and she’s got little feet just so
and she mutters to herself lost lullabies when she’s tired
and leans against me with laughter, slides across my back
and she makes up words for what i am and who i can be
and during the quiet times, she whispers instructions to her little friends
and puts them here and there, telling them their stories
and i believe in her, i believe in this place
and i believe in the magic of life
i believe in the magic of my child
Monthly Archives: March 2007
Fake MX SPAM Trick
Fake MX records can work like greylisting and often much faster. It doesn’t require the installation of new software. What you do is add a fake highest and lowest MX record. Normail email will retry but spammers often don’t. This is especially true of virus infected windows zombie spam. Here’s an example MX configuration.
fake0.domain.com 10
realmx.domain.com 20
fake1.domain.com 30
The fake records can either be undefined or can point to dead IP addresses or to real IP addresses with port 25 closed. On the lowest numbered MX be sure it’s pointed to a closed port because if you just use a temporary error then Qmail, which is not RFC compatible, will never move up to the next MX record.
The reason for the fake lowest MX record is that where most email is delivered. Real servers will get the error and retry the middle MX and deliver the email with only a few seconds delay. Zombie spam will just move on to the next victim. No good email is lost but a huge amount of spam never makes it into the system at all. This not only reduces spam but also reduces system load as SA doesn’t have to process any of this.
Email is supposed to be sent to the lowest numbered MX record first with the higher MX records being backup servers. Spammers often with try the highest MX record first thinking that the backup servers have less spam filtering than the main email server. They try the highest MX record and then never come back. So I set my highest MX record to point to an IP address that always returns a temporary “Come Back Later” error.
A real email will retry and get through. But the spammer will just go away. This trick saves having to process about 25,000 messages a day on my server.
Optionally you can add a lot of fake MX records on the top side. Additional fake MX records on the lowest numbers end will cause some additional delay, but on the high end there’s no penalty. The reason for additional higher MX records is if spammers start trying random MX records then this give them more dead MX records to try.
fake0.domain.com 10
realmx.domain.com 20
fake1.domain.com 30
fake2.domain.com 40
fake3.domain.com 50
fake4.domain.com 60
fake5.domain.com 70
c’mon c’mon
anger and spittle, the chance of everything, of nights split open like pomegranates, of lightning fast and so easily slow, of streets yawning the horizon just before daybreak, of drink upon drink, of steering wheels and jumped corners.
and you were the friend in the need, in such demand and you made me feel cool, like we owned the night with each drink. and we broke things, we broke open ourselves and we laughed, heckled every demon back into it’s corner. we were princes and we were to be feared and loved and reviled and envied.
how i miss drinking with you, losing myself, losing the hours to the night. how i miss the possibility that this is all that was.
how to: vlc stream from pc to dreambox
On the PC:
1. Place a new bat-file (e.g. ‘makestream.bat’) on your desktop with the following (this is one single command):
“%ProgramFiles%\VideoLan\VLC\vlc” -vvv %1 :sout=#transcode{vcodec=mp2v,vb=3072,scale=1,acode c=mp2a,ab=192,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=ts,dst=”X:
sweet little one, you’ve turned three on me
birthday girl today you’ve rounded a corner where suddenly everything is different and while on the surface of things it all appears the same, some intangible mark has been crossed and you are all things suddenly to me. suddenly bigger, suddenly clearer, suddenly smarter, suddenly kinder.
at one point i saw you get into the toy car your grandfather bought you next to your cousin and you both looked at each other and without saying a word, something passed between you and you each nodded and smiled and looked ahead through an imaginary window.
everyday, suddenly, everything is different now.
are you sure what side of the glass you are on?
the looking glass, the seeing glass, i no longer see you, some distant memory of a thought of a fragment of a voice through a muffled wall in the dark just before sleep.
i remember the staircase, bounding down it, two at a time, i could not wait to get out. i belonged out there man, in the streets, in the day, the night, anywhere like some stray animal that did not want to find a home. roaming, hunting, looking for play, looking for more room to move around.
and when i remember it’s as if it’s through the eyes of someone else, i’ve possessed some body, neither boy nor man, something ageless or imagined, or perhaps a bit of both, all of both. an imagined past that still lives within me. oh, how squandered that little bit of freedom. how truly beautiful.
A little too soon
He placed the muzzle underneath his chin. It felt comfortable there, snug. A good fit, a good place to light up the night, turn the town red. A little too comfortable actually and frankly a little too soon. He had other business to look forward to. He put the gun down, put his head in his hands, staring at it some more.
How much longer would he need to think about it, muster the courage to go ahead and just do it? How much more would he have to tolerate their smugness? Dante did not mind people smarter than him, actually admired those who were. But they weren’t, they weren’t enough and it grated on his nerves. But soon, soon it would change and he would end it, their taunting and his suffering. All in one fell swoop, like a cannonball through a set of precisely placed pins.
And he knew where each one was and going to be. He’d get to them all and pay his final respects.