Earlier I talked about generating random Subject lines for emails. I settled on something that looked like Subject: Your email (1024) . Those were fine, but got dull quickly. By switching the procmail rules to look like:

:0 fhw
* ^Subject:[\ ]*$
|formail -i "Subject: RANDOM: $(fortune -n 65 -s | perl -pe 's/\s+/ /g')"

:0 fhw
* !^Subject:
|formail -i "Subject: RANDOM: $(fortune -n 65 -s | perl -pe 's/\s+/ /g')"

I'm now able to get random subject lines with a little more meat to them. They come out looking like: RANDOM: The coast was clear.  -- Lope de Vega

Jetty is a great Java servlet container and web server. It's fully embeddable and at OnionNetworks we've used it in many of our products. It, however, has the same 2GiB file size limit that a lot of software does. This limit comes from using a 32 bit wide value to store file size yeilding a 4GiB (unsigned) or 2GiB (signed) maximum, and represents a real design gaff on the part of the developers.

Lately I've been corresponding a great deal with someone who doesn't elect to use the Subject: line in emails. When responding to this emails my mail application, mutt, uses the Subject line: re: your mail. Mutt also groups conversations into threads using (among other things) the Subject line. So every reply to every person who has sent a message with a blank subject line gets grouped into a single thread when they, in fact, have nothing to do with one another.

Back in 2003 I started tracking some numbers on my email use patterns, especially related to replies. I ran those old scripts on my 2004 mail and the numbers look pretty similar:

• Of the 3236 emails I sent during 2004, 2094 of them were replies
• My five most common response times in minutes were:

• ten minutes: 40 times
• thireen minutes: 36 times
• sixteen minutes: 36 times
• twelve minutes: 35 times
• eleven minutes: 33 times

• My mean response times was 22.36 minutes
• My longest response time was 58.4 days.

The only really meaningful number there is the median response time and comparing it to 2003, I'm a lot faster in general.

I've switched from a mailing list driven system to a wiki based one for this UnBlog. It's less weird than the mailing list setup was, but it's not exactly moveable type either. It offers RSS feeds and subscriptions, though through entirely different mechanisms than the list did. I think I've moved everything over well enough that there are no dead links into the old space. I ended up using my WikiChump thing modified to handle attachments and create comment pages to populate the data.

I try to maintain good password practices -- total random gibberish, never use the same password for two things, change them monthly --, and the EBP lite from http://mandylionlabs.com/ certainly helps.

Last night, at about 3am I was doing my monthly password change and somehow I typed one password wrong in exactly the same way three times. Today when I tried to add my ssh private key it just wouldn't unlock. I tried the "right" password 10 or so times and no luck. I then started trying slight variants on the password: fingers shifted, missed shift key, similar looking characters, etc. After 30 or so of those tries with no luck it was time to script.

It's time once again for that marriage of mathematics and paranoia that is a cryptographic key signing. I'm organizing another for Thursday, January 20th, 2005. Details can be found at: https://ry4an.org/keysigning/ Results from my last key signing can be found at: http://ry4an.org/keysigning/visualize/

If all that's gibberish to you, check you my much better explanation last time I did one of these: https://ry4an.org/unblog/msg00026.html

Thanks once again to the ACM for letting us use their room.

I've got the entries and current scores posted for the Dead Pool at http://sarinity.com/deadpool/ . Thanks to those who entered. I was planning on hitting everyone up to join at the Halloween party, but then I got distracted and forgot. O'well six people, two of whom already have points, is good enough.

Best of luck to the entrants,

I code for a hobby and a profession, but usually it's only the hobby stuff I can release here. However I'm happy to say and proud to announce that Onion Networks, my employer, has okay-ed the release of AntFlow, a tool I largely wrote.

AntFlow adds hot folder triggers and workflow functionality to the ever popular Ant build tool. It's a great fit and a right good bit of code, so check it out at http://antflow.onionnetworks.com/ .

My Halloween costume this year came out pretty well. I went as Alex from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange during his brainwashing. I made the head piece from scrap metal, some syringes, galvanized steel wire, rubber tubing, and a lot of rivets. The actual actor was temporarily blinded during the filming of that scene, but I went less hard-core on the eye restraints and the only after effects I've got are some bruising and puffiness. All in all better than I was hoping for. See the attached image for a photo. Thanks to the Kromhout clan for the photo.