I started a new blog last week based on my exploits in EVE online…   really because this blog isn’t really the place for it - despite my recent mini-review, the politics and trading exploits in EVE are NOT the place on an IT blog, and I’m sure the editors here would promptly tell me off if I was to post all EVE content.

Anyhow I wanted to see how many readers I was getting, where the viewers were from etc.   Reason, purely my interest, as I want to see who’s reading my content, as a blog with no readers is surely not a blog but a journal!
I installed both Google Analytics and Feedburner on my blog.    GA to analyse the breakdown of visiting users, and Feedburner to actually track people subscribing to the RSS feed.   So I posted some content, and  publicised in a few locations, and I finally am seeing statistics.

Of the 2 services, currently I prefer Feedburner.   Google Analytics has a 24 hour delay on its statistics it seems, so thus isn’t as useful up front.   However Google Analytics does have extra detail on referrers to name just one item, which I’m sure in time I’ll find interesting - however it doesn’t give the immediacy Feedburner does.

Feedburner for example shows me who is reading the RSS and when, from where, and is instant updating- for example today I know I had 2 visitors from Denmark, though the majority of my readers are in the USA.

So… my question to you guys out there is:    Is there a feedburner like real time analysis platform for web hits - thats invisible on the page like GA is?

I totally agree with the Conservative policy mooted in this Register article.

Being a member of an IT security team you realise that user-education and actions are what invariably lead to data loss… and a problem with users is their apathy and reluctance to change.

If you tell a user to do data transfer in this “secure” manner - you’re safe, If you use your old process you risk going to jail. I think this one change would focus their minds quite well..

Users in large companies sometimes do try and hide behind the “process” shield, instead of challenging a potentially risky insecure data request from a client/partner in many cases…

For example I still see users internally who are unaware that email is by nature an insecure medium - of course unless a secure pgp or s/mime link is setup in advance of the email being sent…

Thankfully we now have technology in place to spot and stop many such instances from occurring now (in email at least), with the email’s in question being redirected to compliance instead of the end-recipient so they can be educated as to proper data transfer methods. Of course the technology isn’t perfect, user education is the main thing here, and legislation and personal responsibilty for loss is the good thing.

So, hats off to the conservatives - a step in the right direction.

I’ve posted about this before in comments to this post, but I think it deserves a seperate update post:

1 month and a few weeks in, I’m finding the iPhone 3G battery life to still be sufficient for what I use my phone for. There is, however, noticible difference in battery left at end of day if I don’t micromanage (ie turn off/on) the relevant chipsets on the phone. My major gripe is there is no Office/Work/etc profiles to control what is turned on… Doing it manually can be a pain. Right now I have the below setup:

At home: Need Bluetooth, Wifi on, and 3g off (non 3g area)

At office/travelling on train: Need Wifi off, BT off, 3g on

In car: BT on, 3g off, wifi off

Providing I change settings as above, in my usage - yesterday I got (starting coming off charge at 6:30am):

1. 1.5-2 hours of mp3 playback (during half of this was also surfing web on train (mix of 2g/3g)
2. 1 hour of websurfing and email (I have 2 email accounts, one push, one checking hourly) via 3g
3. One 2 hour phone call (2g)

At end of day (midnight), I still had ~ 40% of the battery free and  I realised this isn’t that bad.  Without micromanaging the battery the day before, I had 5% (an estimate) - with an almost identical usage pattern.

In comparison my old Nokia N73 (also 3g) could only handle 2 hours of intensive web surfing/video use - a few more hours if only being used for mp3 playback… and it had a FAR smaller screen. The N73 also ran out of battery with a just being on standby and a 3 hour call in fact…

I think peoples expectations with the iPhone are that it’ll perform the same as their old phone and this is the problem. On their old phone they didn’t spend a minimum 2 hours of the day websurfing, emailing etc (and it has a smaller screen!).   They were, in many cases just using it for calls. My experience on Three with the N73 made me know that a 3g phone with very intensive use does need 2 charges a day. This surprisingly isn’t the case with iPhone for me - at least right now.

My only problem is I may have to get a Morphie and a second plug-in charger to keep me going in the future if I continue increasing my phone usage every day.

iPhone 3G users - have you come to same conclusion as me - in that the battery life issue is mainly due to increased usage of a converged device - not the phone having awful battery life?   Does yours last the day without the micromanagement I do?

Well, after many years with zero anti-spam technologies (and manual deletion of ~ 200 items a day) I decided it was time to move my mail host and implement anti-spam technologies.

Now I already have a home SAMBA server, running Debian, which also acts as a mini desktop. I decided to use this as my mail volume isn’t huge… I get ~20 valid emails a day, ~200-500 spams depending on the day of week really.

SpamAssassin looked to be the premier anti-spam solution out there for Linux, and I selected a Debian EXIM integration. Took a while to learn exim, but I’m now mostly impressed with the configuration. I’ve used dovecot as a IMAP server. All these are the standard Debian stable packages……

Basic procedure for me was I installed the packages - then I followed this guide and got a basic system up and running… and moved a “test” domain name to point inbound SMTP at the box so I could then fully test all the options and tune the anti-spam.

Tricks the above guide missed:

Using CPAN (perl -m CPAN -e shell) to install Net::DNS. Without this vital step Spamassassin missed out on ALL DNS tests, which are quite good for scoring.

Bayesian filtering.

• Set this up to use a system wide database, in a folder you control with world read/write access. The default isn’t right.
• You may wish to increase the default size of the bayes database. I increased mine 10 times.
• It seems to require 200 spams and 200 non-spams to be learnt before its operational - at first I did not realise this. I fed Bayes a folder of 2000 spams, and let it read my (already filtered of spam) archive of personal mails as non-spam (3400 items). This trained the spam filter quite well.. I used a variation of this script
• If you run sa-learn with -D for debug it does tend to show faults in your SA config.
• Increasing score of BAYES_99 for me at least results in better results.
• I’ve set up learn as spam folders in my mailfile, which is learnt and deleted every 6 hours (ie mails making it through SA I drag to this folder).

Setting SpamAssassin up is NOT easy, and requires a lot of tinkering to get runnign as you want (hence my playing with a test domain). Once complete however, its an brilliant system in my opinion at least.

Now its up and running, only 4 spams have hit my mailbox (though I’m still storing all spam - aim is to not store very high scoring spams in future, and only store “uncertain” results. Though right now, with ~5000 spams not hitting my mailbox I’m a happy bunny.

SpamAssassin is also available as a windows version I believe. For Exchange users with nothing else it may be worth a look.

Quick post:

I updated last night to the new 2.0.1 iphone software… and it fixes a few of the bugs in 2.0.0 - namely the browser/other apps crashing regularly and randomly (this isn’t a huge issue in browser as it restarts and usually goes back to page you are looking at) - but since installation, this morning, I had zero crashes in one hour of surfing on the train to work.

So overall, I’d say if you have an iPhone, you want to install 2.0.1 asap.