Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 14

Las Vegas NV Gelato Meetup, 17 February 2024 at Cocolini

A few weeks ago I posted that I’d been sentenced to a week on the desolate Lost Vegas Strip.

There’s an outdoor gelato place near my cell: Cocolini. Apologies for the Meta link, but that’s what they got. It’s at 3717 S Las Vegas Blvd, Las Vegas, NV 89109.

You see that corner in the lee of the sidewalk? Right under the NO TRESPASSING NO LOITERING sign, in between the ads? I’ll be hanging out there at 7pm this Saturday night, 17 February. If you want to meet me, that’s your chance.

In the event t...

Everything, With Banana

A decade ago I looked at everything I’d written and said “How tall is a stack of one copy of everything? Waist high? I wonder… if I include one copy of every edition of everything I’ve published, can I publish a stack tall enough to drown in?” I achieved that in 2022.

Today I would like to say: if I had not quit putting my short stories in print, today’s stack would be safely wedged against the ceiling and I wouldn’t be stuck holding it.

Every time I publish one of these people ask me questions...

33: Larry Leg-Breaker’s Betting Parlor and Emergency Financial Services

I’m no longer dreading writing Run Your Own Mail Server, because I have moved on to dreading the first time I spellcheck it. Fortunately, I’m still looking forward to dreading the kill-passive-voice pass through the manuscript.

If enough Gmail or Microsoft users flag your legitimate messages as “spam,” their algorithms decide that your domain sends low quality messages that should always go straight into the spam bucket. Some people who signed up for mailing lists and later want to unsubscribe d...

Mail Software Projects for You

Working through the tail of Run Your Own Mail Server has led me to a couple things I’d like to see. Maybe some reader would like to hack on one of them.

1) The best way to generate a list of hosts that should bypass Postfix’s intrusive protocol checks, or anything that resembling greylisting, is the postwhite. Postwhite has been abandoned for years, though. This isn’t exactly a problem, as it’s feature-complete and does the job. The configuration is clunky, though. It supports a long-obsolete li...

Block list vs black list in my books

Open source software has been adjusting its language. In a world without systemic racism, technologists could use words like “master” and “slave” without worries. While the Internet’s primordial developers chose those words without malice1, we don’t live in that world. Much of the software in Run Your Own Mail Server is older, however. Many people who don’t speak English natively don’t fully understand the implications of “black list” and “white list” and don’t want to go through the annoyance o...

January’s Jalousie Sausage

(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of January, and to the public at the beginning of February.)

The beginning of the year. Time to not only contemplate last year’s failures, but to select next year’s failures. Not that I’m cynical. Truly, what’s the point of setting goals you know you will accomplish? The trick is to pick goals that are fail-forward. If you decide to lose a hundred pounds but only lose thirty–you still lost thirty!

In that spirit, I’m planning to publish eight books...

32: Only Mildly Suspicious

Rspamd is the best solution we have for managing spam, and that’s… kind of terrifying.

Consider the first symbol, URI_COUNT_ODD. The description reads “Odd number of URIs in multipart/alternative message.” The message has an odd number of pieces. Why is that important, though? Rspamd does not say. You must derive the deeper meaning from your understanding of the protocols and tools. In this case, this is an HTML message. HTML messages should have one MIME part for the text version, and another p...

At long last: the MWL Title Index

I try to hold down the amount of information on this site. I truly do. I also try to keep the menus at the top no more than one layer deep. But finding individual titles on my web site has become increasingly difficult. People complain that they can’t find titles. Everything is filed logically, but logic is limited. Is “PAM Mastery” a sysadmin tool or an operating system reference? Should “$ git commit murder” be filed under crime novels or software crimes?

I maintain the official title list in ...

31: Bringing All These Failures Together

I’m writing about rspamd for Run Your Own Mail Server.

Have you ever looked at a JSON configuration and thought, That could be a regular Unix text file? YAML and JSON and Unix text all represent similar data in different formats. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and each has syntactical idiosyncracies that earn them devotees. JSON might be the most complete configuration store, but it’s not designed to be written by hand and very few people advocate doing so. YAML looks writable, until it fail...

Las Vegas NV Gelato Meetup, 17 February 2024

Been a while since I’ve done this.

Family events are taking me to Las Vegas. The schedule’s pretty booked, but about 7PM on Saturday, 17 February, I’ll be getting gelato somewhere around the Paris hotel on the Strip. I won’t have books or anything, I’m just hanging out.

I haven’t picked a spot. I’ll be looking for somewhere sheltered but airy, with good gelato. Choosing a location will require extensive hands-on evaluation of the many available options.

More details when I find a place.

You want...