September, 2008

I’d like you to meet Hanna, a charming blue-eyed blonde, brunette with brown eyes.

Did you get the “mistake” in the previous sentence? Without reading it twice?

Today, the following mail made it past our spamassassin installation:

I am a charming blue-eyed blonde, brunette with brown eyes, and I'm
looking for an intelligent man to communicate by e-mail, Skype, or on
real dates!

Write me a message by email: Hanna@superflh.com

I find it very interesting to see spam mails like this appear. Nothing is being sold here, no links are being made to commercial websites, no attachments came with it, … and it’s clearly an autogenerated text, meant to make sense in a way. So what is the purpose?

I guess they are trying to hit the so-called self-learning (mostly bayesian) spam-filters at their weakest point: that they are but computers. In many situations, mails like this will be manually marked as spam, and this make it into their learning system as such. Many of these mails eventually lead to spam-filters marking legitimate mails as spam, which for many people is totally unacceptable. And those people might just turn off their spam filters because of that. They “don’t work” anyway, right?

Similar things happen elsewhere too, apparently, trying to fool Mollom.

Does this reasoning make sense?

Anyway, Hanna does seem interesting to me. Let’s drop her a line… ;-)

Hmm, I just found out something strange.

• Click this link: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22mieke+van+loon%22&start=20&sa=N
• How many pages with search results does Google return? (6)
• How many search results? (1,330)
• Now click on Next at the bottom
• How many pages with search results does Google return? (5)
• How many search results? (1,330)
• Now click on Next at the bottom again
• How many pages with search results does Google return? (5)
• How many search results? (46)

Can somebody explain?

Doesn’t this make all those “proofs” based on Google fights moot? I can understand Google is not counting exactly how many results a search query resulted in for optimisations sake, but going from 1,330 to 46… that’s a but far off, isn’t it?

(For the record, Mieke Van Loon is a member of my family and I was looking up her personal web page.)

After reading this post about ifconfig output parsing by Kris, I remembered I once needed a cross-platform way to get the IP address of an interface in Python.

Of course I could just parse the output of `ifconfig`, but I really don’t like such ugly hacks. I guess I’ve got too many (bad) experiences with libwww-perl scripts I wrote for web harvesting various stuff. Basically, this is output parsing too, as HTML is generally the result of some server side script. Each time the webpage changed the way it looked (non-CSS changes) or worked, my scripts started to fail.

That’s when I decided I’ll always try to avoid such clumsy dependencies on third party software.

So, back to the Python question. I set out for a short adventure on comp.lang.python and came up with a solution after some fiddling: pyfconfig, a cross platform Python module to query for the IP address of an interface. Tested on FreeBSD x86, GNU/Linux x86 and GNU/Linux x86_64, with Python 2.4 and Python 2.5. Works just fine.

Compile with (for Python 2.5) and after an import pyfconfig, pyfconfig.ipaddr(’lo’) should return ‘127.0.0.1′ (YMMV).

No dependency on the output formatting of ifconfig. Less bugs.

I have been blogging (infrequently) for only about seven months now and I must say I got more reactions already than I thought I would ever have. Still, visitor statistics and Google showups remained fairly low. Especially after my last post, I became quite surprised. When Googling for “poor man’s NTP”, the first result returned was Kris Buytaerts reaction. Moreover, my original article was nowhere to be found in the search results.

This made me thinking…

For years now, my webpage is found by the keywords “Gentoo”, “Macbook” and “ING”, mainly because of some articles I wrote. But none of my blog posts seemed to get indexed.

I’m not going into detail here, but after 5 minutes of thinking, 5 minutes of tinkering with my Apache setup (I removed a 301-detour towads my blog) a little sed-action later (nanoblogger is great!), Google seems to love me much more.

Try it! :-)