qotd september 4. Patricia Neal: “A strong positive mental attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug.” [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Amen!

I re-installed WinPT & GnuPG today. I got a bunch of M$ security announcements today. I know M$ has problems but this was quite a bunch so I decided to spot check the validity. I had uninstalled WinPT & GnuPG awhile back since I needed to upgrade. The new versions are not much different than the previous versions. I had one bug that took me a little time to recognize. Outlook 2002 suppresses blank lines. If you copy the text of the security announcement to the clipboard with the suppressed lines it won't verify. Stop suppressing blank lines and the text copied to the clipboard will verify.

I had wondered about this for awhile but I think that I finally have it figured out. When you change your domain password on WinXP you need to logoff to change the cached credentials. Otherwise you will nagged into changing the password a second time.

I spent part of this Labor Day trying to update my “Friends List” in Mailtrust Pro. As I have mentioned earlier in “Spam Management”, Mailtrust is my first line of defense for my email addresses against spam and viruses. Mailtrust uses a combination of spam lookup, regexp filtering, blacklist, and whitelist to filter my mailboxes. What I knew but ignored until today was that I was behind in updating my friends list. An important email got deleted today. It had failed one of the filters and had been marked for deletion. After I read it I forgot to remove the delete checkmark and add it as a friend. My valid email addresses are in Outlook and I did not have an automatic approach to updating this list. Today I searched and found a temporary fix. I found an Outlook VBA macro found on spampal.org that dumps the email addresses to a text file. Since I have two contact folders I modified the macro to dump the emails from both folders. Then I copied and pasted the resulting file into the Mailtrust whitelist file. Mailtrust found and removed the duplicates. It would be nice if I could run this macro automatically each day and automatically update Mailtrust but Outlook is pretty fussy about running any macro. Since I do not add email addresses very often, I should probably be safe for a long time.

RSS to replace email? Nah.. I've heard a lot about how Outlook 2003, both alone and in combination with Exchange Server 2003, has been beefed up to fight the war on spam. From a client-only perspective, it doesn't look too promising. Apart from filtering messages that have been externally processed — for example, by SpamAssassin — the primary strategy appears to be blacklisting or whitelisting senders. As this screenshot illustrates, Sobig-like worms destroy that strategy. I can neither whitelist nor blacklist email appearing to be from Dave Ogle or Anne Manes or Tom Thompson or Lowell Rapaport. Quite likely, none of these folks has even been infected with the worm. Their names just happened to be chosen randomly from the address books of users who were infected.  … [Jon's Radio]

I found this post more interesting on the second reading. It took a second reading before I understood the problem. The screenshot I omitted showed an inbox with a lot of email generated from the Sobig worm. Jon says he uses three lines of defense against spam, SpamAssassin, SpamPal, and SpamBayes. He has a a fourth line of defense he did not mention, virus checking software. I expect these emails are probably clean of viruses or worms but are not valid communication from the sender. There lies the problem. You cannot filter this mailbox using only a whitelist or blacklist. An external sophisticated spam processor, such as SpamAssassin, is required to categorize the emails. However, I have not read or seen Microsoft pushing Outlook's new spam processing support as a total spam solution. I got the distinct impression that Microsoft was opening the api's slightly to make integrating external processing easier. Maybe we can get an open source version of SpamAssassin running with Exchange 2003. Deersoft's Spamkiller is nice but free is better if you are competing with a free SpamAssassin on Linux.

W3C Markup Validator 0.6.5 Beta #1. The new “Zeldman Made Us Do It!” edition of the W3C's free online markup validation service includes human-friendly error messages that you can customize, and a “fussy parsing” mode that catches technically kosher but problematic patches in your markup. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report]

You might be a teacher if…

1. You believe “shallow gene pool” should have its own box on the report card.
2. You want to slap the next person who says, “Must be nice to work 8 to 3:20 and have summers free.”
3. You can tell if it's a full moon without ever looking outside.
4. You believe the playground should be equipped with a Ritalin salt lick.
5. You believe that unspeakable evils will befall you if anyone says, “Boy, the kids sure are mellow today.”
6. When out in public you feel the urge to snap your fingers at children you do not know and correct their behavior.
7. You have no social life between September and June.
8. Marking all A's on report cards would make your life SO much easier.
9. You think people should be required to get a government permit before being allowed to reproduce.
10. You wonder how some parents ever MANAGED to reproduce.
11. You laugh uncontrollably when people refer to the staff room as the “lounge”.
12. You encourage an obnoxious parent to check into charter schools or home schooling.
13. You can't have children because there's no name you could give a child that wouldn't bring on high blood pressure the moment you heard it uttered.
14. You think caffeine should be available in intravenous form.
15. You know you are in for a major project when a parent says, “I have a great idea I'd like to discuss. I think it would be such fun.”
16. Meeting a child's parent instantly answers the question, “Why is this kid like this?”

[The Braden Files]

Murphy's other laws

1. Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don't have film.
2. He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
3. A day without sunshine is like, well, night.
4. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
5. Back up my hard drive? How do I put it in reverse?
6. I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.
7. When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty.
8. Seen it all, done it all. Can't remember most of it.
9. Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't.
10. I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
11. He's not dead. He's electroencephalographically challenged.
12. She's always late. In fact, her ancestors arrived on the “June flower.”
13. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted and used against you.
14. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be without sponges.
15. Honk if you love peace and quiet.
16. Pardon my driving, I'm reloading.
17. Despite the cost of living, have you noticed how it remains so popular?
18. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.
19. It is hard to understand how a cemetery can raise its burial costs and blame it on the higher cost of living.
20. Just remember … if the world didn't suck, we'd all fall off.
21. The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.
22. It is said that if you line up all the cars in the world end to end, someone would be stupid enough to try and pass them.
23. You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
24. Latest survey shows that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the world population.
25. If the shoe fits, get another one just like it.
26. The things that come to those that wait may be the things left by those who got there first.
27. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
28. Flashlight: A case for holding dead batteries.
29. The shin bone is a device for finding furniture.
30. A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
31. It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
32. Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
33. I wished the buck stopped here, as I could use a few.
34. I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it.
35. When you go into court, you are putting yourself in the hands of 12 people that weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.
36. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

(Thanks to Annette!) [The Braden Files]

Experts Retrace a String of Mishaps Before the Blackout. At 3:32 p.m. on August 14, a transmission line sagged into a tree just outside Cleveland, setting off the events that led to North America's biggest power failure. By James Glanz and Andrew C. Revkin. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

This is the best explanation of the blackout that I have read. It helps if you have an electrical engineering degree. It also explains why southern Ohio(where I live) was not affected. The short version of the theory is that First Energy(Cleveland) was having transmission line problems. This problem aggravated an overheating with the transmission lines to AEP(south of Cleveland). When First Energy lost a second transmission line, AEP circuit breakers tripped on the lines to First Energy. This walled off First Energy from the south and the system quickly started to pull large amounts of power from the north. In a cascading patttern circuit breakers protected the equipment and shut down the transmission lines from Michigan through Canada to New York. It was interesting to note, that New York was exporting a large amount of power through Canada at the time and went down because they could not slow their power generation fast enough.