From the Deadly to the Bizarre!

This guy had a lucky escape! Builder survives nailgun accident – see the xray! 6 nails in his head! Wow!
And then there was the woman who bought 10,000 Mars bars.. Won’t need to worry about breakfast for a while! hehe.
And it seems IRC is under attack!

Still, I.R.C. perhaps most closely resembles the cantina scene in “Star Wars”: a louche hangout of digital smugglers, pirates, curiosity seekers and the people who love them (or hunt them). There seem to be I.R.C. channels dedicated to every sexual fetish, and I.R.C. users speculate that terrorists also use the networks to communicate in relative obscurity.

Sounds like a really bad place. Maybe Bosco lovers congregate there or something? 😛

Dangerous Driving.. in Cork

I had to leave the office at lunchtime, and on the way back to the office I saw what was almost a very serious crash. Note, I said “crash”, it would have been no “accident”.
Two lorries were in front of me, a heavy earth moving one and a container lorry. The container lorry driver must have been in an awful hurry – on a junction just outside Ballincollig he tried to overtake the earth-mover. Unfortunately for him, a woman driving a Toyota Corolla was turning into a residential park at the junction.
The lorry driver slammed on the brakes, turned left to avoid the car, almost hit the lorry in front of him, and came to a complete halt! The earth-mover moved off, the container lorry pulled in and then carried on down the road, and a very shook woman indicated and waited at the junction for a break in traffic..
That was bad enough, but then, in a 30mph zone the lorry proceeded down the hill at a speed of 40mph or more. He pulled away ahead of me and I saw him swerve from side to side as he followed the other truck.
Eventually he went off in the direction of Iniscarra, I went into work and moments after I pulled up in front of the office I saw the same lorry go past. I don’t know many people who could have gone down the road he went, turned around, and come back up again in such a quick time, even in a small car! The road is narrow, there aren’t many places to turn, and it’s busy!
Only one thing for it.. I called the Gardai and they’re on the look out for him. He’s going to kill someone driving like that!

Data Recovery from a Hard Disk

Some of you may remember my bad luck with hard disks during the summer. One was a Fujitsu drive that died hours after I plugged it in when I got home. I lost a month’s worth of photographs from Chicago and that was obviously upsetting. Of course, after the rest of what’s happened it’s small change in terms of the bad year that 2003 was for me!
Anyway, it’s 2004 and there’s a possible solution to the drive problem!
Here at work another Fujitsu HD died yesterday morning but this time I had more success recovering data from it. I asked on , the ILUG IRC channel, and Christian suggested Parted, while Liam suggested using Gpart. Gpart is on the ILUG BBC and a quick search found this description of how to use it!
I can happily say that gpart worked perfectly! It detected the partition table and I was able to write it to the drive again. A quick reboot and I was able to copy off the important data! Other stuff can wait but gpart turned out to be a life saver here. 🙂
Of course, this is only usefui if your BIOS and Linux/*BSD can see your HD.
I have my fingers crossed that I can do the same on the HD at home. There’s a lot of photos I want to recover!

Spamassassin – scoring on DSL lines

Since upgrading to Spamassassin 2.60 yesterday I’ve noticed a (small) increase in false positives. There were only 4 out of 132 spams caught overnight, but almost all were from dsl or dynamic IP addresses. The default score for this test is 2.5, but if you add the following to /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf you can change the score:

score RCVD_IN_DYNABLOCK 0 1 0 1

That’ll give it a ‘1’ instead of 2.5 which is probably more reasonable. (Ironically, most of the emails caught were from “Karsten M. Self”, a critic of TMDA, who posts directly from his dial-up machine!)