vicchi.org

Various quotes, mostly UNIX related, which I’ve accrued over the years from various sources.

Well my terminal’s locked up and I ain’t got any Mail
And I can’t recall the last time that my program didn’t fail
I’ve got stacks in my structs, I’ve got arrays in my queues
I’ve got those: Segmentation violation — Core dumped blues.

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.

– Grace Murray Hopper

Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the other numerous lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes a mistake, a giant “?” lights up in the corner of the dashboard. “The experienced driver”, says Thompson, “will usually know what’s wrong”.

– Anonymous

The problem with sendmail is that the sendmail configuration file is a rule based expert system, but the world of email is not logical and sendmail configuration editors are not experts.

– David Waitzman, BBN

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I had some hardware delivery to the office this morning; nothing too spectacular, just some disks and some memory. The delivery was taken and signed for by a colleague who works in our IS department and they’d checked that the consignment contained exactly what we’d ordered and paid for.

In order to do that, they’d had to open the box which, judging by the ripped, torn and otherwise mangled top of the box was quite a challenge.

Let’s just look at the top of the box in a bit more detail …

Ahh; they obviously didn’t see the easy to open tear strip on the top of the box, which wasn’t the top of the box, if you see what I mean. Oh well.

As fast as an anti-spam mechanism appears on the net, the spammers try to find a way to circumvent it; recently I wrote about the attempt of spammers to try and create realistic sounding names in an attempt to bypass spam filters with unintentionally amusing results.

The latest weapon in the spammers arsenal seems to be inserting passages from works of popular fiction into mails in an attempt to defeat natural language heuristic checks, with passages from Tolkein’s The Hobbit seeming to be a firm favourite, judging by the contents of my Junk Mail folder.

beeches came right down to the bank, till their feet were in the stream.
Across this bridge the elves thrust their prisoners, but Bilbo hesitated
in the rear. He did not at all like the look of the cavern-mouth and he
only made up his mind not to desert his friends just in time to scuttle
over at the heels of the fast elves, before the great gates of the king
closed behind them with a clang. Inside the passages were lit with red

and

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To find our long-forgotten gold.
Bilbo went to sleep with that in his ears,
and it gave him very uncomfortable dreams.
It was long after the break of day, when he woke up.

How long until they bore of The Hobbit and move onto The Silmarillion or
The Lord Of The Rings one wonders?

I used to have a home made anti-stress ball, consisting of a flour filled balloon; it was made for me by one of the French students currently on industrial placement at work. I say used to as one of my colleagues managed to break it, which at least proved it really was a balloon filled with flour. Which is a shame as I was rather fond of it.

But then whilst out on a trip the self same student found this.

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I get spam email; so does everyone I know with an email address. My mail client of choice is currently Apple’s Mail.app and this includes a Bayesian junk mail filtering system which, after a bit of training, is very effective.

About once a week I check my junk mail folder. Just in case. There’s one spammer who seems to think that a ficticious name, made up of real words, will get past people’s filters. Naive and touching. But occasionally you see some classic names. Here’s the latest bunch in my junk mail folder.

• Inner. T. Windiest
• Costly. V. Property
• Procession. T. Somme
• Shagginess. K. Acutest
• Recurring. V. Husbanding
• Paperweight. V. Savant
• Dreamiest. K. Loopy
• Icurably. E. Methodists