Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

The final build of Firefox 1.5 just got released. Shwing!

For the record, if you have issues connecting your PSP to a WRT54G router (version 3 or 4) using WPA-PSK, upgrade the router firmware using the HyperWRT package. Works like a charm. Also you can upgrade the PSP to the 2.5 or higher firmware.

For anyone following my eBay adventure, here’s their official response:

Hello,

My name is Roberto with eBay Customer Support and I appreciate the
chance to help you with your concern.

Unfortunately i can not locate your email address on our website. The
email address you provided is not the registered email address with
eBay. Therefore, please provide us with your registered email address
or User Id so we may investigate the matter in full.

I realize that the possibility of receiving retaliatory feedback is one
of the most frustrating aspects of a dispute between members. However,
we cannot block members from leaving feedback, or from retaliating if
you leave them negative feedback. If we were to interfere and stop
members from leaving the feedback they choose then the Feedback Forum
would no longer be a place for free and open communication. In addition,
other members would not be able review the Buyer’s and Seller’s comments
for each other, including the replies and/or follow-ups, and make up
their own minds about what happened in a transaction.

Of course, no one wants to receive retaliatory feedback. I can only tell
you that we think it’s important to tell the truth about your
experiences dealing with other eBay members. If that means leaving
negative feedback, then you should do so. Retaliatory feedback is
usually obvious to anyone looking at your profile, especially when
looking at the other, positive, feedback that you’ve received.

Yeah, I think they kind of sided with the seller in this policy. So with the help of Derek I squeezed as much negativity as I could into 80 characters and left it for that seller. When I did that I noticed that he’s gotten a few negatives recently - hopefully future buyers will see that.

Well it was bound to happen I guess. And it was pretty easy to predict if you read my last eBay entry. Yeah, I got fucking scammed.

I’ve been collecting for a while now computer RPGs. I love the boxes and the usually huge manuals that come with them. I’ve got so far Baldur’s Gate 2 plus expansion, Neverwinter Nights and expansions, Morrowind (and expansions!) and Icewind Dale 2. All of them cost less than twenty dollars each, and they’re pretty kickass (excepting Morrowind, haven’t been able to get too into it yet - but I haven’t given up). So anyways, I found Icewind Dale 1 on eBay for a decent price and stupidly order it before reading the fine print. In the fine print is the details “Picture does not match item” and “No boxes or manuals”. That sucks, but hey - at the point I caught that I chided myself for not checking all the details and accepted my loss.

Then the item came. And of course, it’s just the CDs and nothing else. Except they’re burned. And they’re not CDs! For some reason, this guy thinks that Bioware’s “original packaging” is cellophane and DVD-Rs with off-center stickers.

And another painful issue - I paid 4.47 USD for the game and 8.95 USD for shipping. At the time, expecting the box and what not, that was acceptable for me. Then I see on the top of the shipping label that it was sent from Thorn Hill. And the cost of shipping was 6 dollars Canadian. Excellent! Thanks, you bastards. And as I already mentioned they have an “auto-feedback” system, so when I leave them a negative comment they’ll do the same to me.

So I emailed them of course asking for a refund. I get an auto-response back that has a URL to a site that sells thousands of software packages for a penny each! Imagine that! And the best part of the e-mail was this:

Sorry for the incontinence,

THANKS.

Incontinence indeed! Anyways, I’ll wait for their response but I’m leaving negative feedback regardless of the outcome so that other people know what they’re getting. And for the record, the seller had 9505 positive ratings in the last year so I figured I would have been alright.

My first CPAN submission :-)

Wanna see a one of the shittiest policies an eBay seller can have?

We Have AUTO Fedback System…As You Leave Feedback It Will Leave the Same Feedback To You.

Please leave a positive feedback, and we will leave positive feedback For You.

I’m actually going to leave negative feedback to them (since my negative rating wouldn’t fuck me up as a buyer). What a jerk.

Install at least these packages:

• clamav
• clamav-base
• clamav-daemon
• clamav-docs
• clamav-freshclam
• libclamav1
• procmail
• razor
• spamassassin
• spamc

First setup the spamd daemon process to run automatically. Edit the /etc/default/spamassassin file and change the ENABLED variable to 1. Also if you’re running SpamAssassin 3.x, add the “–round-robin” parameter to the OPTIONS variable to fix the broken preforking. Edit the system-wide SpamAssassin configuration (/etc/spamassassin/local.cf) and make whatever changes you want. Personally I’ve disabled the Bayes and Auto-whitelist systems for now but your mileage will vary. Now do a “/etc/init.d/spamassassin restart” to get it started.

ClamAV’s daemon should automatically be up and running if you used the right package, and the freshclam addon will keep the virus definitions up to date.

Make sure that procmail will execute for every user. By default Exim 3 will only run procmail if the user has a “.procmailrc” file in their home directory. Disable this test by commenting out the following line in the exim.conf file:


require_files = ${local_part}:+${home}:+${home}/.procmailrc:+/usr/bin/procmail


If you’re less lazy you can just comment out the procmailrc component. Now edit /etc/procmailrc and make it look like this:

# Drop privileges
DROPPRIVS=yes
MAILDIR=${HOME}

# Scan using the ClamAV daemon. If a virus is found append a special header.
:0
{
        CS_OUT=`clamdscan --mbox --no-summary --stdout -`
        CS_EXIT = $?

        :0 D
        * CS_OUT ?? : \/.* FOUND$
        * MATCH  ?? ^^\/.* ()
        * MATCH  ?? ^^\/.*[^ ]
        {
                :0 fw h
                | formail -I “X-Clamscan: Infected with $MATCH”
        }
}

# This shoves all virus infected e-mails to a shared file.  Make this file
# writeable by the mail users and readable only by root (just a precaution)
# will check if this file is above 0 (and if so e-mail root)
:0:
* ^X-Clamscan: Infected with.*
/var/spool/av/Infected

:0fw: spamassassin.lock
* < 2560000
| spamc

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*
${MAILDIR}/Junk

That file should be fairly straight-forward. In the last rule you can change the threshold for SpamAssasin’s score. I’ve never had a false positive yet with 5 (but again, that’s my experience). Now finally restart exim with a “/etc/init.d/exim restart” and you should be good to go. One thing I recommend is adding a LOGFILE option to the procmailrc file - the only caveat being that the file will have to be writeable by all of your mail users. You can log to the file by putting “LOGFILE=/tmp/procmail.log” as the first line of the file.

Also if your users use IMAP to check their mail, make sure to add the Junk folder to their “.mailboxlist” file (assuming that you’re using uw-imap).

P.S.: Exim 3 is old and dead, I know, and I’ll eventually upgrade to 4 and add any notes here.