response 76 of 123:

May 21 21:08 UTC 2001

program misbehavior.  I  responded to one item in the agora on April 30 and
that response and the following responses to that item appeared only on this
date.  Note that I have "read all new" when I enter the agora and that I have
been on several times since April 30.

response 78 of 123:

May 22 02:50 UTC 2001

Which item, fitz?  What was the date of the response following yours?

response 80 of 123:

May 23 10:23 UTC 2001

I understand:  It's working just as it should then.  Thanks for the
explanation.

response 82 of 123:

May 27 14:06 UTC 2001

mascheck Sven Mascheck         p0    4d  May 23 00:32
mdw      Marcus D Watts       *p1 12:56  May 26 00:16
mdw      Marcus D Watts       *pf 13:50  May 25 23:48

Looks like the idle-killer is dead.

response 84 of 123:

May 28 05:50 UTC 2001

Grex crashed Sunday night about 10:30 when I started the vacuum in the
Pumpkin and overloaded the UPS.  Sorry!  While it was rebooting I plugged
the vacuum into an outlet that wasn't on the UPS, and now the Pumpkin looks
a lot clearer and has less dust.

response 86 of 123:

May 29 05:03 UTC 2001

(re#84:  You plugged an inductive load (vacuum motor) into the USP for
the 'puters?  What were you thinking?  That if the lights went out you
could still clean?  Sorry, but this is just too hilarious.)

response 88 of 123:

May 29 08:51 UTC 2001

Do you get the sense that this is par for the course in 'e-commerce'
these days...  Not for anything other than stupidity.

Like in California where there were 'rolling blackouts' where 'Exodus' a
'dot com' company who's entire point of existance was to prevent being
'offline'.  Well.  I don't recall Exodus.com explained why its hosted
sites were offline during a 'blackout' - the very thing it was paid for
and based its business model on preventing...The very thing it based its
'infrastructure' on to prevent....

Don't worry, be happy. everything is ok.

response 90 of 123:

May 29 11:07 UTC 2001

Mark is not a staffer, though.  Probably if we were properly 'organized' he
either wouldn't have been allowed to use any outlets inside the Pumpkin, or
there would have been outlet labels to indicate which outlets were computer
use only.

response 92 of 123:

May 29 19:10 UTC 2001

I discovered the other day where I work that one of our main server UPSs had
about a 5-second backup time before the battery went dead.  Did some more
checking and discovered that nearly all the UPSs were between three and five
years old, and that no one had ever thought to check the batteries, much
less replace them.  Sigh.  $150 later all the really important ones have new
batteries, at least...

I have to say I'm rather shocked at just how bad the power here in Ann
Arbor is.  It flickers once or twice a day normally, more if there's any
wind.  Houghton's power was much better, and those of you who have been to
Houghton know that it's hardly a Major Metropolitan Area.  Maybe the ice
storms up there force them to actually build with some quality?

Maybe someone should come up with a way of flagging which outlet strips in
the Pumpkin are on UPS, and which aren't.  A strip of red tape on each one
is all it'd take.  And why are you wasting UPS power on a box fan?  Is it
really going to get that hot in there in the 20 minutes or so the UPS will
run before shutting down?

response 94 of 123:

May 29 22:04 UTC 2001

        IIRC the standard for a UPSed outlet is an orange outlet.  Maybe
orange paint or orange stripe on the outlet (with room to write 'on the
UPS').

response 96 of 123:

May 30 15:40 UTC 2001

I tried dialing in on 3000, 3451, 3411.  No luck.  3000 never connected, and
hung up on me.  3451 and 3411 connected but never gave me the Grex greeting.

response 98 of 123:

May 31 05:51 UTC 2001

I don't want to be rude - but I can think of much better things for
staff to spend time on than providing friendly feedback for spam.  Spam
is endless, spam could consume 4-5 staff members *full time* if we let
it.  I believe the goal of spam prevention should be to get rid of as
much spam as possible while spending as little staff time on it as
possible.  What we spend on spam prevention here on grex is one staff
member part-time (me) who spends *all* of his spam efforts writing C
code to trap & reject spam, and a few other staff people who deal (very
part-time) with the occasional fool who sends spam out.  So far this
seems to have netted us better results than many big mail providers.
Probably that's just because we're too small to notice (and not because
we're doing anything all *that* clever).  I think it is true, though,
that we were doing some spam filtering techniques *long* before anyone
else - we've been filtering based on message headers for a long while,
and we also do some content-based filtering -- that's how we trap
"S.1618" spam for instance.  It's evil, but so is spam.

So far as why mail to "uce" hasn't produced any visible results - I
sharpen the teeth in sendmail *maybe* twice a year, at irregular
intervals.  I do check in on mail on "uce" occasionally - the last time
I looked, at the end of march (when I last sharpened the teeth), there
weren't enough reports in "uce" to detect *any* useful patterns in
incoming spam.  It's possible I'll look at sendmail again this summer,
and likely before winter - but I can't make any more specific promises
than that.

I had a look at uce's mail just now.  There are a very few complaints by
real people, including tsty's.  Hm.  I see in looking at what tsty
forwarded, that he didn't include *full* headers.  I don't have time
right now, but if someone can figure out how to get full headers in
berkeley mail, that would be a good thing to add to uce's .plan, and
perhaps in a web page somewhere.  What is odder, and perhaps more
useful, is somehow 'uce' seems to be getting its own unwanted mail
direct from spammers.  Perhaps at least one stupid "mailing list", and
some blatant spam.  Interesting...(the fools)...  Clearly, uce's mailbox
is going to be *very* interesting next go-around.

In the meanwhile, think of 'uce' as a self-serve service.  Send it (with
complete headers), pat yourself on the back, and try not to waste any
more of your time thinking about it.  In particular, *please* don't
think that screaming at me will accomplish anything.  I know, spam
bothers me too, and you have my sympathy.  **but** -- I really do have a
full time job, other things that I *like* doing, and I *don't* have time
to personally respond to 20,000 users who want instant service on
blocking spam.  (Just *responding* to those people could take 4-5 staff
people full-time!)