Saturday, May 08, 2004

Lucent Article on Slashdot

Lucent: Down but not out

posted by Wuphon's at 3:53 PM

Friday, May 07, 2004

Vietnam and Iraq

As we enter the 2nd year of occupation of Iraq, I start to wonder whether we're going doing the Vietnam road again, or if we're going to start forging a whole new dirty road of "necessity". Unfortunately, I'm a bit clueless as to what Vietnam was all about (a few years before my time). One of the few books that I've read about it is Conversations with the Enemy by Winston Groom and Duncan Spencer (pub 1983). Picked that up at a used book store in Huntingdon PA back in 1990/1991. However, since I've never cross-checked the information with other sources, I've never taken it as "holy writ" about what happened. Same with films like Full Metal Jacket and Platoon, not sure how close to reality those were.

So I did a bit of shopping on the used book circuit, picking out half a dozen titles that seemed to be well received by various reviews and user comments on Amazon. (This list is also known as my "summer reading list".) We'll see how well I did if I come back blogging about them in the future.

Here's what I ordered:

The Vietnam War Almanac, Harry G. Summers
A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam, Lewis Sorley
Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, Frances Fitzgerald
A Bright Shining Lie : John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan
Rumor of War, Philip Caputo
Vietnam: A History, Stanley Karnow
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg

Since I already have Secrets and A Rumor of War (which arrived today), I'm planning on starting with those two. (Probably Secrets as I've already read a few pages... in fact, there's a blurb by Senator John Kerry on the back cover. Which is topical, as the Vietnam era seems to be something that both presidential candidates are attempting to bring up about the other.)

Update: Secrets is not a good starting book if you know nothing about the events surrounding 1964 (Gulf of Tonkin). It's written from an insider perspective (the author was inside the Pentagon, seeing the dispatches from the ships in the Gulf as well as knowing about the war plans that were secretly being couriered around Washington D.C.). That makes it a difficult read, because by page 16, he's throwing a lot of information at the reader.

So, I'm going to switch over to looking at A Rumor of War instead (or wait for one of the other books to arrive).

posted by Wuphon's at 6:15 PM

Monday, May 03, 2004

Spam Counts for Apr 2004

2003-10 2944 - 94.5/day
2003-11 3225 - 107.5/day
2003-12 3778 - 121.9/day
2004-01 3252 - 104.9/day
2004-02 3590 - 123.8/day
2004-03 4162 - 134.2/day
2004-04 5144 - 171.5/day

Yeck, large increase in the past month, almost double what it was 6 months ago. Spambayes manages to catch all but a handful per week with no false positives in the past few months. Worse... that's with blocking all executable attachments at the inbound mail server during April 2004 (.asd, .bat, .chm, .cmd, .com, .dll, .exe, .hlp, .hta, .js, .jse, .lnk, .ocx, .pif, .scr, .shb, .shm, .shs, .vb, .vbe, .vbs, .vbx, .vxd, .wsf, .wsh). So it's not like it's all virus traffic, it's (err...) honest-to-goodness spam.

I need to dig into Postfix again and see what the next logical steps are.

(Oh, and in case anyone wonders why I haven't finished the Samba stuff yet... well, you see... I installed Roller Coaster Tycoon while waiting on a compile on Saturday. Which shot the entire weekend because I got engrossed in playing the scenarios. For a game released in 1999, it's still great and runs fine under WinXP Pro. The first time I played back in 2000, I never got past the first few scenarios... I've now finished all but 8 and only have 4 left to unlock.)

Labels: Spam

posted by Wuphon's at 9:57 PM