Scott Bush

The city of Seat­tle is con­struct­ing something-or-other along Lake City Way. As my car­pooler and I drove by today I saw some­thing astound­ing: big-people Legos. That’s right: rec­tan­gu­lar con­crete blocks with four or six stubby cylin­dri­cal nubs on top for stack­ing. How cool is that

Won­der if they come in col­ors besides grey?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever got some mail offer­ing you a mort­gage, degree, med­ica­tion, stock tips, enlarge­ment of a cer­tain male body part, OEM soft­ware, etc. What? Every­one? Keep your hands in the air if you get more than one a day… okay, how about five per day? 10? Two dozen or more? Wow.

If you’ve been liv­ing under a rock, you may not know that stuff is called spam, and it’s the bane of everyone’s exis­tence; much more so if you hap­pen to main­tain a mail server. How can we cope? Well, first off, don’t buy any­thing from such mes­sages. You scoff, but peo­ple do or it wouldn’t con­tinue. Other than that, you can obfus­cate your address.

Address obfus­ca­tion, trans­lated into Eng­lish, is a way to hide your e-mail address in the code of web pages where it may appear (such as your blog, com­pany site, etc.). This can be done many ways with vary­ing lev­els of sophis­ti­ca­tion. Recently, I tran­si­tioned my orga­ni­za­tion’s web sites from out-in-the-open address­ing to the sim­plest obfus­ca­tion: HTML enti­ties. An exam­ple will make this clear:

joe@hotmail.com becomes
joe@hot »
mail.com

That may look like a huge mess (and it is to our eyes), but when a web browser (such as the one you’re using to read this) sees it, it dis­plays the famil­iar English-text e-mail address. Looks the same, works the same unless you’re an e-mail har­vester pro­gram crawl­ing the web, in which case you see the HTML enti­ties and don’t rec­og­nize them. You are denied the evil plea­sures of spam­ming me.Of course, such mea­sures don’t stop the addresses already float­ing around spam­mers’ lists. Nor does it stop the other meth­ods by which addresses are har­vested. But it does ame­lio­rate the prob­lem, which is almost as awe­some as me using the word ame­lio­rate in a blog post. So give it a shot with the addresses posted on your site.

Tip: if you’re a Mac user (as you should be!) you can eas­ily obfus­cate address using this wid­get. If not, there’s a sim­ple web-based tool, too.

PS — If your arm’s still in the air, you can put it down now.

Hav­ing a blog affords me the oppor­tu­nity to share lit­tle nuggets of humor that oth­er­wise would never bring smiles to our lips. Here’s one such per­fect lit­tle story, which I share in nar­ra­tive form.

Date and time: Sun­day, 7:55am

Loca­tion: Front of condo build­ing in Kenmore

Scott stands about, wait­ing for his ride. Enter Lisa, car­ry­ing small, brightly-colored purse.

Scott: “Hey, what’re you doing out here now?”

Lisa: “Going to church, wait­ing for my ride.”

S: “Me too.” Small talk, until Scott notices the phrase dis­played on the purse.

S: Curi­ous, point­ing at the purse “What does your purse say?”

L: “Ditch Him—pretty funny, huh?”

S: “Totally. Fits well with the He’s Just Not That Into You men­tal­ity, right?”

L: Laugh­ing “Yep, but get this. I was in the bath­room at church one week and the old ladies there saw it and were like ‘What? What?! Ditch Him? Him? Oh my gosh, that woman is advo­cat­ing to ditch GOD!’ Yup, they thought I was the devil”

S: Con­fused “What? Why’d they think that?”

L: Point­ing to the ‘Him’ “Look again. See the cap­i­tal H. Him. Like Jesus, get it?”

S: “Wow… ha ha ha, that is hilar­i­ous! The curly writ­ing obscured it for me. What’d you do then?”

L: “Hissed like a snake and ran out of the bath­room, then laughed my butt off.”

S: “Well played, very well played indeed.”

I swear that’s all true… except maybe the last two lines. Actu­ally, she just pointed out it was a novelty-phrase purse and left it at that. But my end­ing is funnier.

This post is for those of you loook­ing to resolve a very tricky issue with your SOHO net­work (and not for any­one for whom the words in the posts title are totally for­eign, except­ing “night­mare”). I wish I’d found a sim­i­lar post before I spent weeks going batty. Here’re the setup and the symptoms:

• You man­age a net­work that uses NAT, giv­ing all com­put­ers on your net­work inter­nal IP addresses (typ­i­cally 192.168.x.x).
• Your net­work has one external-facing IP address assigned by your provider, which is given to your net­work rout­ing device (like a Linksys, D-Link, or Belkin; or, if you’re awe­some, you’re using a Soekris device run­ning m0n0wall).
• Your e-mail provider runs *nux with QMail and Courier-IMAP as its mailserver
• Mail clients on your net­work expe­ri­ence fre­quent, inter­mit­tent con­nec­tion prob­lems to your mail server. This prob­lem is unre­lated to web brows­ing or other inter­net use, and is not restricted to any par­tic­u­lar machine.
• Your stress lev­els and/or hair­loss increases while your peer con­fi­dence lev­els decrease.

The issue, my trou­bled IT col­leagues, lies in the imapd con­fig file. Mine lived in /etc/courier-imap/imapd, though yours may be else­where. The issue is with the default value for the maxperip set­ting, which is only four. This means that the fifth mail client to con­nect to the mail server receives an uncer­e­mo­ni­ous rejec­tion. But, if you try again then you may get through once the other con­nec­tions fin­ish, which com­pli­cates the trou­bleshoot­ing process.

To resolve it, sim­ply open the imapd con­fig file in your favorite text edi­tor and locate the maxperip set­ting. It’ll look like this:

##NAME: MAXPERIP:0
#
# Maximum number of connections to accept from the same IP address

maxperip=4


Sim­ply change the value 4 to some­thing more rea­son­able for your net­work: I use the num­ber fof com­put­ers in the office at any one time, plus 5 for good mea­sure. Hon­estly, you can set it higher until the prob­lem disappears.

I hope this saves some­one out there some headaches (assum­ing Goolge indexes this post and gets found by those in need). If so, I’d love you to post a comment.

Today is the begin­ning of the three-day Enlight­ened Wealth Insti­tute (EWI) at the Hilton in Seat­tle. (EWI is the new moniker for Enlight­ened Mil­lion­aire Insti­tute, which they say reflects their focus on “enlight­ened liv­ing” rather than money.) I’m going to attend, but not until the week­end because I’m busy help­ing at the NSRF Win­ter Meet­ing held just across the block at the Sher­a­ton. The focus for this EWI con­fer­ence is “mulit­ple streams of income,” which EWI founders Robert G. Allen and Mark Vic­tor Hansen describe (both instruc­tion­ally and nar­ra­tively) in their book The One Minute Mil­lion­aire. In a nut­shell, it advo­cates approach­ing wealth-generation through (no sur­prise) mul­ti­ple ways, such as real estate invest­ing, “info-preneurialship,” and both Inter­net– and retail-based sales. The book also strongly advo­cates the use of teams and men­tor­ships, which are hall­marks of the EMI process.

In 2003 I attended a sim­i­lar EMI con­fer­ence in Las Vegas focus­ing specif­i­cally on real estate invest­ing. It was very excit­ing and had a lot of infor­ma­tion about REI; I was already an investor but the ideas—and indeed just the energy in the room—were inspir­ing. Yes, it was a hard sell in the vein of “you’ll learn more when you become a mem­ber and have access to x, y, and z!” Noth­ing wrong with that, as I’m sure their protégé men­tor­ing pro­gram they were sell­ing would be very rig­or­ous and (with some luck) prosperous.

I’m look­ing for­ward to the mate­r­ial since I could use a lit­tle “pump­ing up” after the dis­as­ter­ous chal­leng­ing process of our home-building deals in Florida. I’ll post again once I’ve learned more.

UPDATE! Mathew Bald­win saw fit to include the first of my updated cliches on his site. Thanks, Matt! He’s also got round two of the CRP going.

As evi­dence of this fun, he’s cur­rently ask­ing his read­er­ship to par­tic­i­pate in the Cliché Rota­tion Project. I’ve sub­mit­ted four entries that are as cool as a cucum­ber. But, as they are likely too full of baloney to be among the win­ners, I’ll post them here.

None of them are good, of course. The first entry’s word dead­lights pays homage not to Steven King, whom I believed invented the word in one of his dozens of mediocre works, but to pirate slang as I dis­cov­ered lis­ten­ing to Trea­sure Island over at Lib­rivox.

Astute read­ers may notice four inten­tional clichés in this post. Any oth­ers are unin­ten­tional and I ask your forgiveness.