Animus Wisdom

It is time to get ready for my trip to Mountain View for the KDE Release Event, I will be sharing a room with Dave Yates from the Lotta Linux Links site and podcast, so it should be entertaining.

Expect a lot of pictures!

LUGs + Tijuana, some of my friends and I have looked long and hard for something that might resemble a *proper* LUG with coffee, beer, pizza, hackfests, installfests, monthly or fortnightly meetings, etc.
The only groups found are Internet based, so we decided to start our own.

Grupo de Usuarios de GNU/Linux de Tijuana

I added all the fixins, our own Planet, Mailing lists with Gmane as the archive and NNTP gateway, Jabber server, POP3 POP3s IMAP IMAPS electronic mail access for LUG members. We just need a location, I will scout the city for a good place to hold the meetings.

Anybody have any tips for LUGs in a city with very few GNU/Linux users ?

On a sad note, I might be in the job market next year. I am currently working two jobs and it has taken its tole on my relationship. I have talked it over with the misses and I might accept a job offer from one of my ex-employers, I also got a good job offer from a local big *evil* corporation ( I dare not utter their name ).

Merry Tijuana Christmas to you all

I hope saint nick brings you all a zebra painted donkey.

As I picked up my P.O. Box mail yesterday evening I noticed something was different, a large rectangular envelope had found it’s way in to my slot. It was a FedEx Express Envelope, I decided to open it right then and their and as I did a fresh off the ‘Google’ smell came from the inside.
At first I did not believe it, I looked away and started shaking the envelope vigorously until a smaller envelope fell from the inside, carefully picking it up from the soft carpeted ground I noticed it had some sort of new protection technology — “What is this Sorcery ?” my daughter shouted; Two small plastic rectangular pieces covered with glue on one side kept me away from my prize, I put on my emergency latex gloves and proceeded removing the strange objects, after a growling 2 hours of pealing I was Inside the smaller envelope. Their it was… my Official KDE 4 Release Event Invitation from Google Inc.

After playing around with my electronic mail server I have decided to only accept outgoing mail from authenticated clients via the Submission ( 587 ) and SMTPS ( 465 ) ports on all servers under my control, during the past few days I noticed that server load and spam are way down; since I can now be more strict with client name and HELO/EHLO checks on all connections via the standard SMTP (25) port, something I could not do before.

Authenticated client messages can bypass strict SPAM checks but do get checked for virus infection and are signed with the server’s DomainKey on their way out.

Blocking port 25 doesn’t sound like such a bad idea to me now because 95% of spam attempts on my servers seem to be from windows zombies. After I implemented the new checks I just get a handful of spam from a few hijacked servers and open relays. SpamAssassin gets most of them in the first try.

I am quite happy with the results so far. :-)

I hope everybody had a great weekend, specially the Yankees among you. I also got to eat some delicious turkey since my girlfriend loves to cook.

On a sad note, I screwed up a few minutes ago while playing with Weblogger in GNU Emacs, who knew that C-c C-k deleted posts! *woops* :-). Now my last post has gone A.W.O.L. and I find my self filling in the void.

But I do have some good news, I was added to the Planeta Linux Mexico planet, so I invite you all to go and check it out.