Samuel Pepys (by alaric)

I'd always been vaguely aware that Phil Gyford, an interesting fellow I had the pleasure of meeting through my time with UpMyStreet.com nearly a decade ago, ran a web site that told you what the famous diarist Samuel Pepys was doing three hundred and forty three years ago today.

However, it wasn't until I saw his blog posting about it today that I realised just how much work he's put into it.

WOW.

Well worth a visit, even if you're not into history...

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! (by sarah)

It is the shiny new beginning of 2008 and we are hoping (desperatly) that it is going to be a bit better than 2007 and that we will soon be back in our own home with a shiny new kitchen and nice effective flood defenses etc...

For 2008 i am hoping to loose the last 2 stone of the pregnancy weight (I doubled in weight actually doubled during the pregnancy which wasnt good), we have budgeted in gym membership for me as I need to up my aerobic excersise. your probably all wondering why I dont just do some gardening or somehting but my joints etc... are unstable and I have to be very careful - loading the joints is bad so gentle swims are good digging wholes bad. I will also be starting physio therapy again so that I have some direction inwhat excersises are good for me and which ones will cripple me.

I also hope to actually star a hobby I've been dreaming off and trying half heartedly to do for a few years - I've been interested in it every since my dad carried me into my nans garden when I was a toddler to show me a lunar eclipse. During my GSCE's there was Hale Bop which had me late in to physics as I'd gone round my uncles to look through his telescope the night before.

I've also been reading Astronomy Now off and on since I was working at the museum on meteorites - I cant right now get back to those pieces of sky rock so I will be attempting to consol myself with star gazing. Our binoculars where distroyed in the flood unfortunatly and I dont have the money to buy any equipement at the moment but my bro has lent me his ickle telescope which I am looking forward to actually using. 2008 is going to be a year of astronomy for me 🙂

I shall also be consolidating my webstuff into a proper business of its own. I will have servers and we have nominet registration and as purple cloud is no longer James I can quite happily become a comercial ISP without competing with my friend. We will be doing hosting and domain registration I will also be building websites and setting up blogs, mailing lists and forums for people. I've had a few customers so far so am confident that if I actually advertise and stuff there should be a nice organic growth.

You may have noticed that since the flood the other blogs - Salaric and wigglypets have been a bit neglected - I hope to remedy this asap. So 2008 is also going to be the year of the pooter for Sarah.

Who knows I might even get that noval typed up and published 🙂

Here's hoping every body had a great night last night and an even better year to come!

HAPPY NEW YEAR from the family Snell-Pym 🙂

Excessive mail filtering (by alaric)

I've been taking advantage of some Christmas downtime to bring the Warhead mail system up to scratch.

We now have many layers of defence.

1. When a remote mail server tries to connect to us to send email, if they are a known blacklisted spammer or have a wrongly configured mail server, we reject them up front.
2. If they get through that, then unless they are a known good mail server, they are told to go away and come back later. Many spammers don't bother retrying mails if asked to, so this cuts out a lot of spam.
3. If they are a known good mail server or they do come back later to redeliver the email, then the message is accepted.
4. It's then sent through a content filter, which checks it for known bad signatures (viruses, scams, some spam, and phishing attempts). If it matches any, it's bounced back to the sender.
5. The content filter then runs it through SpamAssassin's battery of message scoring tests, which rate the chances of the message being spam. If it looks spammy, it's marked as looking spammy with ***SPAM*** in the subject line, but still delivered (since SpamAssassin's tests are statistical in nature, they can snag false positives)
6. Finally, the message is forwarded on, or delivered to a local mailbox, depending on the recipient.

From my existing statistics, I know that of about 15,000 messages a day, 13,000 are stopped by the first step alone (which is good, since blocking at this stage saves a whole lot of resources on our mail servers).

I'm looking forward to seeing how many of the surviving 2,000 make it past the rest of the filters 😉

the fatal error (by sarah)

I thought that as Al had been doing his own luandary here in London that it would be safe to entrust basically all the cloths I have with me to him to wash - there is an inbuilt washer dryer and I wanted nice fresh cloths for tonight.

As a pair of my cords where in there I asked that the tumble dryer be put on for a bit longer as they have a nasty tendency to stay damp. Several hours later I notice that the cloths are still tumbling. They are baked they are screwed - he also put tooo much stuff in so they all wrapped around each other baking the creases in.

So I now have no cloths to wear tonight - great start to the new year - I'm not sure if at least one pair of the trousers is actually salvagable.

Sigh - haven't decided if this is more of a disastor than last time he did something similiar :/

Not really sure what I am going to do about to night now at all :'( Oh and in writting this post I have just found another bug thing in the blog - so bare with us whilst it all resumes back to normal.

Making custom power cables (by alaric)

I take great pleasure in making custom power cables for things. It's very satisfying.

Lately, I've been having fun with this. Firstly, I was frustrated when visiting a datacentre that had only IEC power connectors, rather than UK standard 13A sockets - there was nowhere to plug my laptop in.

So, I've made a special adaptor cable:

Job done!

Nextly, at work, we have two 16A managed power distribution units, which have 24 outlets on them, each individually controllable via the network. They're lying around, surplus to requirements. We also have two 32A units in use in the racks - and more than 24 devices that need plugging into each.

Now, the outlets are mainly IEC C13 ten amp ones, but there's a small number of IEC C19 sixteen amp outlets, so we struck upon the crazy idea of attaching the 16A units to the 16A outlets on the 32A units. Thing is, the 16A units have 16A industrial plugs on them - not C20 plugs that go into C19 outlets.

So, once again, I made an adapter cable:

Well, two identical adapter cables, to be precise.

Lots of fun.