My spam count has exploded in the last few days, so I made a decision to adjust my filtering a little more.

Previously, all messages that got more than 5 points in SpamAssassin tests were flagged and sent to my .Spam folder. This got to be a bit of an issue as I still check there to make sure that no emails are miscategorized… Call me crazy, but I’m a bit anal when it comes to that stuff. (I missed an interview because of Gmail’s filters, but that’s a story for another day).

For the last few days, I’ve been reviewing the spam counts for both the more cleverly hidden spam and the less-than-clever spam. I’ve come to realize that while the odds are low that any real emails will get marked as spam if they do they’ll definitely get a score less than 10. So to combat the large amount of spam that’s now coming through, emails with greater than 10 points will now be sent directly to the trash.

Here’s what I put in my .mailfilter file for courier-maildrop:

This way, anything that gets more than won’t even be delivered, and all other emails that get a spam flag (greater than 5 points) get sent to spam, then the rest of my filters are processed.

Tested the email with the GTUBE and with a normal message and it seems to work, but we’ll see if I wake up in the morning and all my email has been dumped in the trash can.

So the Sweetcron documentation isn’t altogether clear on what you should put in cron for it to update automatically, rather than slowing down a user every 30 minutes.

It’s fairly intuitive, but for those missing this logical step, do the following.

Change the setting in the admin panel from psuedo-cron to true-cron, and take note of the URL.

Then put the following in your crontab file (easily accessed with ‘crontab -e’ on a debian machine):

You can change the 5 to be the number of minutes between updates that you want, and you’ll definitely want to change the URL to the one listed in your Sweetcron’s admin page.

Had a Tumblr setup for a while at amdavidson.me but I already have a webserver and didn’t like dealing with another host.

So I searched around a bit and Sweetcron came up as a viable alternative for an aggregator for all my internet activities. It’s a pretty cool little app, very lightweight and seems to be pretty extensible, if I get around to it.

Anyways, check it out, it has a good summary of all the useless stuff that I do on the internet, all three of the blogs, my twitter account, my delicious bookmarks, and my flickr pictures. One stop shopping.

Changed up the site a little. More to come, wanna try my hand at making the typography interesting.

I just thought the old design was a little over done, so thanks to the awesome theming capability of Wordpress… Here’s a new one.

Sorry to any visitors affected by the malformed site that cropped up due to my last post…

Old habits die hard, and I write too many of my posts in HTML only to have a missing quotation mark leave my page poorly rendered. I need to rely on the (fairly) excellent built in wordpress wysiwyg editor. At least until I write a proper, custom blog engine for this page…

The affected post has been fixed and you can now go about your business.

Switch…

That’s all I have to say. Passenger/mod_rails is so much faster and more competent at serving my crappy RoR code than my hacked together mongrel/nginx scheme that I had before.

My ram usage spikes much more when visitors hit the site, but never starts swapping. The increased ram usage is more than worth it for the HUGELY increased speed that I’m seeing by the dynamic mongrel management.

Even better, when the visitors leave (as often happens), the ram usage settles down to the same place it did with my nginx and mongrel combo.

Enjoy the increased speed and stability AMDavidson.com visitors.