Installed a second PIII 500MHz processor in my Debian Linux box last night, so it's now running dual processors. It's still not up to scratch on memory or hard drive space yet, but those will come with time; I need to find an Adaptec RAID card so that I can mirror two 9.1Gb Ultra2 SCSI drives. So now I've just got to finish setting up the software on the box, shame I haven't a clue how to do it...
Finally got round to setting up SpamAssassin on my email account earlier today. The amount of spam I've been getting has gone up dramatically recently to around 70-80 spams a day. I've been meaning to set it up, but just never got round to it, so earlier this afternoon I took the plunge.
I had to firstly set up Qmail to redirect all my incoming mail through Procmail so that I could invoke SpamAssassin to do its work. I found a helpful .procmailrc script on the SpamAssassin Wiki, so it was quite painless. It seems to work as it's trapped a couple of spams since I set it up.
However, it's only trapped 2 of the 5 spams I've received, so I've obviously got a bit of tinkering to do to get it running better. Ideally I'd have Bayesian filtering working via bmf instead of SpamAssassin, but I don't have a big enough corpus of messages to train it with yet.
So now I'm actively collecting mail on the server so that I can build up a decent corpus to train my bmf filter to do a better job. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll have a big enough selection to give it a go and see what happens. Until then SpamAssassin will hopefully reduce the amount of crap I have to download.
I'm getting a bit pissed off as my blog is being targeted by spammers. Every morning I've got around five or six sexually explicit spam comments that I have to remove. There's nothing I can do short of banning all comments to the site. Currently I'm closing comment threads on messages that have been targeted and all new messages have comments turned off by default. When Moveable Type 3 comes out this shouldn't be a problem any more, but until then...
For some reason I decided to do a hundred meters of butterfly at the pool this morning. I'd forgotten what a knackering stroke this is and I was really struggling at the end. The first 25m was great; the second 25m was still pretty good as I was still breathing every other stroke. The third and fourth 25's were a nightmare with the breathing down to each stroke as I barely managed to lift me head out of the water.
Other than that I've just been plodding along with the swimming the last few weeks. I've still not joined the Triathlon club or done any running or cycling and really need to pull my finger out a bit. I'm glad I'm still doing the swimming though as it's getting me a good base to work from. If I want to do a Triathlon though, I'm going to have to do some proper structured training.
I've been using IDS as image display software for a few years now, until CSoft, my hoster, knackered PerlMagick last year. Since then it's not been working, until CSoft moved my account on to a machine running OpenBSD, which had PerlMagik installed on it. However, the version of ImageMagick and PerlMagick were below that required by the version of IDS I was running, so imaging my surprise when it all looked like it was working again.
I quickly uploaded some images and it soon became clear that it wasn't working correctly; in fact it was still completely knackered. So in a fit of pique I deleted IDS and started looking around for something else. Gallery was immediately out of the window, it's a terrible bit of software for what I wanted. So after a quick Google I came across Album, a very simple Perl script that produces some static html pages with thumbnails and intermediate images; it's not perfect but it will tide me over.
I decided after running Album a few times to see what it could do, that I could do better. It doesn't do paging, or show albums as icons and stuff like IDS did, so it's not all I want. So I've started to write my own application that will scan a directory hierarchy and produce a static html album. I'll post updates as I go along; hopefully this will be one project that I actually finish as I could really use it.
Go back out in the garden this weekend and finished the work I started last week. I think the people at the garden centre think I'm mad I went three times to get all the stuff I needed, the top soil was too heavy to take with everything else. So I finished my new flower/shrub bed, weeded and mulched the existing flower bed and weeded, planted and mulched some flowers on Karen's side of the garden.
So I've now got the Buddleia I've always wanted (along with the Magnolia tree Karen gave me from my Christmas), which has been planted with some Hebe's and a load of perennial's. The hope is the evergreen shrubs will provide some colour and shape in winter while the perennials will do the honours during the summer.
I've still to get my hands on a particular Sedum which is very attractive to butterflies, but the plants I've put in should attract a wide range of wildlife which is good. I even planted some Borage, which is loved by bees, so hopefully this year will see an increase in the wildlife visiting the garden.
I've still got quite a bit to do on my side of the garden with another bed to prepare and plant. I can't afford it until after the wedding though, not unless I get a bonus or something at work. I've planted some seed as well this weekend that should provide the evergreen foliage for the new bed, so I'd like to get it all done before the end of the year, but we'll just have top wait and see.
While Karen's away I took the opportunity to nip to the cinema last night to the late showing of Touching the Void. It's a mountaineering tale of human endurance against the odds. I read the book many years ago when I was working in an outdoor shop, so I knew the story. If you've seen the movie but not read the book, then you have to read it, it's an amazing tail and really well written.
I was quite impressed by the movie and totally unimpressed be the foreign bint sitting near me who kept on playing with her phone; someone people have no idea. The film left me feeling totally energised and wanting to just drive and find some mountains to climb. I really miss going mountaineering, Cambridgeshire is just too flat. However, I don't think I'm going to have the time or the money until after the wedding to do any.
Karen has gone to San Diego for a week, she' back next Thursday afternoon, so I'm home alone. Got loads to do, so we'll just see what happens; hopefully not to many pokes of chips from the local chippie...
I was feeling at a bit of a loose end today and really wanted to just get on a do something, so I went out into the garden to start getting it up to scratch for later this summer. To start with I chopped down our holly tree as it was basically dead and looked terrible. I've left a good meter and a half of trunk as I plan to turn it into a bird table when I've got time.
While doing the tree, it started to rain a bit, but the mood I was in I didn't care and just got a bit wet. This really fired me up, so I removed some of the weed proof fabric that's been covering a half finished bed I started last year and cracked on with getting it finished. So it was off to the garden centre to buy some organic soil improver and some top soil.
I managed to get the soil improver down and realised that I'd need more top soil; since it was getting dark I decided to leave it and finish it later. So I've now started a new bed and I've gone all green fingered again, so I'm hoping I'll be able to get into the garden again next weekend to finish it.
Went to see Lost in Translation at the cinema last night after work. Both Karen and I thought it was a good film, but we weren't sure if it lived up to all the hype that it got in the run up to the Oscars. Karen especially thought that she didn't get it and to a certain point I agree with her, however, Karen's been to Tokyo, so she should get it more than me. I'd say it's worth going to see though.
