...making Linux just a little more fun!
Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Quoting Ciara ([email protected]):
> You received this newsletter because you expressed interest in our > products and services.
Well, having gotten mailing lists back online, I'm now motivated to attempt to also reconstruct my former antispam regime. ;->
Until I do, don't be surprised to see this mailing list positively wilt under the barrage of incoming spam, because my former defences just aren't here, yet.
Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]
2009/6/3 Rick Moen <[email protected]>:
> Quoting Ciara ([email protected]): > >> You received this newsletter because you expressed interest in our >> products and services. > > Well, having gotten mailing lists back online, I'm now motivated to > attempt to also reconstruct my former antispam regime. ;-> > > Until I do, don't be surprised to see this mailing list positively wilt > under the barrage of incoming spam, because my former defences just > aren't here, yet. >
I'm just happy to see it back in any shape, and I didn't see the original anyway.
On a spam related note, what is the big deal about Canadian
Pharmacies? I feel like I'm out of the loop, not knowing what's so
special about them, when so many hundreds of spammers seem to 
Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Quoting Jimmy O'Regan ([email protected]):
> I'm just happy to see it back in any shape, and I didn't see the > original anyway.
Jimmy! Good to see you on here. We have some work to do, and some organising, to make LG an ongoing concern rather than a big burden that lands fully on Ben's shoulders. I'll be forwarding to this mailing list the recent announcement of that need.
I've already personally shouldered part of the burden, but we need more people to take on parts of the ongoing tasks, and they need to be people who're serious about it.
Who's with me?
> On a spam related note, what is the big deal about Canadian > Pharmacies? I feel like I'm out of the loop, not knowing what's so > special about them, when so many hundreds of spammers seem to
I can only speculate that it might have something to do with Canada being less infested by the spirit of the War on Some Drugs that still remains underway south of its border -- and also is famously a source of much cheaper supplies of common pharmaceuticals.
On the first point: Canadian chemists ("pharmacies", "drug stores") make available actually effective analgesics without prescription, e.g., cough syrup with codeine, acetaminophen with codeine. Even the milder opiates are strictly controlled at USA retailers. Hydrocodone might also available in that way, though I really don't know for sure.
However, I believe it's really the availability of cheaper prescription medicines from licensed Internet pharmacy outfits that's truly driving the Canadian business, as US (and some other countries') customers slowly get wind of the fact that they're paying artifically elevated prices at home.
Recent history, Chez Moen:
My Internet server, linuxmafia.com AKA lists.linuxgazette.net, suffered a catastrophic hardware failure in mid-April. There was a very powerful wind storm here in the San Francisco Bay Area. During the middle of that, an AC (mains) power spike hit my server, burning out the motherboard, all but one stick of RAM, the power supply unit, and all hard drives. I spent a few hours (upon getting home from work) attempting to get to the data, eventually gave up, and deployed a spare machine as the new linuxmafia.com, later that evening. I then spent some time resurrecting (most) services.
I also spent a couple of days fetching the most recent offsite data backup back across the Internet, so that I could update the older snapshot of that data on the (now-promoted) spare machine. To my distress, I found that that data, sent up to a Solaris "slice" virtual host in a data centre via rsync over ssh, was not stored with the needed owner/group metadata (probably an inevitable consequence of not being about to conduct the rsync transfer as root) -- necessitating a lot of painful work correcting ownership.
By an unfortunate coincidence, hard on the heels of the server downtime came unavoidable personal downtime. Owing to a life-threatening, serious illness that I was fortunate to have diagnosed in December 2008, in time to get effective curative treatment, I went into hospital on Thursday, April 30th for major surgery -- followed by a week as an inpatient, before they would even let me out, at all. I won't be explicit in this space about the nature of the issue, but suffice it to say that I've had a very narrow escape from something that would otherwise have killed me very painfully, a few years from now. The surgery was almost 100% successful in removing the threat, though I am going to need followup radiation therapy as a "mopping up" measure.
The after-effects of the surgery, meanwhile, left me a bit tired and (again, skipping some details) prone to being unable to sleep an entire night without having to get up numerous times -- and thus, short on sleep during the day, most days. The part of my anatomy that had to have the necessary excison is, fortunately, healing, and I'm doing a great deal better all the time -- while also being enormously happy to be alive and relatively well.
Because of the sleep-deficit and accumulated fatigue, and other things I've needed to attend to, I've admittedly been a little slow to fix the remaining glitches in my replacement Internet server software -- which is why I didn't take the needed time and concentrated effort to find and scotch the broken connection between Mailman and Exim (my MTA) until today.
By the way: My wife Deirdre was far more nervous than I was, about my surgery and subsequent recovery. To make her laugh, a week or so before my operation, I wrote the following example of a likeable but difficult form of light verse called "double dactyl":
Higgledy-piggledy, Cytopathology Showed up a gland that had Thrown me some curves.
Carcinocentrical Medical lit'rature Sends methods to yank flesh That gets on my nerves.
(See also .signature block.)
-- Cheers, Híggledy-pìggledy / XML programmers Rick Moen Try to escape those / I-eighteen-N woes; [email protected] Incontrovertibly / What we need more of is McQ! (4x80) Unicode weenies and / François Yergeaus.
Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]
2009/6/4 Rick Moen <[email protected]>:
> Quoting Jimmy O'Regan ([email protected]): > >> I'm just happy to see it back in any shape, and I didn't see the >> original anyway. > > Jimmy! Good to see you on here. We have some work to do, and some > organising, to make LG an ongoing concern rather than a big burden > that lands fully on Ben's shoulders. I'll be forwarding to this > mailing list the recent announcement of that need. > > I've already personally shouldered part of the burden, but we need > more people to take on parts of the ongoing tasks, and they need > to be people who're serious about it. > > Who's with me? >
I've been following the discussion on the Yahoo group, hit reply a few times, and all I could come up with was: ' ... '
I've got a long list of projects and commitments, so my best solution for right now is to ask my GSoC student to write an article (he agreed, enthusiastically), that I'll proofread. I'm kicking myself that I didn't think to ask him earlier - he's a never-sleeping coding machine with the enthusiasm of a puppy in a hotdog factory.
>> On a spam related note, what is the big deal about Canadian >> Pharmacies? I feel like I'm out of the loop, not knowing what's so >> special about them, when so many hundreds of spammers seem to
Ah. If I recall the movies of my teenage years in the 90s, not without reason.
> Hydrocodone might > also available in that way, though I really don't know for sure. > > However, I believe it's really the availability of cheaper prescription > medicines from licensed Internet pharmacy outfits that's truly driving > the Canadian business, as US (and some other countries') customers > slowly get wind of the fact that they're paying artifically elevated > prices at home.
Can't they just check the receipt, like everyone else?
> > Recent history, Chez Moen: > > My Internet server, linuxmafia.com AKA lists.linuxgazette.net, suffered > a catastrophic hardware failure in mid-April. There was a very powerful > wind storm here in the San Francisco Bay Area. During the middle of > that, an AC (mains) power spike hit my server, burning out the > motherboard, all but one stick of RAM, the power supply unit, and > all hard drives. I spent a few hours (upon getting home from work) > attempting to get to the data, eventually gave up, and deployed a > spare machine as the new linuxmafia.com, later that evening. I > then spent some time resurrecting (most) services. > > I also spent a couple of days fetching the most recent offsite data > backup back across the Internet, so that I could update the older > snapshot of that data on the (now-promoted) spare machine. To my > distress, I found that that data, sent up to a Solaris "slice" virtual > host in a data centre via rsync over ssh, was not stored with the > needed owner/group metadata (probably an inevitable consequence of > not being about to conduct the rsync transfer as root) -- necessitating > a lot of painful work correcting ownership. > > By an unfortunate coincidence, hard on the heels of the server downtime > came unavoidable personal downtime. Owing to a life-threatening, > serious illness that I was fortunate to have diagnosed in December 2008, > in time to get effective curative treatment, I went into hospital on > Thursday, April 30th for major surgery -- followed by a week as an > inpatient, before they would even let me out, at all. I won't be > explicit in this space about the nature of the issue, but suffice it to > say that I've had a very narrow escape from something that would > otherwise have killed me very painfully, a few years from now. > The surgery was almost 100% successful in removing the threat, though I > am going to need followup radiation therapy as a "mopping up" measure. >
I'm glad to hear that they caught it. I hope you get through radiotherapy quickly and successfully.
> The after-effects of the surgery, meanwhile, left me a bit tired and > (again, skipping some details) prone to being unable to sleep an entire > night without having to get up numerous times -- and thus, short on > sleep during the day, most days. The part of my anatomy that had to > have the necessary excison is, fortunately, healing, and I'm doing a > great deal better all the time -- while also being enormously happy to > be alive and relatively well. >
Good to hear.
> Because of the sleep-deficit and accumulated fatigue, and other things > I've needed to attend to, I've admittedly been a little slow to fix the > remaining glitches in my replacement Internet server software -- which > is why I didn't take the needed time and concentrated effort to find and > scotch the broken connection between Mailman and Exim (my MTA) until > today. > > By the way: My wife Deirdre was far more nervous than I was, about my > surgery and subsequent recovery. To make her laugh, a week or so > before my operation, I wrote the following example of a likeable but > difficult form of light verse called "double dactyl": >
'Laughter is the best medicine' is not only a cliché, it has also been scientifically verified. Which is probably the most fun a medical researcher could ever have hoped for.
> Higgledy-piggledy, > Cytopathology > Showed up a gland that had > Thrown me some curves. > > Carcinocentrical > Medical lit'rature > Sends methods to yank flesh > That gets on my nerves. > > (See also .signature block.) > > -- > Cheers, Híggledy-pìggledy / XML programmers > Rick Moen Try to escape those / I-eighteen-N woes; > [email protected] Incontrovertibly / What we need more of is > McQ! (4x80) Unicode weenies and / François Yergeaus.
Aw hey! I resemble that remark: 5.9m lines of XML changed in 17 months, according to ohloh.net's laughable metrics, which obviously seem to think that svn move and restore operations count as an edit (I must be the only person at my project to have read the SVN manual - either that, or they leave me to do the fixups as a punishment, because I keep evangelising git).
René Pfeiffer [lynx at luchs.at]
--===============1271112389== Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="GRPZ8SYKNexpdSJ7" Content-Disposition: inline
--GRPZ8SYKNexpdSJ7 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-15 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Jun 03, 2009 at 1635 -0700, Rick Moen appeared and said:
> [...] > I've already personally shouldered part of the burden, but we need=20 > more people to take on parts of the ongoing tasks, and they need > to be people who're serious about it. =20 >=20 > Who's with me?
I am still interested in writing and proofing articles. I also keep prodding my students every now and then to write an article.
Best, René.
--GRPZ8SYKNexpdSJ7 Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQFKJ5eMcjShfQp7h4YRAk8lAJ9cW6O+REb821XjLbOmZz1T9+o2IwCglBPp tpY/wcQ34cY+mQaYZkaJ21k= =7Lg7 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--GRPZ8SYKNexpdSJ7--
--===============1271112389== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline
--===============1271112389==--
Robos [robos at muon.de]
Am 04.06.2009 11:44, schrieb René Pfeiffer:
> On Jun 03, 2009 at 1635 -0700, Rick Moen appeared and said: >> [...] >> I've already personally shouldered part of the burden, but we need >> more people to take on parts of the ongoing tasks, and they need >> to be people who're serious about it. >> >> Who's with me? > > I am still interested in writing and proofing articles. I also keep > prodding my students every now and then to write an article.
Hi folks, can someone please explain to me why this topic is under the subject of "Find me good clinic, plz" which I would consider to be spam content??!? Regards Udo 'robos' Puetz
> Best, > René.
René Pfeiffer [lynx at luchs.at]
--===============0629000316== Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="tThc/1wpZn/ma/RB" Content-Disposition: inline
--tThc/1wpZn/ma/RB Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-15 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Jun 07, 2009 at 2034 +0200, Robos appeared and said:
> Am 04.06.2009 11:44, schrieb René Pfeiffer: >> On Jun 03, 2009 at 1635 -0700, Rick Moen appeared and said: >>> [...] >>> >>> Who's with me? >> >> I am still interested in writing and proofing articles. I also keep >> prodding my students every now and then to write an article. > > Hi folks, > can someone please explain to me why this topic is under the subject of ==20
> "Find me good clinic, plz" which I would consider to be spam content??!?
Yes, it's because Rick commented a spam email that was sent to TAG, and in his comment he asked "Who's with me?" (meaning who is with the team that wants to do something for the LG).
,
René.
--=20 )\._.,--....,'``. fL Let GNU/Linux work for you while you take a nap. /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. R. Pfeiffer <lynx at luchs.at> + http://web.luchs= =2Eat/ `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' - System administration + Consulting + Teaching - Got mail delivery problems? http://web.luchs.at/information/blockedmail.php
--tThc/1wpZn/ma/RB Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQFKLBI7cjShfQp7h4YRAs4eAJ942P5fTV7zQnBqmMLQuRm/Uj0thQCdGUTr aeLaXsgZnUH+X2BkWK39uxE= =k3kb -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--tThc/1wpZn/ma/RB--
--===============0629000316== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline
--===============0629000316==--