the-shrike.net

This has been an interesting viewing for this rainy evening.
It’s just 15minutes long, and I think it’s worth watching, very clever.

2.0 Expo 2008: Clay Shirky

If you’re interested, the relevant discussion on reddit is here.

(Source: Here)

Ok, I’m a magazine addicted, we all know that.
Basically I’m able to jump a full meal if I’m out, starving but with just 5£ left and a magazine I like out with the new monthly issue still to be bought: consider it incredible, but I’ll avoid buying a sandwich and I’ll enter WHSmith instead :p
I read a lot of things in various formats: blogs, websites, books, magazines, webzines, fanzines, newsgroups, forums… whatever there’s around with words on/in it, it’s something I like to take a peak at, but while half of the things listed before come free as in beer, books and magazines are expenses that actually have an impact on my daily life. Not a huge one, but I actually restrain myself from visiting amazon too often (at my looking too long and never shortening wishlist makes me sad :p) and I usually cross the street when I come across a Waterstone shop or a WHSmith one… but it’s not always something I can resist. And when this happens, my bank account is not happy!
Anyway, my magazine addiction has a new item to list now. In addition to Scientific American, NewScientist, Airliner World and Prospect Magazine I’ve (finally) given up and I started buying Wired. My geek side is in giggling and enjoying every single word, might as well become my favourite reading of all the time.
The problem is: will I ever be able to get more geekier that I am now? ;)

18:56:55 curson:> “hey baby, apprezzo il tuo charset… ti andrebbe di uscire con me?”

translation:
18:56:55 curson:> “hey baby, I like your charset… would you like to go out with me?”

Today.
Me.
On IRC.

…there are moments when I scare my own self to death :p

While an awulf lot of things are changing all around me, and in my life (most of them in a nice way, indeed) a lot of the good old habits are just as true and real as they used to be.

Having moved to London, all I have with me right now is the strictly necessary to survive, so even if in my mind the equation wasn’t exactly like that, at the time I packed my bags apparently the final decision was to give priority to clothes against books ad DVDs. Of course, that doesn’t mean at all my reader (or watcher) side is sleeping or dead, quite the contrary. Understanding the inevitable fact that a monthly rent is a fixed expense that can definitely be quite heavy on someone’s bank account, doesn’t mean that you’ll stop yourself buying books&DVDs neither, especially when you have new empty shelves in your room ;)

This to say, buy me books!
Anyway, being 5:40 in the night I quite lost myself, but all the point of this was to introduce a useful customization for all you Opera users out there.
Adding something like this:

[Search Engine 47]
Name=Amazon.co.uk ISBN
Verbtext=0
URL=http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/%s
Query=
Key=ai
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Encoding=iso-8859-1
Search Type=0
Position=-1
Nameid=0
Deleted=0

to your search.ini (for me located in /home/curson/.opera/search.ini) or by editing directly the new search from your Tools > Preference > Search Opera menu, you’ll be able to search for a book on Amazon.co.uk (I’m quite sure it works in a pretty similar way for any other International Amazon website) using it’s ISBN number. Quite useful if you want to be sure you’re looking at a particular edition, or if you don’t want to end up buying something with a similar name but completly different from what you’re looking for.
A very similar search can be created to just look for a title or author (or just about everything…) by using http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/&keywords=%s&index=blended this code as the URL/address field. Note that there %s is the search variable you’re going to type in Opera address bar after the relative Search Key (for the ISBN example above, that Search Key was ai, but you can decide whatever you like as long as unique among your other customized searches).

That’s it, I’m still sleepless, but with a more efficient Opera browser at my disposal to spend my sleepless nights looking for effective way to spend my money :)

I just discovered that I can log-in to blogger.com to comment on a blog hosted there (and to create a personal profile, blog, whatever…) using my google account login&password.
That’s probably something not new, but definitely a surprise for me.

I am not sure if I like that: the good old google is day by day becoming just like something scary in its outstanding run to conquer every corner of the Internet. Feels like someone is watching ;p

Oh god what have I just done.
I’ve failed again… after resisting so many years I’ve done it again: I’ve reinstalled a Tetrinet client… please help me: the addiction is back!

My mail configuration relies on SpamBouncer to deal with spam problem. It works well, and I usually keep spam under control, with very little of false positives and what should be blocked… blocked.
Thanks to Antonio Fragola and his Procmail section (warning: it’s all in Italian) of an How-To he wrote I discovered the joy of using a little Perl script in order to strip the FROM: field of incoming spam messages and add it to a .alwaysblock file used by SpamBouncer as a black list.
The addysort file is simple:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wn
# Extract email addres from the "From:" field
unless (/\]+)/, "\n"; }

and to use it all that you need to do is save it, make it executable, and create a macro (or whatever your mail client has…) to call for it.
In my .muttrc file for mutt I call it with ESC-K with these binds:

macro index "\ek" "| formail -x From: | addysort >> ~/mail/.pm/black.lst\n"
macro pager "\ek" "| formail -x From: | addysort >> ~/mail/.pm/black.lst\n"

Of course being ~/mail/.pm/black.lst my blacklist file.

But let’s come to the point: the addresses are listed fully in the black.lst, which means they’re in the form something@somewere.whatever. This of course will help blocking all further email from that address, but with spam most of the time you’ll end up having addresses like:

ashdgfjg@ispam.net
djgfhsdgfsd@ispam.net
truty47@ispam.net

Same domain with different faked username.
What I usually have done manually in the past year was to edit the file in vim, delete the username@ part with a regexp and save it. Of course that is something that works well, but that is also quite annoying.
So yesterday I came out with a small bash script that uses a few (actually three) perl commands to clean up my black.lst file as I like it: only a list of domains.xx[¹].

#!/bin/bash
#
# Check and clean black.lst file from SpamBouncer.

# Files locations.
BL=/home/curson/mail/.pm/black.lst
BLTEMP=/home/curson/mail/.pm/black.lst.temp

# This will strip the username from the address leaving
# only the domain.
perl -i -p -e 's/[0-9A-Za-z_\.]*@//gi' $BL

# This will strip domain names that could have been
# inserted into the black list erroneously due to faked
# FROM: fields. They're just examples of some of the
# common fake I get, and which I'd still like to receive
# mail from ;)
perl -i -p -e 's/^gmail\.com\n|^yahoo.+\n|^email\.it\n//gi' $BL

# This will strip out all double recurrencies in the file.
# It's 100% unuseful to have the same domain listed
# twice.
perl -ne 'print unless $a{$_}++' $BL > $BLTEMP | mv $BLTEMP $BL

# Now let's do a backup of the black.lst file.
cp $BL /home/curson/mail/.pm/black.lst.backup


Save it, make it executable and write a small cron job and live happy! :)

Continue reading…

My passion for IRC is quite old. I came on-line for the first time in December 1994 with my 14600 baud modem, and since then I spent a lot of time on the various IRC networks around: IRCnet, QuakeNet, AzzurraNet, DalNET and EFnet.
I’m still on two of them quite in a stable way (EFnet & AzzurraNet) and I really still like the IRC world. It’s not just a matter of old feelings, I really still love it as one of the funniest and most interesting expression of Internet.

Speaking about funny and weird expression IRC-related, I stumbled across this amazing video.
Apparentrly, someone has dedicated a Trance song (ok, that’s not my kind, but I’m very open towards musical genres) to an IRC Bot called Anna. The video is something you have to see, it’s a really a good job, and to geeky to be left unseen!

Here you’ll find the video with english subtitles on Google Video. I’m not sure I found the real home page of the project, but actually the closer thing I found is at http://basshunter.m0o.eu/anna/ ;) (…but apparently I’m not able to see the video correctly from there).

In any case, I’ll host both the .avi and the .mp3 for quite some times here, hoping this is not going to freak out my bandwidth.
Here they are:

• .mp3 (4.9 MB)
• .avi (23 MB)

Have fun :D

I just came across (thanks to this post from Taking Aim) a nice interesting roundup of Russian related blogs written in English.
As a matter of fact, I’m studying russian (end enjoying it…) but it’s very nice to have some insight of Russia written in a 100% understandable way!

Here is it: Introduction to Russian Blogosphere.

Enjoy it, I think my bookmarks are going to become larger today! :)