Tom Martin

In this post, Donnie mentioned the use of various spam filters and IMAP proxies.

I don't know about other people, but most of the spam I receive is in character sets that I can't even read. So, it only takes one simple procmail rule to filter them all out:

:0
* Content-Type:.*(big5|gb2312|euc-kr|ks_c_5601-1987).*
/dev/null

It makes sense to put this sort of thing before your spam filters, as it will use nowhere near the resources.

Just got back home after my flight back from Manchester. I'm very tired, but I'll do my best to scribble down a few things. I apologise for not having any photographs, but there is a video/DVD in the pipeline.

Rob Holland (tigger^) gave a great talk on code auditing, in particular with doxygen and his work with that. The slides were a bit rough and ready (hehe), but it was excellently presented nonetheless. He didn't even swear once.

Stephen Bennett (spb) showed me and a few other people Gentoo/FreeBSD with the Gentoo init script system. Really quite impressive.

Daniel Drake (dsd) presented the kernel and user-relations projects. I think the talk will help a lot of users to report better bugs in the future, and maybe even George will sort out his DMA access now.

My talk was really rather scary for me and I was quite nervous (and unprepared!); I think it went fairly well though. The Zsh demo at the end seemed to get a few oohs and aahs.

Harry Moyes, a guest speaker from manchesterwireless.net, gave a talk on the process of setting up a charity in the UK, and the details thereof.

Also thanks to Gareth Bult for his talk on Flash Linux. It was really informative, and it looks like a very useful and interesting Gentoo-based distribution.

Thanks to the organisers, Stuart Herbert (Stuart) and Reuben Finch (grumpydog), for putting so much time and effort into the event. I'm looking forward to next year very much :).

you can find my talk in both LaTeX and PDF on my devspace. Compilation to any format other than PDF probably won't work (you'll need app-text/tetex or similar and dev-tex/latex-beamer at least, and also I would recommend dev-tex/rubber)

This is my first time writing a web log to an audience, but planet.gentoo.org seems to be a great way for the developers to communicate with users and for the users to keep up with what's going on in Gentoo.

Anyway, at the moment I'm writing my talk and slides for the Gentoo UK Conference 2005 and things seem to be going quite smoothly. I've been a bit pressed for time lately, so the talk-writing has been postponed and put-off till I've been able. I definitely think it's time to get stuck in now; I've only got about a day left to prepare for the talk, which is going to last for an hour :). For those that are interested, the slides are being written in LaTeX with the beamer package. You may even find some demo PDFs on my developer webspace, /temp, although these aren't complete or final.

I'm also enjoying getting my Ultra 2 machine up and running. It's a 2x300MHz UltraSPARC II box, with 256MB RAM and two 4.2GB discs. It's been great fun to play around with some non-PC hardware and it's going to be very useful, as a lot of the smaller net-mail packages are missing ~sparc keywords. I can now test on these. After the saga with a crappy 13W3 adapter, it's great to finally get the thing working.

I'm currently running through the recruiting process with a couple of new developers, and next on the list is Homer Parker (hparker). He's probably going to be set up by tonight, so don't forget to reply to my announcement for him on the gentoo-dev mailing list and wish him well!