clearly, I am guilty unless proven innocent.

So I cannot repeat this enough. If you value your email, if you value your friends/collegues/etc. to be able to contact you, do not use SpamCop for blacklisting.

How the west was won…and how the war on terror was lost.

After my passport got stolen last week, the police were very helpful filling out the right forms for stolen identity papers (not the same papers for a burglary), even on a Saturday. After the weekend was over, it was time to figure out how to get a replacement. A call to the consulate in Århus. They were closed for vacation. Bugger. Call the embassy in Copenhagen. I could try the consulates in either Aalborg or Fredericia, both about 100km from Århus, one to the north, the other to the south. Let’s try Fredericia. A very friendly consul explained the procedure and made fun of the insanely detailed new rules for the picture. Remember, this is for your safety only!

He explained that he had a cooperation with a photografer in Fredericia and gave me the address and route. So, I took half a day off and off I went. Oh no! The photografer was closed for vacation as well. Well, go to the consulate and see what we can do about it. No other photografer in Fredericia knew the dutch rules or couldn’t even make pictures with a grey (not white, as the rest of the world) background. Remeber, this is for your safety only!

After a lot of calls, the consul couldn’t find out which photografer i Århus the consulate there was working with, because then I would have been able to go home and send the picture to him. Oh well, not much else to do then go to Odense, where the nearest consulate was, only another 60km. So, back into Fredericia for some lunch, time was running late, and onwards to Odense. Low and behold, the one guy at the photografer who knew about the dutch rules, had a day off! After some discussion, this wasn’t necessarily a problem. Another one could take the picture, and then when the other guy comes in tomorrow, he can edit it in PhotoShop so it fits the dutch rules. This now means, that the picture is taken, then electronically edited, then printed, send to the embassy, then scanned to be added to the very super extra secure chip on the passport. I’ll leave it up to the reader to determine how secure this new procedure is. But I almost forgot. This is for my safety only!

All in all, I just used a whole day and over 300 km (200 mi) to get a new picture for my passport, which I could have made myself in PhotoShop. Looking at the bright side, the weather was fantastic (expect for the wind and the occasional tunder and hail shower) for a motorbike ride. The fresh air hopefully has done me good.