dave: June 2002 Archives

I've been working on a spam filtering system for work which uses sendmail and procmail. I got fed up with clunky commercial systems which cost a fortune and don't allow any sophisticated pattern matching. After spending ages scouring the procmail list and the sendmail faqs, I've come up with a system to do what I want. I'm going to write it up and put it on the site sometime. It'll be at sendmail.html.

One of the budgies was injured too severely to survive and died last night. The other is looking very lonely. We may have to get another bird to keep him (I think) company. I took some pictures of the surviving budgie and of the fish. If I can get my scanner working, I might put these (and more pictures of Roxanne, of course) up on the site.

We acquired a pair of Budgerigars over the weekend. (That's the royal we, meaning Sandra.) Unfortunately, a cat got at one of them yesterday and he's (or she's) looking the worse for wear. One wing is badly hurt and I don't know if budgies heal from that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, one of the goldfish died on Sunday night. The little one went. Now we've got four left - two black ones and two white/red/gold ones.

Ah, the beautiful game. Ireland's journey came to an end last night with a penalty defeat by Spain. Not a good way to go out, and I felt that Ireland played better during the match - they just seemed to not be able to get the ball in the net.

A bit of a scrappy match, with a lot of off the ball nastiness.

England-Brazil should be good on Friday.

Back from Dragon Boat day down in Stanley yesterday. We had a good day, and did some good racing. Unfortunately we were rammed by them scurvy 'Sea Dogs' who lost control of their boat and impeded some others. They were disqualified, although they had the bloody cheek to go looking for a bye to the final. Hello? You can't steer in a straight line and you want to be compensated for it?

Anyway, we (and another team) got byes into the final (Expat Men's B Cup Final, to be precise) and we came fourth, which was a reasonable showing.

The competitions are different this year with the split between Expat Men's A (Fit Gits) and Expat Men's B (everyone else). It means that you can race your heart out and you'll get as far as you can without suddenly finding yourself completely out of your league. It's never been fair to have casual teams (like us) competing against the Paddle Club, or the Diggers who race all year.

Well, I guess Saudi Arabia have now been officially trounced! Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé!

Dig the groovy fabness which is the pictorial backdrop. If you're looking at this with Mozilla, it looks nice. If you're using IE, it looks like a mess. Specifically, the image under the text scrolls with the text when it shouldn't. Again, this is down to IE not working to the CSS specification. If you haven't already done so, give mozilla a try. It's at v1.0 now, after years of solid development. It's completely compliant with the specifications and pretty fast too.

The way the backdrop works is explained by Eric Meyer in his CSS pages. Go look at this page and be prepared to drool. (Probably won't work with IE, but then, IE is not standards compliant.

Meanwhile, you'll notice a few stylistic changes here. I've been setting it up using Mozilla 1.0 as the viewer, and it looks far better in that than it does in IE. Can someone at Microsoft please actually read the web standards? Thank you.

Also, diaspoir.net is now up and running as a virtually hosted site on the same server as this one. (More about the server)

It's the 13th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square crackdown today. The candlelight vigil in Victoria park is down in numbers this year because of the World Cup: China is at their first ever Cup, and Chinese people the world over are going: "Who the heck are Costa Rica, and how did they trounce us so easily?" I mean, two-nil! W00t! Suddenly I have high hopes for Ireland in this cup. One-all against the African champions Cameroon, Germany aren't strong this year and Saudi Arabia seem to be trying to play a different game - probably table tennis or tiddlywinks. Whatever that was they were playing it wasn't football.

Had the second last Dragon Boat training session last Saturday. The Tuen Ng festival is on June 15, and the races will be the same day. I'm rowing for the Scott Wilson team again this year, my sixth year paddling.