This blog has moved

Just another post to say that The England Project had moved to a wordpress blog on this server. The new address is www.theenglandproject.net/wordpress/. I would be grateful if you could update your blogroll links to reflect this new address.

Bloglines subscribers can re-subscribe by clicking on the following button:

The general rss feed is here.

Many thanks.

Announcement

The England Project is moving to a wordpress blog on this server. The new address is www.theenglandproject.net/wordpress/. I would be grateful if you could update your blogroll links to reflect this new address.

Bloglines subscribers can re-subscribe by clicking on the following button:

The general rss feed is here.

Please do re-subscribe.

I have made the move for a few reasons. Primarily because my hosting provider has started providing wordpress as an installable product which means they will provide upgrades and the like.

I will be trying out comments on this new blog using a registration based system. If you want to join in then please do register.

A few design elements will probably be changed over time on the new blog. I hope you like the initial design.

At some point in the future I will install a redirection script from the original blog URL to the new blog. Links to existing blog pages will still work.

I hope that this isn’t too inconvenient for readers.

Slow blogging alert

Blogging here is a bit slow at present as I am working on a new project which will be announced in the following days or, perhaps, weeks. It's all very exciting...

Astonishing and worrying

Looking at my referrer listing I notice a large number of hits coming from some place called drypool.net which turns out to host the guest book for the National Front. The particular place they link to is this email I wrote to the British Council and they also include the full letter text.

For the record, and just in-case anyone over at the NF (or anyone else for that matter) thinks I am a supporter, I am not.

I support an English Parliament and an English Executive. I also loosely support attempts to reduce the real prejudice and perceived prejudice against the English. Granted I bleat against enforced multi-culturism every now and again, but that is because I believe multi-culturalism and tolerance is a natural characteristic of the English. It is enforced aspects I dislike because these programmes themselves are full of prejudice.

An Englishman, woman or child can be black, white, yellow, brown, translucent or any other colour and come from any background. To be welcome in England you can come from any part of the world. I don't care where. I care about behaviour, not about race, and I'm pretty accepting of a wide range of different behaviour.

This is the first time since I started blogging again that I have considered closing down the thing. It makes my skin crawl that words I have written appear on an NF resource (unofficial as it is).

Image hotlinking

I will be disabling image hotlinking on The England Project later on today because it is beginning to account for a larger than acceptable amount of bandwidth. Any fellow bloggers out there using one of my images (eg the 1952 Committee images) directly from this site should arrange hosting and update their image links.

If you can't arrange hosting let me know and I will see what I can do.

Under attack

This site is under a sustained trackback ping attack from an online gambling spammer. I shall have to invest some time in finding out how to prevent this in future (my sql skills being up to the task of removing such pings from the backend database).

Trackbacks disabled for now.

I've cleaned up the mess and enabled trackbacks again. I've also applied a small tweak that has a slight chance of encouraging the spammers to move on, but it is by no means certain.

New document

I've now added a copy of Kipling's England and the English speech to the documents section of the sidebar.

(Repeated hat-tip to Tim).

Unclean

Posting has been light because I have the plague, or perhaps a nasty cold.

On leave

The England Project family are on leave starting tomorrow. Off to the new forest, we are. Blogging will resume Tuesday onwards.

Icky

I have been unwell
My blogging was not immune
Delli belly sux

Our Grand Tour

Dear England Project patrons,

We write to inform you that tomorrow we embark upon our Grand Tour. We look forward to the trip with great excitement and considerable joy and hope that when we return we will bring with us many great cultural treasures and relics.

I have already contacted the British Museum who say they would be delighted to pass a critical eye over any artefacts that we bring back and have assured us that there will always be a place at the museum for any items of substantial quality or interest.

Our journey will be long, taking a full 9 months on one of Her Majesties fast clippers, the Catty Bark. We will be stopping off at a number of ports before reaching our ultimate destination, the port city of Ostia Antica, where we have been assured of a place at a rather special hostelry for the duration of our stay.

Both myself and my good lady are especially looking forward to some trophy hunting whereas the young lad is intent upon some archaeology.

Naturally we will be unable to contact you once we leave these fair isles and trust that you will forgive us our leave.

Thank you for your patronage.

Rosseta:

Month: Approximately one day.
Clipper Catty Bark: A Renault scenic.
Ostia Antica: Devon.
Hostelry at Ostia Antica: Tent.
Trophy hunting: Drinking of the wine and the beer.
Archaeology: Playing in the mud.
See you after the 26th.

Excuse me

Rushed off my feet. I will return as soon as I can.

No blogging today

Off to the local NHS hospital for a spot of bother.

Blogging not

Lack of blogging due to the painting of the windows and the table with the brushes.

Painting of the windows...


...and the table

Busy, busy, busy

I shall return tomorrow.

I have mail

For those of you who are wondering what I did to my email setup I thought I’d jot down the details here. Firstly I have to say that this has all been done for another domain that I own and not theenglandproject.net. The level of SPAM received through this domain is not at painful levels yet.

My main problem was the number of emails I was receiving with viral payloads hidden in attachments containing Microsoft executable files (of one form or another). I would often get 30 pop-up warnings about quarantined viruses when I checked mail and this was making the whole process of communicating via email a real pain. It got to the point where I didn’t want to click my check mail button because the ensuing process was just too damn painful.

Now, because my hosts give me my own Virtual Private Server my domain, to all intents and purposes, exists on what looks like its own linux server with all the paraphernalia that comes along with that. This means I have full access to the configuration for a program called procmail. This program is what all mail to my problematic domain gets routed through and in its configuration it’s possible to add rules or ‘recipes’ which instruct procmail what to do if any mail it is asked to handle fits in with certain rules. I chose the nuke option which means I told procmail to delete any incoming mail that includes attachments that contain any Microsoft Windows executable files. Kaboom. I never even get to know they were sent to me. They are deleted by the server before my email program ever gets to see them.

Ultra-effective.

The other issue was the various viagra style emails, business marketing stuff, free online diploma offers and the spoofs that looked like they came from ebay or paypal. These I had to handle differently from the executable attachment style email. I mean, I was happy for all executables to be deleted without a second thought because no-one I want to talk to would ever email me an executable so that was that but other types of email are harder to spot for definite as SPAM.

Again, my hosts provide a solution in the form of SpamAssassin which they will install on request. This is a program that will scan incoming email and add various information about how likely the email is to be SPAM to the email headers in special fields. This allows the user agent (my email program, yeah I know they like calling stuff agents and whatnot) to filter email into a SPAM box according to the information added by SpamAssassin. The great thing about it is that the rules SpamAssassin uses to classify email are configurable and most of the rules you will ever need are freely available on the Internet.

So, now when I check mail, the number of valid emails that end up in my inbox relative to the amount of SPAM has increased significantly. My inbox is once again information rich, and that’s the way I like it.

As for the mail in my SPAM email box, I maybe take a look every now and again to make sure they are being correcly classified as SPAM. Maybe I just delete the contents without looking, it all depends on the mood I am in. SpamAssassin is very good at spotting SPAM and the longer you use it the more you trust its decisions.

Just to finish the story and to satisfy any reader curiosity the email program I use to view my mail is Poco Mail. I’ve tried a number of mail programs in my time (Outlook Express, Eudora etc) and Poco Mail is by far the best. Ultra configurable but easy to use and simply great looking. The thing is a pleasure to use.

So that’s it. Technodull. Brought to you by The England Project.

Admin

Sorry for the lack of postings. I have decided that I've had enough of spam emails, particularly those with viral payloads so I am spending a little time getting to grips with procmail and SpamAssassin.

Spam has been an escalating pain recently. Soon I will be able to crush it with my thumb.

Arg! I seem to have gone a little overboard with the thumbs and the crushing. The remaining question is where does email go when it dies? Rumours say some place called /dev/null. Sounds nice.