Move along, nothing to read

I have returned from my brief honeymoon. I'll write about it in more detail soon, but for now, a point outline only:

• Fri Dec 1st - Travel and the Taxi driver who didn't know where the hotel was.
• Sat Dec 2nd - In which we acquire bicycles.
• Sun Dec 3rd - Waterfalls, lava tubes, and a close encounter of the paved kind.
• Mon Dec 4th - Recuperation - ouch! everything hurts
• Tue Dec 5th - Replacement bicycle, and exploring Hilo.
• Wed Dec 6th - The finding and snorkelling of a mismanaged reef.
• Thu Dec 7th - Boarding pass SSSS's & social engineering.

Email statistics
Here are statistics on new email that I recieved while I was away. This excludes all mailing-list email, which is not subject to spam filtering as the lists are extremely clear of spam, and my procmail rules shuffle the email into seperate folders quite fine. That would add another ~3000 non-spam emails into the count, but are not really relevant to spam categorization success rates.
I have my spam settings reasonably conservative, as I don't mind deleting spam that makes it through the filters, but false positives are a much larger concern.
total new messages: 2191
total spam: 1771
false positives: 1 (0.045% of total)
false negatives: 446 (20.3% of total, 25.2% of spam)
The false negatives are getting very interesting now. Random chunks of online documents, incl sentances from the document used as subjects, with an attached image as the actual spam, or cleverly merged HTML+CSS that would render the spam text over the other text. Two of them appeared to be chunks of the MySQL documentation.
The gentoo mail aliases like mysql-bugs@g.o appear to be very badly hit with spam, accounting for nearly 70% of the false negatives - this is also possibly because I have to trust the relaying of the Gentoo email servers, and cannot check the machine that the email came from.

Judge Rules Indecent Exposure Is for Men Only

From Associated Press
1:26 PM PDT, October 20, 2006

A Riverside judge dismissed an indecent exposure charge against a woman accused of disrobing in front of a 14-year-old boy, saying the law only applies to men.

Superior Court Judge Robert W. Armstrong said earlier in the week that the law only mentions someone who "exposes his person."

"It's gender specific," Armstrong said.

He dismissed a misdemeanor charge against Alexis Luz Garcia, 40, of Corona, who was cited in May after parents of a neighbor boy said she showed him full-frontal nudity as he played basketball.

Prosecutor Alison N. Norton said the decision to throw out the case will be appealed because another section of state law says that "words used in the masculine gender include the feminine and neuter."

Norton said Garcia had complained that the 14-year-old was making too much noise while playing basketball. She went out on her sundeck.

"He looked up at her, she looked down at him, and she disrobed," Norton contended.

The boy ran inside and told his parents, who complained to Garcia.

"She threatened to do it every time he played basketball," and the parents called police, Norton said.

I meant to blog these a while back, but it slipped by.

Here are the main ones:

• Laura's selection of the best 398 photos from the photographer), with descriptions on all photos.
• The rest of the photos by the photographer, no descriptions yet.
  

Still to come:
Photo sets taken by:

• Judy,
• Johannes,
• Robin's Camera (it was loaned out),
• Marissa's Camera (it was loaned out),
• Richard,
• Jon Kwan,
• Ullrich,
• Laura?
• Anybody else that took photos at my wedding, I'd appreciate a copy of them as well, to host from my system.

P.S. These have been scaled way down for web viewing, but I will still kick anybodies ass if they hit my bandwidth too hard.

P.P.S. If you'd like a large version of one of them to make a print or whatever, drop me an email.

Recently I've been digging around in the annuls of Gentoo history, working on what will hopefully be the final tree-signing proposal before it actually becomes a full reality. During the midst of this, Stuart came up to me in #gentoo-dev:

I wasn't the first to come up with the idea, the BSD ports folk were talking about it around the same time we were in mid-July 2003, and I was aware of their discussion, but I believe that Gentoo was the first Linux distribution to make this jump in turning it off. I took a lot of flak at the time for breaking many PHP applications in the name of security, but history has now shown that allow_url_fopen is a very common PHP exploit, and with the advent of Google Code, many sites may now considerably more vulnerable - and all of this could have been mostly avoided a long time ago if PHP had just included a taint mode from the start...

I hadn't read LWN yet, it's only been out a few hours, yet here the article is: "Remote file inclusion vulnerabilities". Stuart also posted a link back into the murky depths of the Gentoo CVS, with a commit I made in July 2003, that turned off allow_url_fopen by default in Gentoo.

While I do follow a number of other blogs and RSS feeds, I very seldom consider many of the items worth writing about, or linking to. However a new-comer to the posts I read, is the 'Language Log' - a compendium of linguistic differences and other faux pas.

A sample of recent worthwhile entries:
"Lurid language differences by the press"
"Chinglish: The Shrimp Fucks the Cabbage"
"Racy CIA investigators?"