April, 22, 2002 archives

while doing maintenance on the php.net machines this weekend, i turned off the filter i'd been using to block mails to the root address that had a subject of 'failure notice' (ie, all the double-bounces). i am staggered by the amount of spam that is pounding against the whitelist-protected mailing addresses, and bogus mail addresses (like birthdaycheck@php.net) that happened to be published as examples, once upon a time. i'm going to apply the aardvark and zygote trick to these latter addresses. (that is, immediately put the sender in qmail's badmailfrom file, which will prevent any mail from that sender to any php.net address.)

it's nice when “ask slashdot” has a question you need answered. this thread on http log analysis tools is one of those. i think that what i'll be looking for is something to get a handle on intra-website flow, which will probably demand something more dynamic than what i've dealt with in the past.

when i read an article like this about the piles of phantom menace tie-in products in warehouses, it reminds me of the half-dozen-or-so boxes of empire strikes back glasses that are sitting in my parent's garage.

(but holy cow—this site is selling those same glasses for $90 a set, or $80 a set for the return of the jedi glasses.)

this email from paul prescod on the www-tag mailing list is the best explanation of why soap was a poor choice of interface implementation for the google api that i've read. (roy fielding's email from the same thread blasting soap is great, too. you can always count on roy to be entertaining.)

it's entirely unsurprising that they used soap, though. it's junk food for programmers.