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Textbook pricing

Well, seems pharmaceuticals aren’t the only thing that’s cheaper to re-import into the US, rather than buying them domestically.

There’s an article at the New York Times (registration required) and discussion over at Slashdot about how a lot of textbooks can be bought for significantly cheaper from overseas markets than locally. Textbooks from Amazon UK can be as much as half the cost of the same textbook purhased from Amazon US.

Apparently, this is starting to cause textbook publishers quite a bit of consternation, which is about time. I’ve always thought textbook prices were outrageous. One of the most expensive textbooks (on a price/page basis) I ever bought was was a skinny little 8×4 textbook on classical mechanics, probably less than 200 pages. The book cost me about $100Cdn at the time (maybe about 10 years ago). I remember textbooks being a significant portion of my education expense during my undergrad year, and that was 10 years ago!. I wasn’t unusual for me to spend $400/semester on textbooks. With my wife back in school, textbook expenses are about the same, but she’s taking fewer classes than I did and most of the books we buy are used, from places like Amazon Marketplace and Classbook.com to name a few. If we bought them all new, I’m sure we’d be close to the $600/semester mark. Now that I know about this overseas thing, it’ll be one more source to check out at textbook shopping time.

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The wifeblog

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.