Windsurfer acquired

Finally got my own windsurfer today. Mistral Screamer 130L, with a 4.7" sail. It's a beginner board.

There's a cyclone nearby generating some serious wind. Let's hope it sticks around for a couple of days into the Christmas holidays. At Le Morne the wind was 28 knots (14 m/s).

My watch on the support phone. Received the first INT call, incidently from BoD member Mr. Rasmussen, through a routed VoIP call to a local Mauritius cell phone. I'm relatively impressed by Asterisk.

Just discovered that you can browse through all of the US patents using Google. How cool is that? http://www.google.com/patents

Heftig day

Spent the day

• Wind surfing for two hours. It was AWESOME. The wind was great and I'm getting the hang of using a harness. Lukas, Anne and her mom tagged along and they had a great time in the water, which is now 25 degrees and climbing!
• Went home from Le Morne and played 1 hour of tennis with Vincent (neighbor) and Anne at the Tamarin Hotel.
• Jogged home from the hotel.

Don't really know where all that energy is coming from, but it feels pretty good right now!

I'm getting too much spam!

I'm starting to get way way too much spam, and probably like the rest of you (at least the ones reading this) I've spent some time thinking about this problem.
Brians first solution was to install Spam Assassin, or something similar, on our mail server - which I did, and for a few days I was actually just a tad impressed.
However, I started to get more spam in the days following and I just realized that we can't stop the spam.

The reason is that they have increasingly started to attach images to the spam. This was previously a very expensive operation when sending to millions in one go, mainly because of bandwidth issues I suspect. Apparently this is not an issue anymore because I'm getting a ton of these.

Why do these spam mails run thru the spam filters? Well, because they are clever. They body contents of the mail contains a simple short random message - typically in the form of a poem. And then there is the attachment which is randomly named.

Some filters have begun examining the images, but that won't (in the long run) work either, because just like the world has invented word verification when submitting posts, so will the spammers. The images are already beginning to be distorted, like illustrated. There's no way a computer will be able to identify this as spam.

The spam filters can't flag these type of emails as spam because the message is gibberish and random, with one image attached to it, which the spam filter also can't recognize. In other words, we're doomed for more spam.

Microsoft has proposed an interesting way to prevent spam.

1. Sender Id. The first idea was Sender Id, which in fact was not Microsoft's in the first place. The concept involves knowing who the sender was, where certain headers would incorporate some sort of legitimacy. As BBC reporter analyzes, this could be spoofed I would suspect.
2. Email taxation. The second solution is much more interesting, because that involves an entirely different mechanism - the notion of taxing the sender of the all emails. Read more here.
   The idea is that the computer must use a little time to compute some sort of sequence of digits, which normal users would never notice when sending mails. Spammers would however require a substantial number of computers to be able to send as many emails as they do today.

My opinion about the solutions:

1. Sender Id: The algorithm to produce the sender id could be hacked, thus simulating other domains. Besides, if ALL sending computers was required to have a secure id of some sort (similar to a SSL certificate) the cost of setting up an SMTP server would be too great - only the rich would be able to send emails.
2. Email taxation: This is a not a bad solution, really. But, it would still prevent legitimate companies to send newsletters to all it's subscribers without it either: taking too long, or costing too much.

How about open source organizations or NGO's? They don't have money - and to some extent not even their own hardware. How could they possible send emails to all of its potential users?

I've come up with a another solution. The possible solution actually originated from something my former partner and colleague Jørgen Juul mentioned when he ranted about the amount of spam he was getting. He said that an email from me was flagged as spam, which I found very strange, but the reason was that his home-made spam filter (they also use Spam Assassin) would reject ALL emails except if a certain rules passed. How about that? Normal spam filters assume that all is accepted, except if certain rules apply. His solution was definately a (sad) twist. He was simply getting so much spam that he was forced to reverse the criterias.

White list SMTP servers
Instead of having black lists, let's have ONLY white lists. This way, your mail server would only accept emails from servers that are registered and on the list. It would in other words assume that all email from everyone was spam, except mails that come from certain servers.

If your server was not registered the email would bounce with a reply that the sending SMTP server is unregistered and they need to either register their server OR submit a request for direct send to a user, without being registered. I’ll get back to the latter part later.

So, which body should be the registration organ?

• The system would never work unless it was totally open and the people authorizing servers consisted of volunteers.
• The authorizing body would consist of the sys-admins of large corporate firms and open source organizations. The same people that, today, spend way too much of their time trying to prevent spam.
• The same people authorizing would most likely also be able to provide authorizing servers free of charge (another reason for it to be open and free, because other wise the cost of setting up authorizing servers would be too costly).

What is a registration of a “server”

• A registration of a server consists of an IP-address and a domain name.

So, how does a SMTP server get approved?

1. Pay one dollar with a credit card.
2. If you know some of the people that are either: Already approved, or on the approving committee, then the registration would be accomplished quicker (the more you know the quicker, and if you know more than, say 5, you get auto-approved).
3. If you don’t know anyone from the committee OR don’t know anyone that can vouch for you (very unlikely after a while), then you have to wait for someone to physically call you to verify your identity.

The plan here, the whole know-somebody and so on, is to establish a network of trustworthy people much like LinkedIn.

Anyway, the reason it would cost one dollar is simply to have relatively sound proof of identity.

Obviously, these admin guys doing the approval of SMTP servers would not have the time to approve in a fast enough pace (at least in the beginning) so the obvious little money machine would exists for a company that would have staff that approves servers more rapidly.

The results of this solution would hopefully be

• Never receive unsolicited email anymore
• You would know that the email you do receive would come from someone that you would be able to hold accountable. You would literally be able to trace back to originator just like the Sender Id scheme.
• Small companies, open source organisations, or NGO’s could still be mass-emailing without buying a ton of hardware.
• The above mentioned organizations wishing to send emails would only have to pay 1 dollar, not the amount of a Sender Id certificate or SSL certificate or similar.

If someone violated the “spamming rules”, the same rules would apply that today get companies on black lists. They would have to prove that they were sending to consenting users. If not, they would be removed from the white list of SMTP servers. This alone should ensure that people take spamming seriously because all their other corporate email would bounce from then on.
If someone started spamming they would not only risk their own credentials, but also the entire network of co-authorizing buddies.

Now, back to the part about sending emails from a server that is not on the white list. This would be done via a submit form on the solutions website, with word verification and what have you, that would effectively prevent a computer from doing it, but allow normal users to send emails – with a few more hoops to complete, but what the hell, it’ll be worth it.

This idea is just a sketch, but the rough guide lines are hopefully outlined.

RSS feeds

Det er faktisk først nu gået op for mig at folk for alvor skriver interessante ting i de her blogs - måske fordi jeg selv skriver ting som generelt ikke er specielt interessante, eller dvs. jeg håber de er interessante, men jeg er klar over at det kun er for en lille håndfuld mennesker (og selv den lille mængde vold hygger sig nok ikke engang).

Nå, men jeg har brug for lidt hjælp. Jeg har brug for en RSS aggregator så jeg slipper for at holde øje med de få blogs jeg er interesserede i. Derfor, hvem af Jer har nogle gode erfaringer mht. at få fx emails med dagens RSS feed opdateringer?

Krav:

• Da layout - for mig - har en vis betydning, må aggregator'en gerne sende i HTML format og ikke ligne total skrald.
• Den skal ikke sende en mail pr. opdatering, men i en samlet mail (jeg får NOK spam i forvejen).

Jeg har denne liste hvis nogen også syntes det er en god idé. Se mere her.

Kenny går ombord

Fantastisk, vi har fundet en sælger til det nordiske markede. Dejligt - så kan jeg slippe for at flyve helt så mange gange til DK.

Manden hedder Kenny Bogø og er Adobes mand i Danmark - forstået på den måde at han er den person som holder foredraget, når Adobe lancerer en ny version af fx Acrobat Reader.

Manden har over 12 års erfaring som konsulent/sælger til den grafiske industri. Han ved alt om InDesign og Adobes øvrige produkter og bedst af alt - han syntes vores produkt er for smart!

Velkommen ombord Kenny!

File copy without using the system cache?

 

The problem

Have you tried copying a VERY large file (ie 2-10 GB), maybe a big SQL backup or a Virtual PC file, or just a movie?

Have you noticed how this totally damages the Windows system file cache? What I mean is this, it looks like the system has swapped everything to disk because of the large file copy.

 

Why this is a problem

Already open applications respond as if they are being fetched from disk (noticeable I/O).

Normal performance is temporarely severely affected due to this since everything appears to be reloaded from disk.

 

The way the Windows file cache works, is fine for normal app use, but files today can be extremely big and the fact that Windows thinks everything must be available for fast reading is not always in the users best interest.

Most users don't have 2 gb available for file cache anyway - and normal users/apps are not even interested in being able to read a given file quickly yet another time.

 

A possible solution

One way to fix this would be to have a low-level driver that copies file(s) without affecting the Windows file cache.

 

How to activate:

 

Several ways could be interesting

• Hot folders. Most interesting way from a server usage stand point.
  • By using hot folders the user could for instance monitor file activity for FTP, or general file server usages.
  • This way a server would still be able to be of general use even though large files are being served.
• Hot-keys
  • Most usefull for general users.
  • Hold down CTRL+ALT (or what-ever) and then issue a file copy operation.
  • All files that begin to be copied are now surpassing the file cache. This might affect other files, but during normal operations, who cares if a few files skip the file cache.
• Scheduled
• Server usage again. During backup schedules and general maintenance.
• What typically happends is this: The backup starts and the system is generally totally crippled by the heavy I/O. Existing critical apps gets swapped out (such as Exchange server, IIS, etc) and the next time a mail arrives / a user hits a website upto 20-30 seconds of penalty can occur.
• By size
• Files being accessed that are larger than XX mb/gb are ignored by the Windows cache.

Another extra small feature this app could have would be to be able to copy files SLOWLY. Sometimes you want to copy files to/from a server that is being used heavily without severely affecting availability (yes yes, I could write a program that does that quite easily, but it would fit nicely into this app's context).

 

Anyone?

37 grader

Kl. er ca 11 og vi stiger ind i bilen for at køre i supermarkedet. 34 grader viser termometeret i bilen. Puha.

 

Efter frokost tager vi til stranden - nu viser termometeret 37 grader - i skyggen. Ganske vist er bilen sort og tiltrækker meget sol, men alligevel.

 

Lille Lukas er ikke specielt tilfreds med at skulle sidde i så varm en bil- hvilket vi sagtens kan forstå!