Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 24 August 2003

# 3:20 AM

grump

Thanks to the Sobig worm, I've gotten more junk mail in the past three days than I did in the preceding two weeks. My spam filters are very good at screening the worm itself out of my primary inbox, but they don't do anything about the flood of useless bounce messages that well-meaning SMTP servers all over the planet are sending me, whenever the worm tries to mail itself to a nonexistent victim and forges its envelope sender as one of the half-a-dozen variants on "zack@domain.name" that get forwarded to my current address. This is quite deliberate; I don't want bounce messages treated as spam. Under normal conditions, anyway.

One of the interesting things about SPF is that it would completely squelch this secondary effect. There might still be email worms going around, but they couldn't forge their envelope sender so I wouldn't get any bounces because of them.

# 2:50 AM

Biked all over town today getting groceries (at the Berkeley Farmers' Market) and various bits of kit which I needed in order to repair Shweta's keyboard, which got a couple of traces burnt out in a beverage spill. Split keyboards cost $60 and up, so it's worth a fair amount of trouble trying to track down things like conductive acrylic.

The repair process is mostly tedious. It takes about fifteen minutes to disassemble the keyboard to the point where I can get at the damaged traces, thanks to the ridiculous number of screws holding it together. Having done that, I then find the breaks and patch them over with the acrylic, wait for it to dry, then test them with a multimeter. The paint does not conduct well when wet. Unfortunately, "quick drying" seems to mean "half an hour." Then I put it all back together again (another fifteen minutes) and plug it into a computer and see if all the keys work. Of course, they didn't, so I get to do it all over again tomorrow morning.