SpamAssassin is a free tool for mailservers to identify SPAM. It has a several parameters it checks (forged headers, HTML only content, blacklisted hosts, improper mail relays, etc) and assigns a score for every parameter. If the total score is greater than the threshold, it is marked as spam and either tagged, moved to a separate mailbox or deleted. I started using SpamAssassin in April of 2005 and it has caught thousands of messages.

My new Seagate Barracuda 300GB hard drive just arrived. I’ll need some time to redo my entire computer (currently there are 4 operating systems). Whenever I purchase a new harddrive (about once ever 2 years) I always put some serious evaluation into how I will partition it. Some points I consider Windows is primary operating system A second Windows should be possible Windows should have at least seperate ‘applications’ and ‘work’ partitions Multiple Linux distributions should be possible (2-3) Swap partition can be shared in Linux At least /home partition should be shared in Linux In truth I only have about 3-4 GB of actual work and about 6-8 GB of media to save.

When I started this blog it was a “fork of thoughts” from my main blog with a focus on software and linux. So how does a trip to Germany fit it? I decided I would try to take note of the basic differences I observed in computing. Granted Windows is used in far more public places that people realize (i.e. flight status monitors), but people don’t realize that Linux is used in just as many in on different scales.

About 2 years ago I purchased a Linux based PDA: the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500. The PDA was intended to be used on Windows and (later) Linux. The initial driver for Windows setup the device as a USB network device, however the latest driver set it up as a normal USB PDA. I found that using the older driver, I can assign an IP address to the device and configure it as a mini server.

Users of Fedora Core 4, SuSE 10.0 and other distributions with GCC v4 may have found some open source softwares may not compile properly. Using alternate compilers may resolve the problem. FC4 also ships with GCC v3.2. There are many ways to specify alternate compilers during the build process, below are some ways. Environment Variables Most softwares support the CC and CXX environment variables. First assign them, then run configure or make.