rastplats

In order to find out the cause of my recently discovered blood-disease I got scheduled to do a gastroscopy which went down this morning. Saying that I’ve had better monday mornings wouldn’t exactly be a lie.. this set a new all-time high in being uncomfortable. Now for some lunch which I sincerely need since not eating prior to the examination, the only question is how to get it down since my throat feels like it’s been run over by a train.

Not that I’ve doubted it but it all became clear today when this mail came tumbling down straight through all spam filtering:

Hello,We want to add your website rastplats.se to our search engine/web directory (www.yoysearch.com) on such topics as “weekend,crap,week,this week,all that,friday,the book,cruise,ray,seminar,close”.

Especially note the second keyword selected for me.. crap. Now that gave me a warm feeling.. Kind of makes me want to bookmark their site and use it for all my internet needs! But hey, at least they’re honest. The site seems quite non-phishing non-spamming too and the mail was sent without any forged headers. This mail could be one of the first indications on the advancement of artificial intelligence, it has now improved to the virtually inseparable from human stupidity.

My compendium containing answers to exercises in computer science textbooks passed the 1000 downloads mark this weekend. If I get some time over this week I’ll celebrate it by updating them with a few more solutions. I havent heard a single word from anyone that has downloaded them but I hope they’ve been to some help somewhere. Given the amount of Googles query hits in my logs there’s obviously a demand.

Spent the weekend doing nothing much, resting from an extremely hectic week at work was much needed. Next week should be an improvement workwise as people are coming back from the holidays. Besides reading I went to see Timbuktu feat. Damn! saturday night who played at Stortorget as part of the Malmofestival. I’ve seen him play a few times but this was by far the best set to date. Since I had a scrap canvas around I also did some freehand spraypainting which turned out somewhat crappy but better than anticipated.

I get a shitload of spam every day since I’ve never bothered to hide my emailadress in any way. Roughly every other mail I receive is spam which amounts to somewhere around 300 spam a day, every day. So far my setup using SpamAssassin has kept my pretty much in the clear but recently more and more spam is reaching my inbox. It seems to be about time to rethink how to handle my mail situation again. The only really effective method seems to be whitelisting, which also serves the nice purpose of minimizing the cpu-load at mail processing. By using excessive whitelists at domainlevel adressing for all mail reaching my inbox, which in almost all cases originate from sources known to me, and rejecting everything else the flooding should halt. Mail directed to me from unknown sources usually come from mailinglist conversations which can be handled by harvesting mailadresses from the mailinglist archives of sent mail and adding these to the whitelists. For other mail a second trash mailbox could be used for initial verification and adding to the whitelists. To further keep an eye on rejected legitimate mail a list of rejected adresses could be harvested and mailed to me every day.. should work. I should probably write something up in the process to document it all.

Why didnt anyone tell me hell was scheduled for an ice-age last week? My past week at work was probably the most chaotic week of my career so far, everything that could go wrong started off by going wrong.. continued and bursted into flames and concluded by turning into a pile of shit just dropped in my lap. Lovely. The only thing worse is that I know for a fact that at least this monday will even worse. Lovely. As if this wasnt enough I went to the doctor to follow up on my recently discovered blood disease. I will know for sure what caused it when additional testing is done (hardcore medical things involving cameras inside my stomach.. yuck) but the verdict is quite clear so far, it’s chronic and at best I’ll have to eat medicin for the rest of my life. The worst case scenario is that I have one more chronic disease that caused the other one, two’s company.. I had planned to take thursday and friday off but I ended up getting two hours off thursday morning (while at the doctor) and instead worked late every day. I hardly think even Murphy could’ve done better than this.. At least things should only be able to get better starting tuesday, I’m crossing my fingers.

Went to the movies tonight and saw The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Having read the book in both swedish as well as english I must say I’m quite pleased with the interpretation made by the movie director and scriptwriter. As always there were a few details I really would’ve wanted trashed but thats unavoidable since movies are made to please the masses and not the individuals. All in all a decent movie well worth watching.

Things accelerated at work today from full speed to insane speed so my plan to take friday off got canned quite early in the morning. Since I have an appointment with my physician tomorrow morning to do additional testing on my blood disease I’ve taken tomorrow off as well.. yeah right, in my dreams. The irony of the whole thing is that project management is a skill I dont possess and a job I dont like, now I work overtime doing exactly that. Things are starting to feel familiar.. at least my superiors seem to be pleased with my work.

For your computer science reading pleasures I recommend Project Evil: Windows Network drivers on FreeBSD and Is Open Source Ready for BI?. Well worth reading both of them.

There are days that where everything is against you and there are days when everything truly sucks. There are also days when things pass quite normally, seem to go fine, but a single thing that burn up in your face is enough to fuck up the entire week. This is one of those days..

Having grown tired of bulky jewelcases and ugly cd-storage lockers I finally went ahead and picked up two large cd-cases to archive my 400 or so cds in. Big mistake. The end result will be extremely nice but the work involved is painfully boring. I’m somewhere around halfwat through at the moment and my fingers are numb from tearing jewels apart and folding paper. Dismount my old cd storage will be worth it though, it plainly sucks..

Had an otherwise quiet weekend spent mostly sleeping and resting from the past week working inferno. Hung out with friends at Caramello which was clubwise was a pleasant surprise. Nice music and atmosphere but unfortunately filled to the rim with brats and upperclass wannabes so the place will nevertheless suck.. too bad.

Having had my my car deregistered and out of service for the past three years while being a student the time had come to deal with it since I’ve rejoined the antfarm and got a job. When entering the bodyshop this morning I was somewhat nervous that the past years without being powered even once had trashed it, cars arent really made to not move, and indeed it did need work. The total amount of needed repairs came down to.. replacing two lightbulbs. Tonight I took it out for a long ride to recharge the battery and it ran like nothing had happened. Why doesnt Volvo build computers aswell? I bow my head to the engineers involved. Having a car again for the first time in years is a strange feeling though.

Workwise the week has been somewhat extreme but tomorrow will be the last day of understaffing, beginning monday morning there’ll be a few colleagues back in service to relieve me. Having pulled it off quite successfully is of course nice but I dont relly like the feeling of not being totally in control, having only been working there for roughly five weeks I still need to bother a lot of people with annoying questions. Being unskilled in managing projects like these doesnt exactly help either..

Jens introduced me to the documentary Once Upon Atari the other day and having watched it I can only agree with his praise. This is one of the most entertaining documentaries I’ve seen to date. Without resorting to archive clips or MTV-style effects is simply let the people that were involved tell their story. I’m definately going to add this to my tiny DVD collection. Everyone with an interest in the history of the IT industry should check it out, it’s easy to neglect the past in such a young industry and thus remaking the same mistakes over and over again.

While not being entirely computer science specific, You and Your Research is a very interesting read for anyone interested in doing research.

Sunday was spent helping a friend move house in something of a recordbreaking pace, in about four hours we shipped all his belongings cross town. Being restless I wound down with a 10km walk in the evening and this afternoon after an extremely stressful day at work I went jogging for 7km.. my legs are begging for mercy. Nothing much else has happened, work sleep work sleep work..

Being an open source advocate I take an interest in the issue of licensing. The free ebook by Dr Nikolai Bezroukov, Labyrinth of Software Freedom, is recommended reading on the subject. I havent read the entire book to be honest but I intend to, my readingstack is a bit too deep at the moment though.