darkness

Came home and found PJ, my old roommate, sleeping on our sofa. Talked to him for a few hours, between fixing SpamAssassin. He’s doings some cool stuff with SPAWAR in Charleston, SC. No, he didn’t tell me any classified information, sorry. He did teach me how fucked up the government, and the military as an arm thereof, really are though. (Are? Is? Ack.)

Yes, SpamAssassin was fucked up. Apparently I was running 2.3x but I had gotten the latest and greatest Vipul’s Razor at the time I installed it. Unbeknownst to me, that was Razor v2 and the 2.3x version of SpamAssassin I had could only use Razor v1. Hence, I wasn’t getting the benefit of Vipul’s Razor spam checking, which has the potential to eliminate even those very few spams that worm their way into my inbox. I went to upgrade to SpamAssassin 2.4. Their RH 7.3 SRPM (not theirs, I think, but a contributed version they link to prominently) mysteriously didn’t work under 7.2; the Makefile would get written so Perl modules would get copied to directories like /usr/lib/site_perl/5.6.1 instead of /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1. After pouring over ExtUtils::MakeMaker documentation I decided something was just weird and made a quick patch to the spec file to fix it. (Not so quick, really. Took my several builds to get it right. Something kept changing my damn paths around every which way.) If anyone wants this patch or hints on things, you can mail me.

So after this ordeal of rebuilding this SpamAssassin RPM and installing it, I find that Razor is only used when running like spamassassin, not when run as spamc. I don’t recall the exact error, but it was something bizarre like “no such file or directory” followed by a sufficiently different error. I decided to upgrade Razor and had some fun there too. I believe Razor’s Makefile makes some assumptions WRT where files are going to be after “make install” that aren’t correct when you’re building an RPM with a build root. I basically let the RPM build fail, ran make install from /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/razor-agents-whatever which put the actual files in /usr/lib/perl5/wherever, then rebuilt the RPM. Voila. Nasty. I should have just fixed the problem. If someone mails me with interest I could probably be convinced to.

Surprisingly, upgrading Razor got rid of the weird errors and now spamc reported Razor hits. Yay.

Somehow I decided a good reward for this would be some WC3. Bad. BTW, some strategy guides for WC3 if I haven’t posted them here. (Short term memory… failing… wait, what the hell is this? I don’t know you people.) Unfortunately euphorik’s game crashed at what was probably to be the beginning of our big rush on the two (easy) computer opponents. It has since crashed in about two or three other WC3 games tonight. I took the most recent crash as a sign that I should program instead.

As for programming, I only managed to eek out an interface description for the Logger class. Simple enough. As for other productive things I did today, though: cleaned out kitty box, cleaned kitty food tray and bowls, did two loads of laundry with a third in progress, and made some pretty damn tasty Sicilian Swordfish with a recipe from Williams-Sonoma. (Don’t think the recipe is online, though. It’s in their grilling cookbook, IIRC.)

Also spent some time purchasing a FilePlanet account against my better wishes. My intentions were good, though: I was getting The Sims Online public play test for darkho. She couldn’t get it working and I was in the middle of practice or cleaning when she was trying, though, so it was a few hours before she could get to it. It’s a 1.2GB download, so be prepared to wait a while. It took me about 2h on my cable modem on a Sunday evening (1700-1900). Then it asked for a registration code we didn’t have. Only when she uninstalled and I tried a reinstall did a web page pop up during the initial phase of installation showing me the “CD registration key” I was supposed to use. So beware: if you download The Sims Online play test, get the key that pops up on the web page during the first part of installation. She hasn’t played much, but I have to say it so far looks really cool. Add a good combat system and programmed behavior to objects and you’d quite possibly have the killed RPG.

Too much typing. Need to take a load out of the dryer and go to sleep. Going to the office tomorrow.