BrianJarrett.com

Getting Spam Assassin Working with Procmail and Postfix on a Fedora Core 5 Server

I bought brianjarrett.com in 2003, set up e-mail there, then kept it spam-free for three years. Then, it came. It was slow at first, only fifty messages a week maybe. It wasn’t long until it turned into fifty or a hundred a day; hundreds and hundreds by the end of any given week. On the client side Thunderbird did an okay job with it and Outlook 2007 did a better job with it but it was still a major pain in the ass, sitting there and waiting while Outlook churned through message after message promising pre-approved loans, penis enlargement, cheap Viagra, mini-RC cars, and messages about how some girl starting dating this guy but his “member” was too large for her mouth and she practically choked.

Now as sorry as I felt for this girl I just couldn’t stand the e-mails anymore. I thought about changing my e-mail address once again …read more »

Finally I was able to upgrade my site to Wordpress 2.3 . Initially it broke during the process and I had to restore everything then try again when I had more time. Turns out the BlogStats plugin didn’t work and I had what appears to be a deprecated category function call in my theme (wp_list_cats).

One of the more interesting things with this upgrade is tags. Tags, at least how I’ve implemented them, are sort of like micro categories. I like to think of categories as macro and tags as micro. For instance …read more »

I hate to give this any more press than it’s already received but I felt like I needed to mention it, at least to prove a point. Apparently Kathy Griffin used her right to free speech (as our founding fathers intended) and made a few off-color remarks during the acceptance of an Emmy. According to Excite news…

Griffin said that “a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus.” She went on to hold up her Emmy, make an off-color remark about Christ and proclaim, “This award is my god now!”

So apparently a Christian theater group had “had enough” and released these comments. …read more »

Richard Dawkins elegantly and effectively answering the question.

Here’s a tip I picked up from a co-worker (thanks Matt H.) a few years back during a big ETL rewrite he and I were doing for the company I worked for. First off, I don’t recommend doing ETL in Perl. Perl is interpreted, which makes it a little slower, and it also can become a maintenance nightmare. I love Perl but coding ETL in Perl is exhausting. I’d recommend using something like DataStage, Informatica, or Data Integrator instead. Those programs are expensive though, and if your company is on a tight budget they might not spring for any of those tools. Perl is free and that really is one of the cheapest ways to go about this. We’ll proceed under the premise that you’re left with no other options.

This code snippet can be used for a fact table load job. I’m presuming a working knowledge of Perl, ETL, SQL, and dimensional modeled (star schema) databases here. This also presumes you have knowledge …read more »

Perl has no built-in “trim” function so you have to write your own using search and replace and regular expression matching. Below is simple trim function that will remove spaces from the beginning and end of any string …read more »

Traci in 1978

Traci in 1978

Orson in 2007

Orson in 2007

So, why a Mac? Well, I’ve done a fair amount of thinking about this decision and have come to a few conclusions. I need to upgrade within the next two years. My current box, although still quite snappy, will continually become slower and slower as software and operating systems (Vista, in particular) become more processor and memory intensive.

First of all, I had to consider my options. I have three options really; Windows, Mac, or Linux. I know there are other operating systems out there but for my personal machine at home none of the other options make sense. Given these three options I first needed to identify what I really wanted. Part of me, at least the non-conformist in me, wants to buck Microsoft completely. Sorry to disappoint all you Linux apologists out there but Microsoft is and will continue to be a major force in the computing world for some time to come. There is no escaping Microsoft completely, especially if you’re coming from a Windows world and have already come to use some Windows-only software.

But I still want to …read more »

Date::Manip doesn’t work “straight out of the box” on Windows due to the fact that Windows doesn’t have a timezone defined. I use Perl on both Unix and Windows and as a result I use Date::Manip on both systems as well. When I was a newbie this confounded me to no end when coding for Windows. I couldn’t seem to find a good solution for it but ultimately through research and determination I figured out how to fix it.

I create a system variable in Windows for the timezone and then …read more »

This is why MySpace sucks is so awesome: Hippie Paulette! …read more »