lifebsideben

I run Spamassassin on my server where I have my primary email account (yes, I still run my own email server, I know, that’s so 1995). Anyhow, I haven’t upgraded Spamassassin, or its rulesets, in about 3 years, and the volume of spam that’s been slipping through is really getting insane. Sure, the clients can weed out a bunch of it, but their rules aren’t as sophisticated as everything that SA can do. I finally took the plunge and upgraded it, which actually was pretty painless considering I am running an ancient version of RH (really ancient, don’t ask) and was moving from an old RPM to a new source-build. I still had to upgrade probably a dozen or more CPAN modules, although that generally went smoothly. And of course now, I actually set up a cron job to update the rules, which should keep things working nicely.

The results? Instantly, I saw a massive improvement in terms of what SA was able to correctly flag as spam! I got my inbox back! I estimate it’s catching about 95% of the spams that were slipping through prior to the upgrade, now. There’s also a couple false positives I need to deal with (from Bacula, most concerningly), but that is the next mini-project.

As a nice bonus (ok, the real reason I was doing this), the mail on my iPhone is now much more hammy, which makes it infintely more useful as a mail-reader!

Tags: Computers, email, linux, productivity, software, spam

Roxio is the company that makes Toast, the best disc-burning software on the Mac. Which is a little like saying they make the best anti-virus software for Windows, in that it’s something the OS should really provide a pretty robust solution for. Anyhow, it is pretty good, and although I think I’ve yet to get it to transcode video into a DVD without crashing, it manages to do the basics–jamming files onto DVD-Rs, reasonably well.

The catch to all this, is that it’s a really expensive piece of software, at least for what I have successfully made it do, with a list price of $99. Now, I’m sure no one pays the list price, I mean even on their own site you can get it for $79. Still, eighty bucks is a lot for software that basically copies files. Plus, between Toast 6 and Toast 7, they removed some features at the behest of the MPAA. I don’t like my software companies taking orders from bully industry groups. But anyhow, I bought 6, and upgraded to 7, which cost me $60 as I recall. So, I’m into these guys for well over $100, and basically, just to burn backup copies of my digital photos. I mean, there’s some features about making audio CDs–oh wait, I use iTunes (free) for that, and for video editing–oh wait, I use iDVD for that (iLife came with my Mac). Still, I’ve been relatively happy with it as a product, and it makes burning the occasional .bin/.cue easier than not having it.

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Tags: bitching, dvd, email, roxio, software, spam, toast, upgrade