Dave’s blog

Just posting a quick update, since its been a while. Dori and I are in Vermont this weekend, skiing and snowboarding at Mt. Okemo . Its my first time snowboarding in Vermont, and the conditions are pretty good. Not markedly better than my experiences at Greek Peak in college, but they’re still good for my first time out this year, especially considering how warm the winter has been so far this year. Our first day was great, the mountain was basically empty, and we were out from about 1-4:30 (they close at 4). I was connecting turns and generally getting down the mountain without any problem - likewise for Dori, she took a little time to get her legs back, but was feeling great at the end!

Our second day here was harder - we were still sore from Friday, and today the mountain was packed. Traffic on the slopes makes me extremely nervous, since I tend to go slowly and go from one end of the slope to the other and I’m afraid of getting hit by someone coming fast behind me. I know, downhill traffic has the right of way, but tell that to some kid doing 30 and not expecting me to brake for no good reason. Dori also had a harder time today, but she’s really a lot more solid than me. She fell once at the beginning of the day, and felt a little uncomfortable after that.

We’re supposed to hit the slopes in a few weeks at Wachusett with Gil and Josh, so we’ve got another chance to work on our form. Maybe even getting off the green trails for a day.

I’ve vaguely been considering getting my own board, mostly in the name of long-term improvement, but I have a feeling its not really a practical thing. Wachusett and Blue Hills are pretty close, but a starter board, bindings, and boot set goes for about $400. I’m just not sure yet - I keep thinking that I’d like to try an Alpine board, since most of my mountain-time is in the northeast, where there’s lots and lots of ice. Of course, I’d love to try one - maybe I just need to plan ahead and find a place that will rent me one next time - if such places exist. I think the Alpine board fits my interests more anyway - its nice and fast and you can carve beautifully. I’m not really interested in half-pipes or other skateboarder-on-ice stunts, so why invest in a freestyle board?

As an early Chanukah gift, Dori’s father and step-mother bought us a
crazy fully-automatic bread machine. I never thought I’d say this, but it kicks ass!

I made some whole wheat bread last night, and it came out great! Basically you get your 6-10 ingredients together and put them in the machine, turn it on, and come back ~3 hours later to a fresh loaf of bread.

As I looked through the rather extensive manual (which included numerous preemptive scoldings about the need for precision measurements), I couldn’t help but think to myself that some guy programmed these things. Geeks brought together over bread - it’s almost biblical!

Yesterday was really a noteworthy day on a whole range of fronts. Just keeping it brief:

• Democrats won control of the House (and now the Senate) - ok this technically happened Tuesday.
• I got a really nice ‘thank you’ call from my boss saying how much he appreciated my work during this cycle.
• My sim practice is paying off already; I was able to hover my helicopter for the vast majority of 2 battery packs (say, 30 minutes). These were indoor flights, and my hands were shaking at the end.
• Dori and I finally had time to go foodshopping! No more PB&J sandwiches!

And it keeps getting better, today I managed to get through about 95% of the loadbalancer setup for GeekISP!

A mix of big and small, but it was just really nice. I also couldn’t help but think how many Americans woke up Wednesday morning with a renewed hope for our nation.

So I ended up getting a HoneyBee CP2 helicopter, and promptly crashed on my first day of outdoor flight. This is after about a week or so of indoor bunny hops and trying to get the thing going. I did some of the online training courses, but clearly I need more practice.

I’ve really got to get a sim cable, and practice before I spend any more time doing repairs. On the upside, I learned a lot by taking the thing apart.

I got my replacement RC Helicopter from ThinkGeek last week, and sure enough, it had the same problem. The bottom rotor wobbles heavily during flight, making forward flight nearly impossible. I RMA’ed it again, but this time just requested a refund.

On a similar note, since I did have a lot of fun with this little thing while I could, I’m moving in the direction of getting a more sophisticated RC helicopter. It seems its possible to get a rig for a somewhat reasonable amount of money, but I may not be taking into account spare parts and other sorts of stuff that goes with it. Still doing my homework, but it looks like a Walkera 22E might be in my future.

Yesterday I played at the MGA’s fall handicap tournament; it was my first Go tournmanent, and overall I had a really good time. I entered at 12 kyu (according to some recent recommendations placing me in the 10-12 range) and played 4 games:

The first was against a 19 kyu player, so I had to give 7 stones. I am not used to that sort of a fight, so I got out a little slowly. Also the clock kept ticking and making me nervous, so I made a few silly mistakes early on, and ended up losing by ~20 points.

The second round was against an 8 kyu player, and with 4 stones he resigned at the end of the mid-game period. He had a large center section which probably would have given him the win, but I had a big reduction through a weak position of his stones, and as he tried to hold on, one of his larger groups ended up being cut off.

I took 8 stones in the 3rd round, and the fighting was very intense. There were big swings at the end, and I missed a big cutting point (I thought I was connected, but I was not), so I was forced to resign. My opponent was able to successfully invade a large moyo I had created, and I killed many eyes, but he made his way to the corner and found life there.

The fourth round was against a younger opponent, and I took 6 stones, but this may have been too many. He resigned after I cut off a big group, taking a big chunk of the top left (I had retained the other 3 corners as well).

All in all it was a fun day, and the clock stopped bothering me after the first round. I also played a 6-stone handicap game against a club regular whose name I don’t recall, but it was also extremely close - white won by 5 at the end.

Today one of GeekISP mail servers was listed in the SpamCop blacklist for hitting a spam trap. I learned quickly that for all SpamCop has done for good, it can be a huge problem as well.

For those not familiar with SpamCop, they are an anti-spam web service dating to around 1998. They offer several services including filtered email, spam reporting, and a blacklist. Their spam reporting service allows several different techniques to identify spammers, the one of interest to me today is the ’spamtrap’.

A spamtrap is an email address that is never actually used. It is posted on usenet or on web sites as bait to lure the spammer to send it an email, at which point you can say “aha, got ya!” SpamCop maintains that extreme secrecy is needed to protect these spamtrap addresses, lest they become useless. If you are the unlucky administrator of a site that hits a trap, you’re quickly added to the aforementioned blacklist until either a) more reports come in, which means get comfy where you are or b) the 24 hour waiting period passes, and you’re released.

As a result of the secrecy, the ordinary “this message was reported as spam” reports are not provided when you hit a spam trap. This leaves the well-meaning administrator with no real recourse to take other than to beg the SC deputies for a morsel of information by which to track down the problem. [Aside: apparently at one point, these reports were sent out. Then spammers used them to detect spam traps and work around them. Instead of saying “oh gee this doesn’t really work”, the SC people decided to use secrecy as a means of fighting spam, and thereby create more problems than they actually were solving.]

With the playing field laid out, I believe that one of my customers’ TMDA challenges has sent a challenge to a spam trap. I don’t really know for sure, but this type of message is one of the very few types of post-SMTP-transacation bounce that my server will send. At this point I can really only guess. Now, GeekISP’s mail server doesn’t currently enforce SPF or DomainKey signatures, which offer some help to this category of problem. The problem is that if these emails are secret, how can I know that they have valid SPF / DK records published?

For now, I have sent a web request for my mail server to be removed from the database, and a message to deputies@spamcop.net (hey, you guys can deal right?) for more details on the trap violation. No response so far today.

In addition to the above, SpamCop’s website makes plain their anti-challenge/response policy. They also feel that it’s appropriate for them to set policy for my hosting company and my customers. To quote:

Selfish: This is the problem we are mainly concerned with. By using challenge/response filtering, you are asking innumerable third parties to receive your challenge emails just so that a relatively few legitimate ones get through to the intended recipient.

You emailed me, didn’t you? How am I being selfish by asking you to confirm your message? There’s more:

Solution: Do not use challenge/response filtering. Although it may stop most unwanted email for the person shielded by it, it generates more unwanted email for others.

And the best of all:

Since more and more sites will rightly block these challenge emails, you can never be sure they will reach their target even when they are not misdirected themselves. So these systems will lose legitimate mail in an attempt to stop unwanted mail.

Aha, I see. And why will they lose mail? Because SpamCop blacklists you for using them. Let me paraphrase: “we’re going to block these kinds of mails, and since we’re going to block them, we’ve undermined the effectiveness by which they operate, so better not to use them since they’re broken.” How’d I do?

All of this and more can be found here. I particularly like how SpamCop tells me what to do before going on vacation. If you guys want to cover my mail, sure I’ll let you know, but that’s the limit of how you can dictate policy to me.

The bit about C/R email systems sounds very funny coming from a group owned and operated by IronPort, a company selling security and anti-spam products.

Last night I went up to Davis Square to play at the Mass Go Club. Being an unfortunate sap with a job, I had to leave my apartment about 6:40 to go up there, and sat in a ton of traffic; in fact it took 60 minutes to travel all of 7 miles. Parking, thankfully, was relatively easy.

I was pleased to see the attendance was good (admittedly Tuesday night is their busy night), with around 10-15 people playing simultaneously. Back in NYC, a busy night was about 8 people playing, and that was a predominantly older crowd. This club seems a little more decentralized - there’s no club manager who is there running it every night, since members are given the combination lock on the door. As a result, you have to check if anyone is interested in playing on a given night (except Tuesday / Friday), but with a 30-60 minute drive ahead of me, this isn’t such a bad thing.

I played two games: one against Adam, an AGA 5kyu player who started a few months before me, and one against Walter, who is at least AGA 3dan. Generally I think I played fairly well, considering I haven’t been playing much, but clearly I need to review my life & death problems, and some of my fighting tactics. I’ve been reviewing ‘Learn to Play Go Vol. 5′, so back to one of Davies’ books after that.

From time to time I like to browse the catalogue over at ThinkGeek, as they tend to have stuff that makes me go “Whoa!” or generally smirk at the cube-warfare fantasies they perpetuate. I can certainly identify with some of them, but they always seem to lose their zeal in real life.

Now that I work from home, there’s really no line to be crossed in building these out; simply, there’s nobody to offend. In a throw back to my single-digit / early teen years, I’ve purchased a RC Helicopter.

It’s really cool.

So far I’ve not managed to do much more than take-off, hover a bit, and land. I think I may have slightly damaged the bottom rotor when taking it out of the box, because when hovering, the top rotor spins clean and level, while the bottom appears to wobble a little. It looks a little like a bike with a bent rim. As a result of this, flight is quite challenging, and forward flight isn’t very stable. When I push the stick forward, it moves forward very slightly, then usually jerks hard to one side into a spin (unless I correct quickly).

Generally the controls are extremely sensitive, including the throttle. Getting the chopper to hover for more than a moment is tricky, probably due to air currents and the aforementioned bottom rotor. We’ll see how I do after this weekend in NY.

Update: I managed to break the bottom rotor today while doing a short test flight, so I’ve put in an RMA request with ThinkGeek. I had suspected this unit was defective anyway, so hopefully they’ll agree…

The latest, greatest installment:
http://movies.crooksandliars.com/CountDown-SpecialComment-Bush-911.mov