My wife has decided to try her hand at blogging. So I set one up for her here. I don’t know how long she’ll stick with it, since she’s usually pretty busy with school. It’ll be her little corner of the net to vent. She reads mine every now and then, and thinks some of my entries are hilariously funny. I think it’s inspired her to give it a shot. Hope she enjoys the experience.
Spam busting
I discovered a spam fighting utility called POPFile through a post over at TechReport today. It’s a tool that runs on your local computer and acts as a POP proxy between your mail client and your ISP’s POP server. You reconfigure your mail client to connect to your local machine, and when you check mail, it queries POPFile, which goes out to your ISP’s POP server and grabs the mail. Then it does some kind of analysis (probably Bayesian) and forwards the results to your mail client. POPFile also runs a local web server that’s used for accessing retrieved mail for training the filters, and configuring POPFile.
Mail is sorted into what it calls buckets, which in Eudora-speak would be analogous to mailboxes. You can set up magnets, which are filters that file message directly into a particular bucket based on an email address or domain for example.
The training process looks pretty simple. Just a matter of connecting to the local webserver, selecting the messages that need to be reclassified and reassigning them to the appropriate buckets. POPFile adds a couple of headers to the message, which should make it pretty simple for your email client to do any secondary filtering afterwards.
Since most of my spam seems to come overnight while I’m not at work, I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see how effective it is out of the box. Earthlink’s Spaminator supposedly catches a good portion of the spam I get, but lately it’s been sucking. The amount of spam getting through Spaminator has pretty much doubled over the last couple of weeks, and seems to be slowly increasing. Hopefully POPFile will help with this after a little training.
Dining out
Finally, a decent place to get Chinese food in Charleston. Our other favourite restaurant was Osaka, a Chinese/Japanese restaurant with a really good sushi bar. Unfortunately, it suffered some fire damage several months ago, and we’re still waiting for them to finish renovations and re-open (at least we hope they’re doing renovations and planning to re-open). In the meantime, we’ve been going to Shi Ki Japanese Restaurant on East Bay. Their sushi bar is pretty decent too, and they’re one of the few Japanese restaurants that serves udon noodle soup.
Yesterday, we read about a new place, Red Orchids Chinese Bistro on Sam Rittenberg. So we went over there today to check it out. It’s kind of a higher class restaurant in Ashley Crossing Mall, a very unassuming strip mall. The food is very good, several steps above your traditional cheesy Chinese restaurant with the all you can eat buffet (I just stay away from those places). Prices are very reasonable, and you get a good amount of tasty food, so it’s a very exceptional value.
Interesting web server log entries
The last few days, I’ve been ‘tail -f’ing (no, it’s not what you think) the webserver logs just to see what kind of traffic the server gets. Most of it is internal, lots of spiders and web crawlers, and more than a few crack attempts. Then this morning I saw one I’d never seen before
211.21.44.211 - - [20/Oct/2003:08:31:32 -0400] "CONNECT 1.3.3.7:1337 HTTP/1.0" 200 9612 "-" "-"A Google search yielded many promising results including this very informative one.
netstat or ps didn’t reveal anything usual at the time. A lookup of the IP told me the IP address was part of a block registered to Cool Er Ke Ji Ltd in Taipei, Taiwan. A portscan of the offending machine didn’t reveal any open ports out of the ordinary.
Well, I’m pretty sure my server is still reasonably secure. A couple of mods to my server config should keep anybody from trying to use it as a proxy server. A lesson to sysadmins: Keep an eye on those logs.
Grits
Grits: A coarse cereal made from something called hominy, which apparently is a type of corn.
Anybody from the South, or with roots in the South can tell you what they are. Anybody not from the South will look at you funny wondering why you’re talking about eating sandpaper. Anybody not from the South over the age of 25 will recognize grits as something Flo from Alice is always telling people to kiss.
My first encounter with grits was on that TV show, Alice. It was one of those sitcoms that I grew up watching, because it was funny and had strange characters. Flo was always telling people to ‘Kiss my grits’, which didn’t really mean much to me at the time. Perhaps it was some unknown part of the female anatomy or something.
My second encounter with grits was many years later, when I made my first trip to NY to visit my future wife. There I learned it was a white gloppy substance that people ate for breakfast.
So over the years, I’ve learned to eat grits, and even how to cook them. Grits aren’t something that I’ll go out of my way to eat though. When I do eat them, it has to have lots of cheese. I’ve been told I cook a mean pot of grits though.
When cooking grits, caution must be exercised at all times. Cooked grits have high viscosity, and a very high specific heat. Anyone who’s had grits splashed on them will tell you it BURNS. And it sticks to you, prolonging the burning process. If you try to lick it off, you’ll burn your tongue, and the part that got splashed will still burn. I’ve always imagined that if there were grits back in medieval times, they would have been used for castle defense when the caudrons of burning pitch ran out (or even before).
Castle Defender: “They’re coming! Prepare the grits!”
And I’m sure if the US military could come up with a way to keep grits steaming hot in a bomb, it would be far more effective than napalm.
Anyway, how do I cook grits?
- 2/3 cup water
- 2/3 cup chicken broth or stock
- 1/3 cup grits
- pinch of salt
- Cheese (whatever kind you want)
If your chicken broth/stock is homemade, go with all broth/stock. If it comes out of a can, go with half water/half stock. Canned broth tends to be a little on the salty side. Add grits to water/stock in a pot and bring to a boil. Stir often. Grits will stick to the bottom of the pot. When the grits become thick and gloppy taste for texture and add pepper to taste. If the grits are still a little hard and coarse, add 1/2 cup water/broth and stir. Cook until they become thick and gloppy again. Stir in the cheese (as much as you want). I like extra sharp Cheddar in mine, sometimes with a good healthy handful of Parmesan (freshly grated, not the stuff in the can) on top to garnish. You can use whatever kind of cheese you prefer. Serve in a bowl or over a fried egg. Immediately immerse the empty pot in hot water and let it soak.
Don’t ever let grits dry in the pot, or you’ll need a chisel to chip it out.