Oblomovka

2004-02-01»

We all really enjoyed Emerging Man last year. It was a makeshift campsite in our back garden that we used to house some of the geeks who were having trouble finding affordable accomodation for Emerging Tech in Silicon Valley. This year, the cost of finding a hotel room in San Diego looks to be even worse. Even worse to that "even worse" I don't live in San Diego. Damn me!

This wasn't a problem of pure altruism. I'm speaking this year, so I don't have to pay for a ticket, but even so we were having real problems working out how to afford the trip.

I think we've pulled something together. Dachb0den run a hacker l0ft near where the conference is being held, and they've really kindly let me and whatever squatters I could assemble sleep on their floor.

When this was tentative, I put out feelers with UK people to see if anyone needed a bed, and the spaces filled up before I really had a chance to make it public. There may be more room as time goes on though (people came and went at Emerging Man, and you know, there'll probably be some in-conference bartering of nice accommodation for Orkut testimonials or something).

And, anyway, we'll have a party on ... Wednesday? To which you are invited, of course. And, just to play to all the stereotypes a little bit more, here's the Em3rg1ng L0ft W1k1.

The other idea I was hatching but never really got together there was to have an Emerging Tech/CodeCon crossover session in San Francisco. There's a lot of people who traditionally go to both conferences, but haven't been able to afford to go to both this year. Also, as ever, a bunch of people applied with really good papers to either one and didn't get accepted.

It occurred to me and a few others that would could hire somewhere in SF during the intervening week, and manage both a decompression from ETech and ramp people up for CodeCon. And you could easily fill a schedule with people who didn't fit at either. I'd love people who managed to make it to ETech to recount the good bits in lightning talks to people who didn't, and you could use the same format to plug interesting upcoming ideas for Codecon, or stuff that got missed by both. It'd make for a fun evening. Well, I think it would.

Doing this rather fell off my radar, but there's still time. If anyone knows anywhere has Secret Knowledge (Moonbase University? Dorkbot SF?) on hosting such a ConCon in SF during the intervening week (February 14th-20th), go for it. I'm going to be monster busy when I get back from Etech but I hereby foolishly volunteer to do an impressionistic rendition of my Etech talk and anyone elses I see. If you're on for the hassle, mail me, and I'll put you all in touch with each other, and then I shall stand well back and try and publicise it in San Diego and elsewhere.

2004-01-30»

It's always a joy to watch prissy corporate mail filters twitch their lace curtains and bounce back NTK when they spot a phrase they don't like. This week they refused to deliver NTK because we used the word "dyke". As in Greg Dyke. (Admittedly, the completely justified use of "butt" and "wanker" elsewhere might not have helped our case.)

Not as bad as one UK firm's IT department, which is currently binning any incoming email with "hello" or "Hi" in the subject line. "These are common header descriptions of the e-mails containing the [MyDoom] virus", they say. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest they're also common header descriptions of the e-mails not containing it, too.

2004-01-29»

A bit too late for most, I guess, here's the procmail recipe I've been using to fend off the majority of MyDoom

:0 HB
* <50000
* ^Subject: (test|hi|hello|Mail Delivery System|
             Mail Transaction Failed|Server Report|Status|Error|)$
* ^Content-type: application/octet-stream;
* (file)?name="(document|readme|doc|text|file|
               data|test|message|body).(pif|scr|exe|cmd|bat|zip)
mydoom

It's nabbed about 900 of them so far. There's a variant that uses random ascii for the document name which that it doesn't catch, but I haven't seen many of those.

Now, to devise some way of coping with the million anti-virus checkers that bounce the mail with a "Virus Refused" message - even though their designers know that the return address is fake, and they are bouncing to innocent parties. Sigh.