A spam quandary

Personal, Tech

At the moment I make use of Exim’s sender verification callout feature which tries to work out whether the (supposed) sender’s email address given in the HELO is legitimate or not. For this is connects to the remote mail server and tried to do a RCPT TO for that email address. If it can’t find a mail server or gets rebuffed then the email address is rubbish and Exim rejects the mail even before it gets accepted. This cuts down on a huge volume of mail and also stops the "drive by" spamming of innocent third parties that might get an NDR.

The problem with this is that people are idiots. Most often an automated system (typically shopping carts it seems) try to send as apache@domain which is not a valid address on that system, rather than myshop@domain which probably is. Sometimes these systems set the reply-to header in the message, but this isn’t visible in the envelope.

This is causing me an annoyance. On the one hand, if I leave it on, I seem to end up missing semi-important mail (even FON can’t get it right it seems). On the other, if I disable it I end up receiving a deluge of junk mail (ok, I have spam assassin to sort it for me, but it’s still annoying to have to spend money on the bandwidth and storage).

It would be nice if I could start blocking on SURBLs and RHBLs natively with Exim.

Grrrr…

 

Talk Talk arseholes

Personal, Random

I just got cold called by someone from Talk Talk broadband trying to flog me ADSL. My home number has been on the the TPS for well over a year which legally requires companies not to make marketing calls to me. It takes a maximum of 28 days for it to take effect, and I’ve never had one until tonight.

What’s made me particularly angry is that I queried why I was being called as my number is on the TPS. The lady on the phone demanded to know what my "registration number" was and they’d then stop calling me.

I stated that this wasn’t how the TPS worked to which the lady said that without a "registration number" she didn’t believe that I was on a do not call list. I was particularly angry at this remark and demanded to speak to her supervisor. She then hung up.

 Arseholes. Thank $deity for online complaints forms…

Runometer

Personal, Running, Sport, Tech

OK, so I’ve uploaded a couple of runs now…

I like it, and I like the fact that there’s a growng community behind with the coders actively seeking out improvements. I’m particularly looking forward to the ability to plot your speeds on top of the map.

They also have a nice widget, so I can show you my last run:

Anyone else who runs round Greenland Quay want to join some sort of league? I’m rubbish and need the motivation ;)

New Nike+ running site

Personal, Running, Sport, Tech

I’m a bit of a fan of my Nike+iPod system (and the sexy lycra running gear to match, but that’s another matter…) but the only problem I’ve found is that you’re forced into using the Nike running website to store your data and graph your runs.

Firstly the Nike running site is a bit slow and flakey at the best of times, and second, what happens if they suddenly decide to do away with it? All my data is lost forever.

No longer! Some cunning soles have reverse engineered the file format the iPod stores your run data in and also integrated it with a GMaps pedometer stylee thing. You can even share your runs out with others to find and have a go at.

It’s a bit beta and although I haven’t tried it yet, it promises lots. I shall let you know how I get on.

 http://runometer.com

[Via http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/24/runometer-maps-your-nike-ipod-data-to-running-routes/]

WinTV Nova-T USB2 and Vista

Tech

I posted a while back about the troubles I’d been having with my Hauppauge DVB TV card. Hauppuage don’t have any drivers that work with hyperthreaded and dual core CPUs; Vista will blue screen shortly after starting to use the TV card.

The Microsoft supplied drivers that get installed from Windows Update when you plug the card in are reliable but non functional (they tune the channels 1mHz out).

There is a workaround though!

In the registry, search for the string "Hauppauge Nova-USB2-T DVB-T Adapter" under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet.

You should find an entry similar to the screenshot below in the classes.

Under one of the values (mine was 008, but yours could be 007 or similar), there’ll be two subkeys, "Capabilities" and "DriverData".

In "DriverData" create two new DWORDs, with these decimal values:

– TunerRemap = 0
– UseFreqOffsetDVBT = 167

You’ll probably need to restart and may even need to rescan the channels in Media Center (although I didn’t need to).

The drivers do vaguely work, mine suffer from a bit of stutter, crackly audio and don’t survive a sleep. But hey :) One last thing, these instructions only apply to the Microsoft/Windows Update supplied driver. You’ll need to clean off any Hauppuage ones if you’ve installed them.

O2 voicemail improvements

Personal, Tech

O2 have just told me through our corporate provider that they’ve made some changes to the 901 voicemail service. In particular, you can now have the voicemail notification flag set on your phone, rather than a text or phone call.

I remember having this on Orange years back and it was really neat. I’ve just enabled it on both my work and personal phones and it works a treat.

Here’s the full list of updates:

• Time and date after each message: You can choose to have the time and date that your messages were received played after each message
• On-screen voicemail notification: You can choose to be notified with the on-screen Voicemail symbol and screen text when you receive a new message
• Mailbox full notification: You will now be notified with a text when your voicemail box is full
• Simplified call return feature: All you need to do is press 5 and you’ll be connected. (Previously you had to press three keys.)
• Re-record: Callers who are diverted to voicemail will be offered the option to listen to and re-record their message
• Temporary greeting: You can now record a temporary greeting and like email you’ll be asked if you want to switch it off when you access voicemail

Living with Vista – part 2: more niggles

Personal, Random, Tech

I promise I’ll write up some of the good things about Vista at some point, but I have to get the bad stuff out of the way first. These are going to seem a bit nit-picky, but I think they’re pretty symptomatic of what the regular user’s going to experience once they get their mits on Vista at the end of the month. Don’t forget that Vista Ultimate will set you back £250 – for that kind of money I expect it to work.

Firstly, I have a Microsoft keyboard with an integrated fingerprint reader. Not for any sense of security (we all know how rubbish they are), but for convenience – it makes logging on and signing into web sites and email a lot easier. I was pretty pleased to see that Microsoft have a proper release of the "DigitalPersona" software available for download for Vista. Logging on (initially) worked just fine with the reader, however if I locked the screen and then tried to unlock it again by fingerprint, I’d just get an error "invalid username or password" (regular password worked fine). Great.

I could *just* about deal with this, however I started to find that when I was using IE7, it would crash on exit with an error about ntdll.dll and then decide to restart itself. I was trying to close IE in the first place, so I’d quit it and it would crash again, and again, and again… I found some posts where other people had had similar problems, and lo, the problem was caused by MS’s DigitalPersona software. Off to the junk it went and the problems went away.

This is pretty amazing – a Microsoft produced product, running on their flagship OS with one of their premium bits of hardware. And it doesn’t work. What does this say about their quality control and testing?

Next, yet another Microsoft mess. I have a copy of Vista Ultimate (albeit from MSDN, but still not cheap) – I like Media Centre. I love the design, the fancy graphics, the fact it can play and record TV… Perfect! I have a Hauppauge Nova-T USB2 which is touted to have drivers in the box for Vista. I plugged it in, Vista found the drivers and away I went.

I started Media Centre and started scanning for TV channels and it found all the regular ones I’d expect, except I couldn’t watch any of them. Well, apart from some shitty shopping channels which might as well be nothing. I couldn’t understand – with digital TV, if it finds the name of the channel during the scan you can be pretty sure it’ll be able to view it. I ran up TV on an XP box and it worked fine, so I doubted it was the aerial.

It transpires that the Microsoft supplied drivers tune themselves to the wrong frequency – it’s only off by 1mHz, but it’s enough to make it unusable. The beta drivers from Hauppauge themselves cause Vista to bluescreen too… You can’t blame Microsoft for Hauppauge’s rubbish betas, but you can blame them for shipping wonky drivers in the first place.

If I’m an average user, I’m going to expect things to "just work". When I plug something in and it appears to work but then later transpires not to, I’m going to be pretty pissed. I’m not going to want to be trawling dodgy hardware manufacturer’s forums in the vain hope of finding some broken beta driver from a slow FTP site that turns out to make my lovely new Vista PC more unstable than Windows ME!

Don’t even get me started on the shocking state of Vista technical documentation. Even if it does exist, it’s poorly written, wrong or just plain contradictory. Want to phone them up and get help? Well, you can’t because Vista "isn’t released yet", not even if you throw money at them (which currently stands at £200 per incident).

Well, I suppose it’s no worse than open source ;)

Next time – some good things to say!

Case modding

Personal, Random, Tech

It’s pretty weird and to some it will be a complete waste of time: I present my SGI O2 case mod – I’ve stuffed a Core 2 Duo Vista machine inside the case of a mid-90s vintage workstation.

As it’s quite a major undertaking, I’ve written up its own dedicated page.

Gallery updated

Personal, Photography, Tech

I’ve switched to using Gallery2 instead of Coppermine for my gallery software – it’s a lot easier to create custom themes and to upload items. I think I’ve updated all the pictures used in the blog, but there’ll still be external links that point to the wrong place…

Let me know if you think anything’s broken or you can’t find what you’re looking for!