The Net Monkey

Title: more bouncy balls

Uploaded By: sem

I’m going to treat myself well over this weekend. I’m going to eat good food and be around good people I can enjoy the short time I have away from work.

I see a lot of confusion surrounding the intent of email sender authentication technologies.

Sender ID, SPF, and DomainKeys (now DKIM) will not stop spam. Period. They’re designed to authorize the identity of the email sender. Period.

One camp says that using these technologies will help stop spam. Yes, they’re actually right. An email message with a spoofed address can be blocked. What happens when spammers start to use these same technologies to send their email? The other side of this argument will say that the purpose is defeated if spammers can use it, but this is to be expected. This is nothing more than short-term thinking on both sides of the fence.

Before I talk about long-term results, I first want to discuss short-term consequences of using sender authentication. A result of knowing the indentity of the sender is that more power is in the hands of administrators and users. Spammers will be forced to use legitimate email addresses, so knowing this information allows one to easily block email which he or she doesn’t want to receive. This helps stop spam before it reaches the expensive content filter, which will result in a cost savings.

The ability to put a stop to phishing scams and other fraudulent emails is probably the biggest benefit of authentication technology. All of those PayPal and eBay messages, for example, telling you to update your account information can be a thing of the past, but only as long as targetted companies participate in one or all of the potential standards.

The long-term goal here is to establish a robust email infrastructure on the Internet where users only receive the email they want. We know that spammers will use real email addresses that will pass authenticaton tests. This is where reputation services will become important. A mail server will be able to take the domain of the sender and check it against a database. Based on the reputation returned by the service, the mail server can accept, block, or tag the email as spam. A sender’s reputation can be based on anything, but most likely will be determined by the amount of complaints received by the reputation service itself.

While I consider reputation services to be the next step in the evolution of spam fighting, I do think that we’re a long ways away from that goal. In the meantime, server administrators will probably employ a combination of technologies, with various layers of content checks and the such.

Handling email is going to be a lot more complicated before it gets simpler.

I laughed out loud when I found this on Tom’s del.icio.us links. I don’t know if this is a joke or not, but Alan Cumming has his own cologne called CUMMING. Fabulous name! Watch the commercial below.

http://www.cummingthefragrance.com/commercial.html

Seems like he enjoys the fragrance a little too much since he’s practically masturbating on film.

Title: katamari

Uploaded By: ejhdigdug

Work has been a pain in the ass for the last couple of days!

Yesterday, I was working with a guy trying to correct a duplex mismatch on one of our load balancers and ended up taking a good part of our site down. Of course, a good long meeting followed and we went over what we should and shouldn’t have done. Guilt ensued.

Today I went to work on the load balancer issue and decided to reseat a hard drive in a degraded array on one of our mail servers. Usually, failed hard drives just need to be reset, and they will rebuild. In this case, the whole system crashed and is now having to be replaced by the manufacturer. Meanwhile, teams of people worked to get the other systems to take the load. Lovely.

Way to be a good worker, Matt!

Title: Infinite 87

Uploaded By: mattbarton77

Infinite Flickr is a group on Flickr where you take a shot of yourself with the most recent photo in the pool. Essentially, this creates a whole string of linked photographs. What a cool, original idea!

Link: Infinite Flickr: The Movie
Link: Infinite Flickr Pool @ Flickr
Link: Infinite Flickr Slideshow @ Flickr

I was reading mnslog.com this evening and saw an article talking about the movie Breaking Away which included a Google Maps image of the limestone quarries. You really can’t be from Indiana and not have seen this movie.

It’s a strange coincidence to see the article since I was travelling to Loogootee, Indiana, today for a wedding. On the way down from Indianapolis you pass through Bloomington, which is the home of Indiana University and the main setting of the film. You also travel through Bedford, which is the “Limestone Capital of the World” as marked on this big sign along SR-37. I also saw a sign for the town of Oolitic, which is the name of the type of limestone found in southern Indiana.

Aren’t coincidences fun?

Link: Satellite Image @ Google Maps

Title: sushi

Uploaded By: Randy Hershfield

I’m up way too late tonight, after having been out at the bar. I’m not wanting to go to bed for some reason, but I need to hit the sack because I have to get up in the morning and begin a trek to Loogootee, Indiana, which is way down in the southern part of the state. My friend Tim is getting married to his long-time girlriend, Natalie.

Title: Jason M.

Uploaded By: mattbarton77

It is very strange and surreal to hang out with ex-boyfriends.

I was awakened this morning by a phone call from Mom telling me that Betsy Blaudow passed away. She was the sister-in-law of my very frist boyfriend, Rob. Just earlier this month his father passed away after suffering a heart attack and dealing with open heart surgery. I can’t possibly imagine how overwhelming all of this must be for him and his family.

Rob and I are on good terms, but we really don’t communicate much with each other. This is one of those moments when I want to say something, but I’m not entirely sure what. So, in my sadness and symapthy, I decided to write him an email. (Yes, I would have called, but his cell phone isn’t working.)

Robert

Mom called me this morning to tell me about Betsy’s passing. She saw the obituary in the Star and wanted to let me know.

I’m very sad to hear about Betsy. I liked her very much. She was a sweet woman and was the most welcoming and accepting of me — more so than any other member of your family. And that meant a lot to me. I remember talking to her about how nuts we thought your parents were. <chuckle>

Let me know if there’s anything I can do. Our romantic relatoinship ended nearly six years ago, but we do have history, and, with that, I offer my ear and shoulder, if you need it.

I plan to attend the viewing tomorrow night. The rest of my family sends their regards, as well.

See you tomorrow.

I had turned 19 years old right as Rob and I started dating. He was 27 years old at the time (younger than me now) and came from a family that wasn’t entirely accepting of his sexuality. Some of them would keep their distance and avoid discussion of the fact that we were a gay couple, but others were very kind and accepting — like Betsy. She welcomed me in to the family, bought me Christmas presents, and expressed sadness to my mother when Rob and I ended our relationship. She and I weren’t really close, but I felt relaxed around her and was able to open up. I am very thankful for that.

So, I am going to trek up to the northside to the viewing at the funeral home tomorrow night. It will probably be awkward and surreal, at first, since I haven’t seen all of his family in nearly six years. Hopefully they will remember me.

Link: Full Obituary @ Indianapolis Star

Title: Lawn Bowling

Uploaded By: mattbarton77

It’s been over a week since I returned from San Francisco, and already I wish I were going back there for another week.

My friend Tony wrote a play called Catch which is currently on stage at the Lambda Players Theatre in Sacramento, California. Below is an excerpt from a recently written review of the show.

Tom enters a star-crossed relationship with Bob, a younger man who’s had sex, recently, with many guys. Bob says he’ll give up that lifestyle to settle down with Tom. They go for an HIV test, and they’re shocked when one tests positive. Soon, the “clean” member of this couple announces a plan to deliberately acquire the AIDS virus, so that they can continue together as equals. His underlying assumption is that with modern meds, you can live with HIV pretty much indefinitely, right?

Please check out the show if you’re near the Sacramento area. It’s a great social commentary on the whole “bug catcher” phenomenon, which seems to be happening to guys in my generation and younger.

Link: Full Article @ Sacramento News and Review

I’ve had dinner and drinks with friends from work for the last two evenings. Good times.

Last night I was invited to Tom and Lara’s for goat stew. She served it with salad, mashed potatoes, and a very grainy, seedy bread. Everything was delicious! The appearance and texture of the goat looked a lot like roast beef. Given the amount of seasoning in the stew, I don’t think anyone could tell the difference.

As you know, goat isn’t something you’d find in a grocery store. Lara bought the meat from a vendor at the farmer’s market at Trader’s Point who said that this particular goat was a mean son-of-a-bitch. So, it would seem that mean goats make tasty goat meat.

Tonight I went with my friend Grant down to Thai Spice in Greenwood. I can’t recall the name of the dish, but it was a soup with noodles, leafy vegetables, broccoli, and spices. Dessert was fried bananas with vanilla ice cream — a favorite of mine. Afterwards, we went over to his house and drank a whole bottle of Pinot Grigio while waiting on his partner, Buck, to come home.

It has indeed been a very satiating couple of days.

I <heart> WordPress!

I installed and modified the TechnoTag plugin last night. It allows one to store Technorati tags as a custom field entry for each article. In the past, with Blogger, I had to add the tags to the body of the post. This is a much cleanear way of handling tags.

Tonight I installed RSS Fetched Link List. This plugin allows me to take any RSS feed and create a link list with it. I find it to be extremely configurable; however, I with it supported Atom. I’m using this code to display my five most recent del.icio.us bookmarks and Flickr photos (titles only, no images), and the next five rentals in my Netflix queue.

Very cool stuff!

I’ve finally converted this blog to a new platform. I originally intended to use Movable Type 3.17, but I was unhappy with the available templates out there and the complexity in maintaining such templates. Earlier today, I decided to try WordPress 1.5.1.3 and am very impressed. I was able to install, tweak, and import my old posts and comments from Blogger in a matter of a few hours.

Also, if you subscribe to the FeedBurner feed, you will not need to change anything as the source has been switched accordingly.