i summon one kim

Half a year ago I mentioned greylisting as an option to fight spam. A few months ago NetBSD.org enabled greylisting and it made a huge difference in the amount of spam and viruses being forwarded to me. Now I finally got around to deploying postgrey on the Global Wire mail infrastructure.

Greylisting is so simple that it seems strange that it is as effective as it is. I’m certainly going to enjoy it as long as it keeps working. Unfortunately I don’t expect that to be more than a year…

For implementations of greylisting on different platforms, have a look at greylisting.org.

Aaarrrggghh!

I ended up writing the bottom half of the previous article three times, thanks to not having been careful enough when upgrading WordPress. I had lost my fixes that send out the necessary headers to prevent the admin pages from being cached. I guess others don’t get bit by this because they don’t have ExpiresActive enabled on their web server.

Anyway, I’ve saved the changes in a patch file now, for future reference…

I wanted to see if I could have my WordPress links in the Firefox Bookmarks menu. I thought this should be possible, since it knows about RSS. From using reBlog I had learned about FeedCreator, which is a great package for quickly creating feeds. So I enhanced wp-links to support feeds.

However, I was to be disappointed — the links are in Firefox now, but they are all piled up together in a single huge menu. In the WordPress database the links are categorized, as can be seen on my links page. I was hoping Firefox would use the categories to create more subfolders.

I thought about another approach: XBEL. The format is simple enough to follow, so I added XBEL support to FeedCreator 1.7.2. This works perfectly with the Bookmarks Synchronizer plugin for Firefox. I’ve configured it to download a single subdirectory inside Bookmarks, and all my WordPress link categories show up as subdirectories inside it.

I’ve made some sample code available to show how I’m calling wp-links. The code won’t run as-is, as it calls some other libraries I’m using. It should be simple enough, though, to remove (or ignore) the “extra” stuff.

I was surprised to see a new version of the old IceS client — after all, it wasn’t supposedly developed anymore. The reason I’ve packaged it is that it supports streaming of MP3 data. My Audiotron doesn’t handle Ogg Vorbis, which is the only format supported by the new IceS client.

So, to stay current on the version, I’ve upgraded the ices-mp3 package to version 0.4. It adds FLAC support, actually, so that might be a reason to upgrade. Note that it transcodes the data, though, so you’ll need the CPU power to decode FLAC and encode it to MP3 (using LAME).

I recently had some time to go through all the packages I maintain to see what version upgrades would be needed. One long overdue one was www/wml.

It wasn’t an easy upgrade, though. Since the software apparently hasn’t been maintained for a couple of years, it took some work to make it work with the pkgsrc framework. It seems that we expect more recent behaviour from configure scripts than what was available 3-4 years ago.

I got the software to compile, finally. I just hope I didn’t break any functionality. I don’t have a wml-based website to test with anymore.

I have new versions of Firefox running on my computers, and I was busy adding block images rules on each one. I thought this was less than ideal, so I decided to give Privoxy a new try. I saw that a new version is out, so I updated the www/privoxy package as well. Apart from getting more up-to-date filters, there’s a memory leak fix and I could also enable threads for parallel request handling.