I fancy having a go at coding an alternative spam filter plugin for Wordpress.
For me Akismet does capture a hell of a lot but misses the odd few.

I’d like to try integrating something like CRM114 discriminator into a plugin. Maybe into the back end of Spam Karma 2 which seems like a good place to start now that it’s GPL’ed.

FYI Spam Karma has been moved over to Google Code as the lead dev is retiring from its’ active development. His site with a fair amount of docs and info can be found at Dave’s Blog >> Spam Karma.

Cam.

Over the last couple of days have you been struggling with the slick icy pavements in Glasgow ?

Is it just my perception or have Glasgow City Council been really slow off the mark getting roads and pavements treated with road salt, if at all ?

Not only that but can you even find any grit bins ?
I know that they get taken in during the summer months but I think that they must be stockpiled somewhere waiting to be deployed too late to make a difference.

I called Glasgow City Council Road Department today to complain about the pavements outside our shop to be told that they don’t have a list of where the grit bins are and that if I wanted one, I’d need to apply in writing !

If you don’t know where they are,

1. How do you refill them when they are empty ?
2. How do you collect them in come summer ?

A few of our customers from South Lanarkshire said that their council seems to be coping so why can’t ours ?
Come on Glasgow City Council, get your act together and pay more attention to the Met Office !!

</Rant>

Cam.

I’ve not had the best day trying to get a Gentoo Hardened kernel running in a Xen DomU.

After remembering that adding console=ttyS0 to the grub kernel line can be really helpful when stacks are flying past you, I discovered that there’s a bug in QEMU that’s trying to write to an area protected by the Hardened Kernel.

Here’s the oops;

[root@oxo xen]# xm create -c firewall.eigen
Using config file “./firewall.eigen”.
Started domain firewall.eigen
Linux version 2.6.25-hardened-r10 (root@oxo.eigen) (gcc version 4.1.2 (Gentoo 4.1.2 p1.0.2)) #2 SMP Tue Dec 2 16:00:41 Local time zone must be set–see zic m
Command line: root=/dev/hda3 console=ttyS0 pax_softmode=1
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)

<snip all the bog standard kernel guff>

Kernel command line: root=/dev/hda3 console=ttyS0 pax_softmode=1
kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
VFS: Mounted root (ext3 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 252k freed
PAX: swapper:1, uid/euid: 0/0, attempted to modify kernel code
BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request at ffffffff803eb060
IP: [<ffffffff80200c40>]
PGD 3e4067 PUD 3e8063 PMD 2001e1
Oops: 0003 [1] SMP
CPU 0
Modules linked in:
Pid: 1, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.25-hardened-r10 #2
RIP: 0010:[<ffffffff80200c40>]  [<ffffffff80200c40>]
RSP: 0000:ffffffff806abe88  EFLAGS: 00010046
RAX: 0000000000000000 RBX: ffffffff80600670 RCX: 000000008005003b
RDX: 0000000000000000 RSI: 0000000000000000 RDI: 0000000000180018
RBP: ffffffff80600320 R08: ffff81000785b91c R09: ffff81000785b900
R10: ffff81000785b900 R11: 0000000000063851 R12: ffff810007856b60
R13: ffff810007856810 R14: ffffffff80600320 R15: ffffffff80600b00
FS:  0000000000000000(0000) GS:ffffffff80673000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
CS:  0010 DS: 0018 ES: 0018 CR0: 000000008004003b
CR2: ffffffff803eb060 CR3: 00000000003e1000 CR4: 00000000000006e0
DR0: 0000000000000000 DR1: 0000000000000000 DR2: 0000000000000000
DR3: 0000000000000000 DR6: 00000000ffff0ff0 DR7: 0000000000000400
Process swapper (pid: 1, threadinfo ffff81000785a000, task ffff810007856810)
Stack:  ffff810001005780 ffff810001007900 ffffffff80600320 0000000000000000
ffffffff80600000 0000000000000000 00000000fffedd8f ffffffff803d10d2
ffffffff806abf58 0000000000000046 0000000000063881 ffffffff80218566
Call Trace:

Code: 53 32 89 d7 66 41 0b 7c 24 32 74 04 31 c0 8e da 89 ce 48 c1 e6 0c 0f 20 c1 48 89 c8 48 25 ff ff fe ff 0f 22 c0 31 d2 48 8b 04 d3 <48> 89 84 d6 60 b0 3e 80 48 ff c2 48 83 fa 03 75 eb 0f 22 c1 8c
RIP  [<ffffffff80200c40>]
RSP <ffffffff806abe88>
CR2: ffffffff803eb060
—[ end trace 4c1898a7f99977f8 ]—
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

As the observant among you may have noticed, I’d already tried switching off PaX but it appears to be deeper than that.

I found some good bugs reports and a Gentoo Bugs entry that’s been reopened.

• Observations from Reto Gantenbein on how the same kernels work with different versions of qemu.
• Discussion between Natanael Copa and Gentoo Hardened’s pageexec on this very issue
• Gentoo Bug 177387 - using app-emulation/qemu with app-emulation/kqemu resulting a GPF on hardened-sources and enabled PAX_KERNEXEC

For your info, I was trying hardened-sources 2.6.25-r10 with gcc 4.1.2 on 64-bit Xeon.
Just let me know if you want a copy of my kernel config.

Cammy.

In case anybody has ever wondered, please find below a list of orange animals;

• Tigers
• Goldfish
• Clown Fish
• Butterflies
• Foxes
• The Common and Ushindi Ost

More orange animals coming soon …..
Your suggestions are more than welcome too.

Hi,

After much hard work, heartache, and more money than we ever thought it would take, we’ve finally got Pure Mayhem soft play open in Bridgeton, Glasgow !!!

Things seem to be going well and the entry numbers are starting to build nicely. We’re pleased to have regular customers already.

Just waiting on the printers for the next big marketing push.

Cam.

Did anyone else see what looked like a meteor shower about 20:50 tonight ?

My daughter and I were looking towards the northern sky tonight and noticed about 10-14 glowing objects moving along the same trajectory.

They were definitely not planes as there was no flashing lights and some of them very close together. They also seemed to fizzle out as they reached about the north east direction.

Never got any pics I’m afraid.

Cam.

Some people believe that there’s actually an active volcano in the Scottish Borders. Co-incidentally, it’s almost directly under Peebles High School, an establishment attended by many young people in the surrounding area.

The main fault line runs down from Penicuik through Kalimdor, then into Peebles, continuing south before stopping around Newcastle.

On a final note, if you are Mark Connolly, I can’t believe that you fell for this you total tube !!!!!!!

I was watching ‘Nina and the Neurons’ on CBeebies recently and noticed a bonkers piece of driving.
When she’s driving back from meeting ‘The Experiementers’, she’s singing away to the camera car in front with a Mercedes Vito behind her when suddenly, some looney decides to overtake all three cars in one go.

Has anyone else seen this ?

I’d love to be able to share this with you but don’t have my freeview dvr card setup.

Cam.

I was looking to show my daughter the Hale and Pace rendition of ‘The William Tell Overture’ and stumbled across it on Youtube the other day. Classic Hale and Pace humour.

After three…1….2….3…. Poppadom, Poppadom,Poppadom, pom pom…….

Yesterday, I posted some stuff on Ebay and it seems to be taking a rediculous amount of time to appear in the search index. It would seem to be a common problem as the Answers section of their site is full of similar questions.

This seller has some interesting information about why it takes so long. They reckon that it takes about 24 hours for items to appear in the search listings due to Ebay scrutinising for fake goods. Apparently, Sunday (today) is also a bad day for getting items into the index. I personally don’t believe that they manually handle each item posting, especially for what I’m selling, some fast food tables in the ‘Business, Office & Industrial >> Restaurant & Catering >> Furniture/ Décor’ category.

My question is if Ebay know this, why do they bother offering 1 day and 3 day auctions over the weekend then ?
I suspect it’s because they really don’t care.

Cam.