I am currently employed as Operations Manager and Principal
Engineer at Tamale
Software.
Tools
The Jewish
Holidays and Event Scheduling page will tell you everything you
need to know to avoid scheduling events on dates that will conflict
with Jewish holidays.
Projects
Free software that I maintain or dabble in includes:
bogofilter-milter.pl
a Sendmail::Milter script for integrating bogofilter into
sendmail. There are also start/stop scripts
for Fedora
and Gentoo.
p4pr.perl,
a script to emulate in the Perforce Software Configuration Management System the functionality of "cvs annotate".
Emacs
VC mode support for Perforce, an integration between GNU Emacs
and Perforce which allows you to use the native Emacs SCM commands
on files controlled by Perforce.
The move-newsrc
package, which helps transfer a .newsrc file from
one NNTP server to another
The MIT Athena delete/undelete
package, a set of utilities to replace rm and
protect the user from accidental file deletion
xscreensaver, yet another
UNIX/X screen-lock program (but probably not the
“xscreensaver” you're familiar with!)
clean-mqueue.pl, a short but sweet
Perl script for interactively scanning the messages in the sendmail
queue and deleting or quarantining unwanted ones.
Some of the projects I've worked on in the past are:
An attempt to get King
Richard's Faire to stop discriminating against people whose
disabilities or religious observance prevent them from eating the
food sold at the Faire.
An ongoing battle with the U.S. Social
Security Administration to get them to admit that their
software for “fixing” mailing addresses when sending
out social security cards is buggy, and to get them to issue a
replacement for my daughter's card, which was lost in the mail
because their buggy software threw away my correct ZIP code and
replaced it with an incorrect one.
A somewhat surreal battle with
Staples over a $10 rebate which they failed to handle
properly, to say the least. Read my story and e-mail me if you've
had similar experiences!
My crusade to make Peoples Federal
Savings Bank own up to, and correct, various screw-ups they
committed in the process of upgrading their computer systems in
June 2001.
I created the news.answers
newsgroup and most of the other "*.answers" groups and
moderated them for several years before recruiting a
team of moderators and handing over the task to them (I'm the
"moderator emeritus" of the group now).
I was the first person to volunteer to act as a neutral
third-party vote collector for any Usenet newsgroup creation
vote whose proponent couldn't or didn't want to run the vote,
using vote-collection code built into the rtfm.mit.edu mail
server, long before the Usenet Volunteer Votetakers
organization was created.
After Cancelmoose[tm] started
cancelling spam
on a large scale, I was the first News administrator to do so
under my own name (as opposed to anonymously). The software
used by many of the current spam cancellers is based on
software I wrote.
Publications
Some of the publications I've worked on are:
While working for MIT's Project
Athena when it still had "Project" in its name, I wrote a
parody of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" called "Atlas' HDA". Be warned:
If you never worked for Athena, you'll probably miss many of
the jokes.
Of course, I was inspired by the parodies that came before
mine, including "Alice's
PDP-10" and "MIT's
AI Lab". It seems that parodying this song is a
long-standing tradition at MIT.
I wrote the "How
to find sources" Usenet FAQ and maintained it for several
years; it is now being maintained by Kent Landfield
(he hasn't posted it in a while, but according to E-mail from
him on 9/27/96, he'll be starting up again soon).
I wrote the "How
to become a Usenet site" Usenet FAQ and maintained it for
several years. It is now being maintained and posted by Chris
Lewis.
I wrote the "Welcome
to news.newusers.questions!" Usenet FAQ and maintained it
for several years. It is now being maintained and posted by
Leanne Phillips.
I worked on the MIT Course Evaluation Guide (CEG) for a couple of
years. Just when I got to know the system they were using to
store all of their data, they decided to change it, so that's
when I decided to pursue other interests. The CEG is defunct
and has been replaced by The MIT Office of Academic Services'
Student Subject
Evaluations.
Miscellaneous
Check out this glossary for
definitions of some of the Jewish terms I use in these pages.
I use bogofilter
to filter my email. It does a very good job. This graph
shows the volume of spam I receive per day and how much of it
bogofilter blocks automatically:
I also filter incoming email using
the Spamhaus ZEN blocklist.
Here's some history of how much email it blocks:
Note that a blocklist blocks SMTP connections, whether or
not those connections would have actually tried to send email to valid
local accounts, whereas bogofilter blocks email messages to
real users. This is why the number of messages blocked by Spamhaus is
so much higher than the number blocked by bogofilter — most
attempts to send spam are sent to invalid email addresses.
I also filter incoming email using
the NJABL.ORG DNS blocklist.
Here's some history of how much email it blocks:
As you can see, the amount of email blocked by NJABL dropped is
almost nothing compared to Spamhaus, because most of the sites in
NJABL are in Spamhaus as well.
This document was last modified on $Date: 2008/08/17 09:05:39 $.
