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In some undoubtedly hastily thrown together media stunt to get some publicity back from the Liberal Party after yesterday’s leadership spill, and change, Kevin Rudd bowled a few cricket balls at Ricky Ponting and Matthew Hayden today.
Is it just me, or does Kevin use a LOT of starch in his tie? It doesn’t seem to have moved from the straight up and down position!
Not to mention the completely “tard” look on his face.
At this time of year, living in Geelong can be a humourous thing – especially when the Geelong Football Club are having a good year.
I wonder if they are starting to get worried that maybe their “back-to-back premiership” is not as “in the bag” as so many people down here think?
There is always a lot of debate in regards to the best possible way to eliminate email spam, and there is nothing more annoying than working on the road, connecting to the corporate network, and spending a big chunk of time downloading 30 emails, only to discover that 29 of them are spam.
Most off the shelf spam filtering solutions are largely useless. They rely too much on the “daily update” model – much like anti-virus. Once a day, they download a new set of detection signatures, designed to trap the latest spam profiles.
The problem here is that spammers are smarter than that. They come up with new profiles, and attack vectors everyday. No sooner do the spam filters update for yesterday’s spam, they are useless against today’s spam.
Blackhole lists are useful, but you often end up blanking out too much email, and miss far too many legitimate emails.
Newer challenge response systems are great, but often frighten genuine email senders that they have been caught by a spammer, and refuse to respond to the challenge.
Then you have the problems of false negatives – (emails that should have been marked as spam, but weren’t) – and false positives – (emails that shouldn’t have been marked as spam, but were). The biggest problem is that once an email has been accepted, there is a chance that it will be incorrectly classified.
So don’t accept it. Sort of.
Every email that arrives is potentially a legitimate email – so treat it as such. Only use a blackhole list on your gateway that blocks the source IP of human verified spam. And only use one, or your gateway can get confused – one list might block, another might allow.
In the end, genuine “zero spam” then relies on your users. Educate them to the value of maintaining accurate whitelists – whitelists that apply at the gateway level – not at the email client.
Anything that doesn’t get through the whitelist check needs to be quarantined – once a day, send your users an email with a list of everything they “received” that was blocked, and let them decide if they want it or not, and if they want to add it to the whitelist.
I have not received a single piece of spam in my inbox in almost two years. How many have you gotten today?
Scientists believe they have captured the first image of a planet orbiting a “sun-like star”, outside of our own solar system.
It is located approximately 500 light years from Earth, and believed to be 8 times the mass of Jupiter, making it a truly gigantic planet.
| Image Captures Planet ‘Orbiting Sun-like Star’ |
Much like Jupiter, the planet is expected to be a gas giant.
Here’s a good reason not to park in front of a fire hydrant.
A picture is certainly worth a thousand words!
Stepping back in time once again, the late 1980’s were a tough time for Holden supporters in Australian touring car racing.
From the moment Allan Grice won the 1986 James Hardie 1000 in a VK Commodore, a Holden did not lead a single race lap at the Bathurst until lap 32 of the 1990 race, when Larry Perkins briefly held the lead during the first round of pitstops.
It would turn out to be a magnificent day for all Holden fans. Not only having led a lap after so long, it actually looked like one of two Holden Commodores might actually win the race.
For most of the day, the Win Percy/Allan Grice car looked the most likely, with the Larry Perkins/Tomas Mezera car not far behind. Right near the end, it seemed that the Perkins Engineering team was going to walk away with it.
But a mix-up with the dual pace cars in operation that year – (and never again, thankfully!) – going at different speeds, Larry lost half a lap at his final pitstop, leaving the Percy/Grice car back in the box seat.
A few late race nerves in regards to fuel consumption kept us all on the edge of our seats, but a Holden won again, and didn’t the fans love it. As former Channel Seven commentator Mike Raymond says on the final lap – “Look at them! You’ve made their day!”.
All I can remember was thinking that it made more than just my day. It was awesome.
You may have noticed that the site was down for a couple of hours yesterday, and when it was back up, that most of the content was missing until this morning.
Well, my fault – I was doing some database maintenance, and inadvertently dropped the entire database. Normally, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Except when your backup script isn’t running. Gulp!
I’ve just moved the site from an older server, onto a newer one – and was cleaning up afterwards. Hence the need to do a little database maintenance. However, I’d not started using the database backup script on the new server yet.
Needless to say, I am now. I found enough data from old dumps, and RSS feeds, that I was able to piece it all back together.
And yes…I do feel like a dill! Moral of the story – completely wake up, and have at least one coffee before doing database maintenance.
This Sunday, the Essendon Football Club will farewell two of the finest servants of the club – Jason Johnson, and the inspirational Adam Ramanauskas.
| Adam Ramanauskas Profile |
Ramanauskas joined the club in 1999, by way of selection 12 in the 1998 National Draft. On paper, 133 games doesn’t seem like a massive achievement, but after two cancer scares and a full knee reconstruction since 2003, to be even on a top-level football field is a mammoth achievement.
Adam was a member of the glorious 2000 premiership side, as was Jason Johnson, who also announced his retirement today.
After 183 games – with injury severely hampering his 2008 season – Johnson, like Ramanauskas, has decided to leave the game on his own terms. Fans will always remember him as the engine room of Essendon’s amazing 69-point turnaround against the Kangaroos in Round 16, 2001.
| Jason Johnson Profile |
I will be there on Sunday to see them play their final games – and I don’t mind admitting, there will probably be a tear or two in my eyes.
Only a matter of days ago, the Australian government joined the international chorus of condemnation in regards to the filtering of internet access for visiting media during the Beijing Olympics.
| Conroy Welcomes ISP Filtering |
Hypocritically, news is now “filtering” through in regards to the details of the “mandatory” filtering systems, currently being trialled on behalf of that same Australian government.
| Net Censorship to Cost Users |
As an Australian, I’m pretty disgusted that they can point the finger at China – (and they do need fingers pointed at them) – and push on with this “mandatory filtering” program, and suggest that it will cost us, the users, to implement.
Poor form chaps – we are watching. And we will take you to task.
No, not an advertisement for The Price is Right, but in what people are already talking about as 2008 AFL Mark Of The Year, Essendon captain Matthew Lloyd took a huge one against Melbourne on the weekend.
Gotta love Tony Shaw – (vomit!) – calling it “That’s A Car” – in reference to the prize for the MOTY winner each year.
Gold.