It was spews which blocked my email. If you're interested, here's the report for my IP: http://www.spews.org/html/S333.html . I'm sure you know more about spews than I do, but there are reasons why an IP may be blocked unfairly. For instance, a spammer may have used an IP on my host for spam, been kicked off the host as per its terms of use, and still be listed on spews. Imagine if you are the sort of hosting company who takes a lot of these $9.99 sites on an automated basis. You could get a number of spammers using your service before your sysadmins kick them off and follow up with legal action or whatever. It would then be difficult to get off the spews blacklist.
It's also possible that spews could just plain make a mistake, although I don't know anything about the process by which it blacklists IP ranges.
Of course it's your prerogative to use spews, just as it's mine to continue to stay with my hosting provider. They have cheap prices, great uptime and are very responsive to questions. It is this responsiveness which leads me to believe (albeit possibly incorrectly) that they would also be responsive to misuse of their network.
I've been setting up Fetchmail, Procmail and Spamassassin along with an IMAP server on my computer for the last couple weeks. Man, what a HUGE improvement over using my hosting company's POP3 servers!
Fetchmail polls my POP3 servers and downloads my mail to the local account(s).
SpamAssassin marks my messages as spam or not spam, and even after a week or so it's already pretty accurate.
Procmail dumps my spam into an IMAP mailbox that I can ignore and only check once a month or so, thereby avoiding issues with server-side blacklists. I can also use rexexp-based filtering rules which totally rock over Outlook's filters.
With IMAP, I can check my email using Pine, Evolution, or whatever on my linux computer, and from Outlook on my windows computer and laptop. All my email is synced automatically on all my computers, which is a Godsend when I'm away from home on my laptop.
I've been using UNIX for about 12 years and Linux off-and-on since about 1997, although I don't consider myself much of an expert with either. This stuff wasn't very difficult to set up, and my productivity is so much greater. It's flexibility like this that is causing me to reformat my windows drive for Linux on my main workstation as soon as I get the time.
Hear hear. I have a site (clarke.ca) on a shared host with webmasters.com. They are as "anti-spam" as the next hosting company, but for some reason my sister's little ISP on Vancouver Island blacklists them. I have my sister's email forwarded from the server to her email account on her local ISP. After a few months of not getting any email, she called me up and we found out that when mail was sent to her email address, my hosting provider's forwarding was sending it on to her ISP. Her ISP was sending a "you loser we don't want your mail" bounce back to my host, which was dumping it AND the original message and not sending a failure message back to the original sender.
Haha, this reminds me of my childhood in smalltown Zambia. The cool thing was to make wire cars. The were made entirely out of heavy wire and you could steer them and everything. Pretty cool. Anyway, my friend and I would go to this big telecom switch in the ground and pull out all the bright colourful wires to adorn our cars. I knew it wasn't the nicest thing to do but it wasn't until later when I looked back that I realized just how evil that was. Ironically enough, my friend ended up working for the telecom company.
On another note, we were one of the few people in town who actually had a phone line. 80% of the time it didn't work though (hmm I wonder why) and when my dad would complain, they would simply unplug someone else's working phone and plug his in, until someone else complained and our phone got unplugged again. Aaah, the good old days.
So technology has made NO positive impact in any sport you play? Comments like this may come across as insightful to others, and that's great, but to me it sounds like you're a grouchy old stick-in-the mud. Does your sport have footwear? Possibly you've forgotten how much improvement there has been in functional, comfortable and durable athletic footwear in the last twenty years. Try putting on a pair of football (oops soccer) cleats from the early '80s, or skates, or running shoes. Maybe your sports don't require specialized footwear (bridge? chess?) but I for one appreciate not having to purchase a new pair of shoes every 6 months because I wore out the old ones.
I just finished reading a large supplement to last week's Wired magazine that pooh-poohed 3G in favour of 802.11x. They even interviewed T-Mobile's CEO and how they're providing internet access in Starbucks restaurants. Articles can be found here.
Wired must really hedge their bets because I see on their home page they now have Analysts Sour on Commercial Wi-Fi. Aaah, the "news".
How this guy managed to trumpet his horn into becoming a usability expert is beyond me.
I guess in his opinion the best design is no design. Sure, if you have a site like his which exists purely to disseminate information, then having simple text is fine. I like simple text sites. Mine's like that, mostly because I can't do decent graphics though.
However, if your objective is to sell product, this sort of design generally falls flat on its face. Like mblase said, there's very little indication of what's more important than anything else. What the heck is behind the "Paper Prototyping" link on his home page? Huh? Or "Low-End Media for User Empowerment"? How about "DUI GUI PHOOEY"? OK I made that one up but it's just about as informative as the rest of them.
All Nielsen really teaches me is that I should go off and be an "expert" in something too.
OK granted I wasn't the MOST involved in social activities, but when I graduated with a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo (1-2 hours away from McMaster, in Southern Ontario) 7 years ago, I never HEARD of any "Kipling" ceremony.
We had the IRS (Iron Ring Stag), and the Iron Ring Ceremony, and of course graduation, but that's all *I* recall...
As a Canadian with a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada), I was quite shocked when I first moved to the US and found out you could be a "Sales Engineer" without even needing a high school diploma. WTF is a Sales Engineer anyways. To agree with the poster above, in Canada "Engineer" is a PROFESSIONAL designation, like "Doctor". I very much doubt that this law is making Texas the "laughingstock of the global high-technology community". If anything, it helps prevent the dilution of a professional designation, thereby giving Texas a MORE professional appearance in the marketplace.
Dictionary.com defines "engineer" as:
1. One who is trained or professionally engaged in a branch of engineering.
2. One who operates an engine.
3. One who skillfully or shrewdly manages an enterprise.
I have a degree in Engineering, and I have my own consulting firm for which I do a lot of "engineering". However, I don't feel that this makes me an engineer any more than having a degree in pre-med would make me a doctor. IMHO "sales engineers" and the like should have their business cards struck by lightning.
Just do what I do - go get business cards printed up that say "president" on them, haha:-)
Just to add to your post, for maybe that 80% of the market, the bells and whistles ARE a functional part of their computer. People buy computers as "toys" quite often - sure they write email and browse the web, but it's mostly for "fun". So if using their computer is more "fun", then it is more usable because that is ultimately what they want from it.
No harm in that.
Thanks to a system upgrade by defense contractor Lockheed Martin (LMT ), flyboys (and girls) could hop onto a special Air Force network from any PC equipped with a Web browser and special military encryption and authentication software. Once on this network, they could call for air strikes, direct reconaissance planes, or plot the movements of the most powerful flying force on Earth -- all from their laptop in a café (or, more likely, at a secured facility). "All you need is Internet Explorer," says Doug Barton, the director of technology for Lockheed Martin Mission Systems, based in Gaithersburg, Md.
Man, that is really REALLY REALLY scary. Either that or it's just a massive honeypot for catching would-be "cyberterrorists" (oh how I hate that word).
Seriously, for an organization who can't even protect their web servers, how the )(&#@)(% do they expect to secure the entire US military? ORDER MILITARY STRIKES OVER THE INTERNET? Geez...
And actually since 1991 its reliability record has risen considerably. I remember reading a couple years ago that they had the highest customer satisfaction index of any luxury vehicle.
Some insects DO lay things in you when they bite.
on
First Man To Mars?
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· Score: 1
I'm not kidding. It happened to me when I was a kid, growing up in Zambia. I still have the scars on my leg, and was a very painful and gross experience. If you leave your clothes out on the line at night, they lay eggs or something on your clothes. Then the insect burrows a larva in under your skin, where it festers and grows, and eventually flies out if you let it. You kill it by putting vasoline over the wound so the larva can't breathe. After it's died, you pop it out, along with a lot of puss.
I'm REALLY NOT making this up. Notice that the snopes.com article talks about SPIDERS crawling out of womens' cheeks, not other bugs. Check out the section under "Warble(s)" here, for instance.
I wonder - would it have mattered any more or less if it had have been Asian-Americans, or even *gasp* caucasians walking along in the mall, holding hands and talking on their cell phones?
Umm, I read that as Dell being the customer and having a harder time obtaining printers. Really you and I are Dell's customers. Dell is HP's customer (or was).
Well, I guess I'll have to run out and get one now. My current iPod is exactly 7.692% too thick! Thank goodness the new one isn't, say, only 7.69*1* percent thinner...
You don't have to use aerosol sprays to see the laser beams because they're VISIBLE!! Geez, don't you watch movies AT ALL?!;-)
(note to those of you who don't get sarcasm - yes I know you can't see laser beams. But you can in the movies. That's my point. So you don't have to respond to say that you can't see laser beams. Thank you.)
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It's also possible that spews could just plain make a mistake, although I don't know anything about the process by which it blacklists IP ranges.
Of course it's your prerogative to use spews, just as it's mine to continue to stay with my hosting provider. They have cheap prices, great uptime and are very responsive to questions. It is this responsiveness which leads me to believe (albeit possibly incorrectly) that they would also be responsive to misuse of their network.
Fetchmail polls my POP3 servers and downloads my mail to the local account(s).
SpamAssassin marks my messages as spam or not spam, and even after a week or so it's already pretty accurate.
Procmail dumps my spam into an IMAP mailbox that I can ignore and only check once a month or so, thereby avoiding issues with server-side blacklists. I can also use rexexp-based filtering rules which totally rock over Outlook's filters.
With IMAP, I can check my email using Pine, Evolution, or whatever on my linux computer, and from Outlook on my windows computer and laptop. All my email is synced automatically on all my computers, which is a Godsend when I'm away from home on my laptop.
I've been using UNIX for about 12 years and Linux off-and-on since about 1997, although I don't consider myself much of an expert with either. This stuff wasn't very difficult to set up, and my productivity is so much greater. It's flexibility like this that is causing me to reformat my windows drive for Linux on my main workstation as soon as I get the time.
Hear hear. I have a site (clarke.ca) on a shared host with webmasters.com. They are as "anti-spam" as the next hosting company, but for some reason my sister's little ISP on Vancouver Island blacklists them. I have my sister's email forwarded from the server to her email account on her local ISP. After a few months of not getting any email, she called me up and we found out that when mail was sent to her email address, my hosting provider's forwarding was sending it on to her ISP. Her ISP was sending a "you loser we don't want your mail" bounce back to my host, which was dumping it AND the original message and not sending a failure message back to the original sender.
Haha, this reminds me of my childhood in smalltown Zambia. The cool thing was to make wire cars. The were made entirely out of heavy wire and you could steer them and everything. Pretty cool. Anyway, my friend and I would go to this big telecom switch in the ground and pull out all the bright colourful wires to adorn our cars. I knew it wasn't the nicest thing to do but it wasn't until later when I looked back that I realized just how evil that was. Ironically enough, my friend ended up working for the telecom company.
On another note, we were one of the few people in town who actually had a phone line. 80% of the time it didn't work though (hmm I wonder why) and when my dad would complain, they would simply unplug someone else's working phone and plug his in, until someone else complained and our phone got unplugged again. Aaah, the good old days.
Yep, there's nothing quite like a good fork...
So technology has made NO positive impact in any sport you play? Comments like this may come across as insightful to others, and that's great, but to me it sounds like you're a grouchy old stick-in-the mud. Does your sport have footwear? Possibly you've forgotten how much improvement there has been in functional, comfortable and durable athletic footwear in the last twenty years. Try putting on a pair of football (oops soccer) cleats from the early '80s, or skates, or running shoes. Maybe your sports don't require specialized footwear (bridge? chess?) but I for one appreciate not having to purchase a new pair of shoes every 6 months because I wore out the old ones.
I just finished reading a large supplement to last week's Wired magazine that pooh-poohed 3G in favour of 802.11x. They even interviewed T-Mobile's CEO and how they're providing internet access in Starbucks restaurants. Articles can be found here.
Wired must really hedge their bets because I see on their home page they now have Analysts Sour on Commercial Wi-Fi. Aaah, the "news".
How this guy managed to trumpet his horn into becoming a usability expert is beyond me.
I guess in his opinion the best design is no design. Sure, if you have a site like his which exists purely to disseminate information, then having simple text is fine. I like simple text sites. Mine's like that, mostly because I can't do decent graphics though.
However, if your objective is to sell product, this sort of design generally falls flat on its face. Like mblase said, there's very little indication of what's more important than anything else. What the heck is behind the "Paper Prototyping" link on his home page? Huh? Or "Low-End Media for User Empowerment"? How about "DUI GUI PHOOEY"? OK I made that one up but it's just about as informative as the rest of them.
All Nielsen really teaches me is that I should go off and be an "expert" in something too.
OK granted I wasn't the MOST involved in social activities, but when I graduated with a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo (1-2 hours away from McMaster, in Southern Ontario) 7 years ago, I never HEARD of any "Kipling" ceremony.
We had the IRS (Iron Ring Stag), and the Iron Ring Ceremony, and of course graduation, but that's all *I* recall...
SQL is a lot like that:
select firstName, lastName from users where email = 'hello@there.co.uk'
etc. While you're doing the simple stuff, it's very intuitive.
As a Canadian with a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada), I was quite shocked when I first moved to the US and found out you could be a "Sales Engineer" without even needing a high school diploma. WTF is a Sales Engineer anyways. To agree with the poster above, in Canada "Engineer" is a PROFESSIONAL designation, like "Doctor". I very much doubt that this law is making Texas the "laughingstock of the global high-technology community". If anything, it helps prevent the dilution of a professional designation, thereby giving Texas a MORE professional appearance in the marketplace. Dictionary.com defines "engineer" as: 1. One who is trained or professionally engaged in a branch of engineering. 2. One who operates an engine. 3. One who skillfully or shrewdly manages an enterprise. I have a degree in Engineering, and I have my own consulting firm for which I do a lot of "engineering". However, I don't feel that this makes me an engineer any more than having a degree in pre-med would make me a doctor. IMHO "sales engineers" and the like should have their business cards struck by lightning. Just do what I do - go get business cards printed up that say "president" on them, haha :-)
Just to add to your post, for maybe that 80% of the market, the bells and whistles ARE a functional part of their computer. People buy computers as "toys" quite often - sure they write email and browse the web, but it's mostly for "fun". So if using their computer is more "fun", then it is more usable because that is ultimately what they want from it. No harm in that.
I'm still trying to figure out how many football fields that is...
I wonder if anybody who ever worked for a "linux company" now either uses a Microsoft product or works for Microsoft. Wouldn't THAT be crazy??
All the crazy aussies were shouting that at the '96 olympic rowing events. That's all I know...
And actually since 1991 its reliability record has risen considerably. I remember reading a couple years ago that they had the highest customer satisfaction index of any luxury vehicle.
I'm not kidding. It happened to me when I was a kid, growing up in Zambia. I still have the scars on my leg, and was a very painful and gross experience. If you leave your clothes out on the line at night, they lay eggs or something on your clothes. Then the insect burrows a larva in under your skin, where it festers and grows, and eventually flies out if you let it. You kill it by putting vasoline over the wound so the larva can't breathe. After it's died, you pop it out, along with a lot of puss.
I'm REALLY NOT making this up. Notice that the snopes.com article talks about SPIDERS crawling out of womens' cheeks, not other bugs. Check out the section under "Warble(s)" here, for instance.
Umm, did you go to their web site? Did you read it? From the tiny little text at the bottom:
"This site is laid out with the use of CSS boxes and conforms to HTML 4.0 and CSS 2 standards. It is best viewed in Mozilla."
I wonder - would it have mattered any more or less if it had have been Asian-Americans, or even *gasp* caucasians walking along in the mall, holding hands and talking on their cell phones?
Just wondering...
Umm, I read that as Dell being the customer and having a harder time obtaining printers. Really you and I are Dell's customers. Dell is HP's customer (or was).
If you're doing MS SQL development, this site is awesome.
http://www.sqlteam.com
Well, I guess I'll have to run out and get one now. My current iPod is exactly 7.692% too thick! Thank goodness the new one isn't, say, only 7.69*1* percent thinner...
OK but would YOU create your security system out of ultra-cool ultra-expensive visible green lasers?
No, you'd use the visible red ones, because that's what Hollywood uses for their security.
why am i even typing
You don't have to use aerosol sprays to see the laser beams because they're VISIBLE!! Geez, don't you watch movies AT ALL?! ;-)
(note to those of you who don't get sarcasm - yes I know you can't see laser beams. But you can in the movies. That's my point. So you don't have to respond to say that you can't see laser beams. Thank you.)