sudo rpm -e openoffice.org-i18n
Good grief.
Also, I cannot begin to tell you how frustrating it is to play the disk space shell game every couple of months and try to free up space here and there so that I can compile a new kernel. DANG I need a laptop hard drive that’s bigger than 30 megs!!!!!!!!!!!
Merry Christmas, all!! =:) I have had a wonderful time with my family for the last several days, and am not at all looking forward to going back to the grind. Among other things, my beautiful kids and bride gave me a XXL Old Navy fleece hoodie (VERY warm and snuggly!!), and the new Tobymac CD (also VERY good and snuggly). OH–also, I got a cool little iced-tea maker!! We’ve probably gone through about 8 pitchers of home-made peach iced tea in the last couple of days. =:)
So, here’s wishing you and yours a very blessed time with your family.
Here’s to hoping you have/take the time to enjoy your family and friends.
Here’s wishing Mike and Liz a healthy new life soon and a new Halo box soon. =:)
Here’s hoping you see God’s love in your life and the lives of your family in a very special way in the next year. =:)
Here’s hoping I can finally get the hang of close-quarters combat or long-distance sniping or anything helpful in Halo. =:/
I just saw this $498 linux laptop the other day and thought I’d mention it. That’s a pretty danged inexpensive laptop. =:) All that, and without Bill!! =:)
At some point, in the most probably distant future, someone will stumble upon these ramblings and wonder what sort of maniac would leave such entries as these, mine. But for the present, as my readership exists solely of myself and Opera’s refresh button, I shall conclude my Chronicles of Riddick(ulous) : The Quest for One Good Camera. That is to say that I hope this is the conclusion of said Chronicle, because I have invested enough of my time on this planet on it already.
The Kodak DX7440, combined with a free 256M PNY SD card, and a $20 coupon at my local Staples has declared itself as the most eligible bachelor. Thus far, I am very impressed with the wee beastie. It has tons of features and I’ve yet to see a bad picture coming from it.
I suppose that’s all for now….
I have learned today that, despite what you might think, using an aluminum propane camping grill is not a good option for disposing of a large stack of paper. What you will find is that:
- there is a LOT of smoke from said approach and your neighbors might be seen peering from afar at you
- you will severely warp the grill of said camping grill
- your clothes will smell like smoke and your teenage daughter and wife will complain that you stink
- you will have an appreciable mess to clean up from all of the half-burnt paper and ashes, which don’t simply disappear on their own
- you won’t actually be able to burn all of it anyway, just the outside edges of the papers and the bottom/top of the stack
- you will feel like a criminal, waiting to be caught, cringing at every siren that you hear
This much I know now.
I’m now trying the dump-the-stack-into-a-large-container-of-water-and-leave-it-for-a-week approach. I will report back with my results.
You are welcome for the knowledge.
=:P
Maybe I’m just feeling melancholy today.
Maybe I’m just frustrated by having invested literally more than a dozen hours into researching what the best digital camera would be for my family, and still don’t know which one to get or where to get it from.
Maybe I’m burnt out from work-without-vacation-days-off for quite a while.
Maybe I’m just tired from not having slept consistently or well for a while.
Maybe I’m frustrated by my career path.
Maybe I’m suffering paralysis from prosumer over-analysis of the available camera choices.
Maybe I’m dreading going out into the mad sea of almost-Christmas consumerism, cringing from the very thought of the fighting with traffic, unavailable items, checkout lines, ad nauseum.
Maybe I’m frustrated at not being able to master any sort of survival skills in Halo whatsoever (my only semi-successful strategy is smash-and-grab, and that only rarely works in real games).
Maybe I’m frustrated by my inability to buckle down and lose those last 5 pounds.
Maybe it’s [D], all of the above.
My bride tells me that I always get like this during Christmas. I don’t know about that, but I do know that I’m tired of feeling like this, and that life is too short for it. The Son of the living God spent 33 years on this dusty, frustrating earth, preparing Himself all the while for the most violent and bloody death I’ve ever read, and living a perfect life all the while. And He did this so that I could be at peace with God, and have that peace in my life. That’s a sobering thought. I need to spend more time reflecting on that amazing, loving life and less time focusing in on my frustrations, I think.
I also could use a day off, perhaps, and a $LARGE_SUM_OF_MONEY landing in my bank account.
Maybe just a day off would help.
Just to answer my own question, sort of, I’ve found this.
which turns out to be very useful. It’s not quite as automatic as I would like, but it seems to work. In case the page is moved/removed/whatever, I’ll paste some of it here…
Assumptions
- that you know how to log in to CPanel
- that you know how to use Outlook, or know how to configure your Email client based on my descriptions of using Outlook, to add an IMAP account
- for these examples, the LunarPages account name is lpaccount and password is lppassword ; your domain name will be mydomain.com ; I’ll do my best to keep those colors used throughout this text to highlight where you’ll need to insert your own information.Terminology
SPAM: unsolicited Emails that you’ve received that want you to buy something or contain adult-themed references that you’d rather not get anymore.
HAM: non-spam, legitimate Emails
SA: short for SpamAssassinGetting Started
Generally speaking, there are a handful of steps to follow to get this working:
1. set up IMAP folders to hold spam and ham messages
2. set up an IMAP account in Outlook if you so choose
3. set up your SA user_prefs file
4. build the training Perl script
5. learning how to run the script
6. closing notes and suggestions
7. more thoughts on SpamAssassin1. Set up IMAP folders to hold spam and ham messages
- log in to cpanel
- click on the mail icon
- click on the ’spam assassin’ link
- click on the button to ‘enable spam assassin’
- click on the button to ‘enable spam box’- click the ‘home’ link at very top of the screen
- click on the ‘webmail’ icon
- click on the ’squirrelmail’ link
- click on the ‘folders’ link
*snip*
- also in the ‘folders’ screen, towards the top, you should be able to create new folders under a heading called ‘create a folder’
- create a folder called “myham” under the subfolder of ‘none’
- create a folder called “myspam” under the subfolder of ‘none’
- click ‘refresh folder list’ on left frame again, and you should see ‘myham’ and ‘myspam’ in the list2. Set up IMAP in Outlook to manage these mailboxes
*snip*
basically, this is very-well documented in the linked page and I won’t repeat it here. Suffice it to say here that the goal is to copy HAM (not SPAM, but mistakenly identified as SPAM) into the “myham” folder and missed SPAM into the myspam folder through your e-mail client.3. Set up SpamAssassin’s preferences file: user_prefs
SA has a configuration file that you should have accessible to you in your CPanel file manager.In CPanel:
- click on the File Manager icon
- should see a folder called /.spamassassin/
- click the folder icon beside it to move into that folder
- you should have 3 files in there:Quote:
bayes_toks holds data about various elements it has seen from messages from previous scans; this information includes where the message came from, the route it took to get to you, when the message was sent, who it was from, who it was to, the subject line, other headers, and elements within the body of the message itself
bayes_seen holds data about which messages it has looked at in the past
user_prefs is the configuration file we’re going to edit- click on user_prefs link to change the menu on the upper-right side of the screen, and click on ‘edit file’ from that menu
- here is what i have set in my configuration file, you will need to modify a few elements in this file:
Quote:
required_hits 5
rewrite_subject 1
subject_tag {SPAM}
bayes_path /home/ lpaccount /.spamassassin/bayes
bayes_file_mode 0600
bayes_ignore_header X-MailScanner
bayes_ignore_header X-MailScanner-SpamCheck
bayes_ignore_header X-MailScanner-SpamScore
bayes_ignore_header X-MailScanner-Information- save the file and close the window that CPanel opened for you to edit that file
- go up one level in the file manager
- go into public_html
- go into cgi-bin
- click on the link to ‘create a new file’
- call it “sa-learn.cgi” (no quotes)
- here are the contents of the file:#!/usr/bin/perl
my $salearn = “/usr/bin/sa-learn” ;
$| ;print “Content-type: text/plain\n\n” ;
print “Learning SPAM:\n” ;
print `$salearn -p /home/lpaccount/.spamassassin/user_prefs –mbox –spam –showdots /home/lpaccount/mail/myspam` ;
print “\n\n” ;print “Learning HAM:\n” ;
print `$salearn -p /home/lpaccount/.spamassassin/user_prefs –mbox –ham –showdots /home/lpaccount/mail/myham` ;
print “\n\n” ;exit ;
After a good couple of days of research, I’ve decided to take a chance on vortexhost.com. Unfortunately, I could not find any feedback on the webhost-reviewing sites about them, which doesn’t help put my mind at ease. But in the end, the really good comments I’ve read in vortexhost.com’s forums, combined with the really quick and professional replies to the e-mails I’ve sent Justin Reel (the admin of vortexhost) won me over to at least give them a try. They offer a 14-day money-back period, so here’s to hoping that I won’t need to see if I can get my money back.
This is the first time that I’ve ever wanted to leave my e-mail on my webhost. Previous to now, I’ve always used fetchmail to POP my e-mail off of the webhost to a machine on my home LAN, and then a combination of procmail for filtering, bogofilter for spam filtering, and courier-IMAP to store my e-mail on my home machine and be able to retrieve it via IMAP. Though the weakest link in this chain is the constantly-changing and semi-flaky Verizon DSL connection, this has worked pretty well for me for the last several years. The problem is that when this breaks (and it does, periodically), I am completely without e-mail. Which is why I want to start keeping my e-mail on my webhost, thinking that I should never go without e-mail this way.
The problems/differences that I’ve hit thus far:
- cPanel’s IMAP uses mbox instead of Maildir format for storing e-mail. I’ve had problems in the past with mbox corruption, and do NOT want to deal with this again. This is my biggest concern, actually. I am most tempted to change hosts (after < 1 day with my new host) and find a host that will use Maildir format for storing my e-mail. I’ve read that Plesk stores e-mail in Maildir format. You can look forward to seeing quite the rant here if for some reason, I lose e-mail because of cPanel/IMAP/mbox, I guarantee you that.
- SpamAssassin is the defacto standard used on cPanel-based sites nowadays. I’m a little leary of relying on it, as I’ve read that bogofilter is more efficient and has a better algorithm for dealing with spam. I’ve also had very good success with bogofilter for the last couple of years, and am a little hesitant to have to go through the learning process (pun intended) again. I’ve gotten bogofilter trained/seasoned very well by now…. So, what I cannot find information on is how you can train spamassassin on a webhost that uses cPanel. It can’t be that hard….
I had previously been using bogofilter on my home machine combined with procmail to check for spam. I had 2 folders set up for training bogofilter… one for Spam and one for Ham. I had a cron job that ran every couple of hours that went through these 2 folders and trained bogofilter as to what Spam it had missed or what Ham it had mistakenly identified as Spam. It worked. =:)
I need to be able to train SpamAssassin when it makes a mistake.
Does anyone know how I can do this? I don’t see anything built into cPanel that allows me to do this, nor do I see anything built into any of the webmail front-ends. Is there a “provided” or approved way to do this in a hosted site? Or do I need to create my own solution by using a similar approach to what I did before, with separate mailboxes and cron jobs?
So, I’m tired of having things sort of work and sort of not sometimes with regards to my web hosting company and e-mail. In researching for webhosts, I’ve found some interesting comments from others, most notably that most people start off with web hosts searching for the best price (like me–currently using hachour.net for their really cheap prices), and then after becoming frustrated with the lousy service and support and unprofessionalism, become willing to pay money to not have to deal with it.
That’s me.
If you know me, then you know that I am currently in the running for the top 10 cheapest individuals in the world. However, I am now willing to pay (as little as possible) for a good, reliable web host that gives me all of the things I want. Namely, these are:
- Linux server
- php4 with gd2
- ssh access
- IMAP access
- at least 1 mysql database
- at least 20 e-mail addresses
- SMTP access
- cron jobs
- spam filtering (including the ability to train the spam filter)
- administrative interface usable from Mozilla and Opera
So, here are the ones that I’m looking at…. None of them do SSH, so I’m thinking that’s something I can just live without…
hostvector.com : $5/month, 200M, $60/year
chronichosting.com : $4.25/month, 250M, $51/year
ixwebhosting.com : $6.99/month, 1500M, $85/year
vortexhost.com : $5/month, 250M, $55/year
Anyone (not that I’ve ever gotten ANY responses from anyone previously) familiar with any of these guys? Any suggestions? As you can see, I’m trying to stay in the $60/year-at-the-most range.
I realize most won’t care about this, but it’s an encouragement to me nonetheless. Adriaan has kindly accepted my new memofile conduit into kpilot’s CVS repository!! =:) I need to fix it up some as soon as I get a chance and make it kde-compliant for translations, etc., and I still need to get my hand-drawn UML diagrams into a tool and into CVS to go with the code, so those are the next 2 things on my todo-list.
Speaking of UML tools….
Umbrello does a very nice job of reverse-engineering my C++ classes, but it does a lousy job with drawing the diagrams. For methods that call other methods internally (you know, like just about every method in the world does???), I can’t for the life of me get it to play nice.
Poseidon seems to be a very nice tool…. which can’t bring in existing C++ files and in which case is useless to me.
Ditto for Visual UML–and to make matters worse, I think I read that they intentionally pulled out SQD-functionality.
Describe seems to do a semi-decent job of reverse-engineering C++ files, but if it hits something that it doesn’t like, it just skips it entirely instead of trying to at least give you something to work with.
Blargh.
Does ANYONE know of a feature-complete (C++ reverse-engineering AND competent drawing functions) UML tool???