Articles

It finally happened. Something has finally irked me enough to write about Internet Piracy.

When I send email to some of my contacts, I have been getting a bounce message indicating my email was being treated as spam. This is due to my IP addresses being in a range of IPs on a Realtime Blackhole List (RBL). The idea of an RBL is simple - if you send spam, your IP gets tagged as a spammer and added to a list. Other responsible mail admins can "subscribe" to the list and then block any messages from your IP. This is just one of many methods to fight spam, but can sometimes be controversial - as I found out.

NOTE: Fifo is now defunct. The links will not work.

I have been asked to do a regular blog over at Linux World Net on programming topics. Today the blog was launched - you can see it at http://fifo.linuxworldnet.com/. And you can see the introduction entry at http://fifo.linuxworldnet.com/hello-world/ - where I introduce myself, and talk a little about what FIFO is and what it's for.

Isn't life ironic sometimes? In my last post I commented on some of the work Microsoft has done with some industry standards, and how the standards sometimes don't work the way they are supposed to. Today there is an article on SlashDot that highlights another example.

For the past two days, I've been trying to recover data from a damaged hard drive. The drive got damaged when a squirrel was running along the above ground power lines, and caused an explosion when it shorted the circuit. This of course stopped the computer (and the entire neighborhood for that matter). And as occasionally happens in this type of circumstance, the drive was damaged. The partition with business data was no longer recognized - er, well, we could tell it was there, but couldn't mount it.

Lesson number one - make sure you have your data backed up.