barnson.org Half-baked opinions, served lukewarm.

Today marks the first day I've ever received spam to my "matthew" address at barnson.org! I've received it to numerous other addresses on the barnson.org domain, but for a weblog in operation for over a year, with an easily-guessable and abundantly available address in various places on my site, well, this tells me that if you're cautious about where your email address goes aside from your personal domain, you can prevent a lot of spam that way. Obviously not a cure-all, though, and since I'm on one person's list now, I expect to soon be on a ton.

In the interest of science, here's the Postfix transaction log (with my email address defanged, because I'd rather my email address not be too-easily harvested. But I've left theirs intact, you know...)

Today I read a beautiful metaphor on one of my message boards. I've revised it a good deal, and present it to you here:

Most people have seen Disney's Toy Story. A few years ago I watched the movie (again) and felt compelled by Buzz Lightyear's character. As you may recall, Buzz was charismatic, confident and even charming. He believed himself to be an authentic space ranger, together with wings and a laser that could stun and even kill opponents. He believed he was an important member of a force fighting against a cosmic foe bent on destroying the universe.

Received this in my mail today; author unknown. Laughs unbearable! You probably have to live in Utah to get it...

In celebration of Barbie's 40th birthday, Mattel has created a Mormon Barbie for the folks in Utah. The most popular, Celestial Barbie, comes with 8.4 children. She wears a mid-calf flower print Laura Ashley dress with conservative flats (no heels), a bow in her flowing shoulder-length hair, with puffy bangs.
Barbie wears a permanent smile and comes with her own bread making machine, store of wheat, list of ways to feed a family of 12 on less than $200 a week, casserole recipes, and year's supply of green Jell-O.

If you're a programmer, you'll probably get this cartoon. If you aren't, good luck to you:

http://www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/2003/10/03/

If you have a spare 45 to 60 minutes today, read the latest essay over at ejectejecteject.com. The only problem I ever have with Bill's work is that, well, he goes on for a really, really long time. His skills as an essayist are improving, but growing more wordy at the same time :)

The topic of this essay is America's use of "The God Button", as well as an overall look at historical use of power, and the maturity of the human race in dealing with it.

A far-ranging essay.

A co-worker wondered aloud the other day, after compiling a Linux kernel, how he could add drivers without re-compiling the entire kernel. I wasn't sure how to do it at the time.

Now I am!

Now, I realize there's a bit of a language barrier, but the twisted logic of this middle eastern soldier takes the cake.

My favorite part of the rant to American reporters:

The American people want to destroy the Muslim, want to force on us their values. I cannot be a Muslim, that's the whole problem between me and the American people. If I am a Muslim, then I am a terrorist and I am not a terrorist.

Original Article available Here.

I have two words to say. And the first one is a male bovine.

It's nice to see that Bugzilla is getting multi-language support; in this case, as of October 1 2003, it can handle Korean competently. I haven't been active in the project for several years now, other than very rarely submitting a documentation fix. However, they've been working on multi-lingual support now for quite some time, and now you can run Bugzilla in more languages than I can pronounce!

As many of you know, I'm out of a job here by October 31, 2003. That looks much, much closer on this side of September than it did before! That's only 29 days away. My goal is to walk onto a new job Nov 3, 2003. Here's hoping. And I'm working my butt off to get there :)

Anyway, one of my final projects here is to get some LDAP integration into our Postfix gateway so people won't have to muck so much with configuration files.

I'll be experimenting with different themes for barnson.org over the next few days, as I try to incorporate Jon Brusco's graphics, and correct a whole bunch of HTML problems with the theme I'm using, called "polder".

"Polder" is really cool, handles stuff in a really nifty way, but unfortunately just doesn't adhere to HTML standards well. I'm a big fan of validating my HTML, and looking at the number of changes I'd have to make to polder to make it valid transitional HTML is just exhausting, so I'll probably be using another theme as a basis to create mine.