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Bye bye spamSome success on the Spam front. Of all my emails that came through today, 120 have been successfully filtered as Spam. About 10 have still gotten through to my inbox. There were no false positives.

I’ve set up Spamassassin to place all my spam into a seperate ‘spam’ mailbox (genius huh?) which appears as just another email folder on IMAP in Outlook. So, basically, I can browse through the spam quickly to spot false positives. I also set up Outlook to auto-delete after one week. Can’t have the critters filling up the place!

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If you have a Nokia 3650 and are using some kind of bluetooth connection to it you’ve probably found that when you try to connect to it from the computer it crashes, probably taking explorer with it. It sucks. This assumes the drivers are installed, as well as mRouter and your phone software.

This is an annoying consequence of the way the connections are made. Basically when you connect to the Nokia 3650 it’ll immediately disconnect and try to initiate a connection back to your PC. My Bluetooth thingy can’t cope with this and usually crashes.

The solution lies in how you connect in the first place, and which COM ports are allocated. If you right click the Bluetooth icon in the system tray and choose ‘Advanced Configuration’ you can check/tweak which COM ports are used. By default (I think!) Incoming connections come in on COM3 (Local Services tab) and outgoing on COM4 (Client Applications tab). If they aren’t like this you ought to fix them (and then probably reboot).

Now, double click the mRouter icon in your system tray. You should get a list of Connections, many will be labeled ‘Bluetooth’. Make sure COM3 is checked. Then, make sure COM4 is checked. If COM4 is already checked de-select it then re-check it

Basically the process of checking COM4 initiates a connection to your phone. When prompted (assuming you haven’t paired and authorised the connection), the phone will connect back on COM3. Therefore in your PC Suite use COM3 as your phone comms port.

If you found this article useful let me know. I spent ages trying to figure out how to connect my phone. Then ages more trying to figure out how to connect in such a way that it didn’t crash Explorer on the way!

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Ok. I’ve finally done it. After getting something like 150 spam emails Friday I’ve decided to switch on my auto-delete Spam filter. It’s not quite deleting them – merely putting them in another mailbox for access should it screw up. So far it seems to work very well. There’s always a nervous tension when you start up your mail server again in case it loses email on the way (of course, it’ll all be set up ok won’t it 😉 ….). Then, a few minutes later, a batch of spams came in and were immediately filtered. A kosher email sent by a friend appeared in my inbox correctly.

For those who want similar success. I’m using SpamAssassin and Postfix for mail + filtering, and refered to Geekly.com for tips.

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Dead Like Me

If you haven’t seen it yet Dead Like Me is a quite remarkable new TV series about George, an 18 year old girl who is hit by a toilet seat from Mir, and is sent to the afterlife on the first episode. She then discovers that her new role is to be a Grim Reaper. Cracking comedy, with very clever plot twists and storylines that let you enjoy it as well as become engrossed in the sometimes quite emotional storylines.

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Don’t You Just Hate itDon’t you just hate it when something beeps or makes a noise very briefly, and you have no idea what it was?

Something in my room just made a three tone jingle. My phone doesn’t show signs of activity. My computer shouldn’t have made any noises at the time, and there are a billion other electrical gadgets in here that – until now – haven’t made a peep. This is annoying.

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HiThought I’d just post to give people feedback on how im doing. The hotel is very nice and im thoroughly enjoying the environment. The other 19 students are great company and not at all like the stereotypical computer science students we get at uni. The workshop sessions are very interesting and extremely worthwhile. Tonight we went to pizza express which was a rather lovely pizza restaurant in Winchester, which concluded an evening out at the bowling alley. Tomorrow we meet the uk managing director of ibm, Larry Flint and have a bbq at the lovely IBM club house, as well as another day of workshop. More soon!


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Off to IBM

I’m going to be away for a few days at a rather tasty four-star hotel in Winchester, for an IBM E-Business Workshop (which looks very interesting!). IBM are paying for board + meals, etc. so I’m going to thoroughly enjoy it 😀

I’m not looking forward to my email collection Thursday morning 🙁

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The Linux graphical environment just confuses me sometimes. I’ve installed Redhat 9 on my shiny new computer, and windows seem to take ages to load – Mozilla is incredibly slow to load, as are most other apps and Terminal (which I’m admittedly more comfortable in anyway) won’t load. It just says “Starting Terminal” on the taskbar for about 10 seconds then disappears with no error. I’ve heard (from m’learned Linux-friendly colleagues) that I’m using the wrong ‘window manager’ – I’m using KDE I think – it was one of the two default options so I’d assume it would be fast/reasonable enough!

Help!? Should it really be this slow?

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Randomness

Last night, while in Portsmouth, a friend suggested that we visit the sweet shop. It was 12:30am. I thought he’d finally lost it, but lo and behold, the shop was open. This, in my books, is amazing.

So, if you’re in Portsmouth in the middle of the night with a sudden craving for licquorice allsorts or Murray Mints, go to Albert Road (I think), between the King’s Theatre and the pub on the corner. The people there are very friendly and there is a huge selection of confectionary.

We call it the Vampire sweet shop. It’s open freakishly late. Tell your friends.

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As if Five were Enough

I decided to get a new computer the other day. I also finally bit the bullet and got a DVD Writer (something I’ve been meaning to do for ages but the price was prohibitively high). Part of the new computer’s tasks, alongside menial backups and websurfing when main PC was busy, was to write DVDs.

I’ve gotta say, I’m impressed! The PC Chips Motherboard with onboard everything (including CPU) works quite well. The CPU is 734Mhz, but since I’m not using it for games it works fine. it has 256Mb and an 80Gb hard disk, totalling something like £150 – inc. VAT. Hooray for eBuyer.

As is mentioned countless times in the reviews (although I misread them slightly) – you need to swap the ‘Clear CMOS’ jumpers over so it’s off. I also discovered (I’ve never built a computer before) that you need RAM installed before the computer agrees to power up 🙂

If anything goes tits-up I’ll reveal, but so far I’m quite impressed.