diary at Telent Netowrks

A half hour wasted by spamassassin#

Sat, 06 Jul 2002 15:44:13 +0000

A half hour wasted by spamassassin. I reattached to the wireless lan when I got here this morning, ran fetchmail, and watched my computer eat all its swap and drive the load average to something above 40 trying to start 70 copies of spamassassin. It's really time I sorted some kind of daemon-based approach; in the meantime I just disabled the thing. Perhaps I should replace it with some elisp/gnus stuff that I can actually trust.

A PHP talk: "Using PHP for large web sites". Can be summarised as "PHP is too evil to use for large web sites" (slightly longer summary: "PHP is far too evil to use for large web sites), but was more entertaining in the long form. It was gratifying to have my uninformed three-hours-reading-the-docco opinions on PHP confirmed by someone who has actually used it in anger.

A Bugzilla talk: how to write a scalable featured database-backed bug tracking and management system.

Not that I think any of these are going to be requirements for Entomotomy in the near future, but we can hope.

They also have serious problems with low-quality bug reports, and a lot of their development (the UNCONFIRMED status, voting on bugs, etc) has been driven by the need to manage this. Hope this won't be our problem either in the near term.

Out-of-context quote of the day: "Bugzilla is a very forked project"

Bug 12411: Mozilla does not have a kitchen sink (look at the attachments)

An RT talk: RT is an insanely customizable ticket tracking system. But then, it's written in Perl, which (when done right) is almost sufficient to get you both of "customizable" and "insane" For Free.

Zope 3. You thought Zope was a web application server, but actually it's an "Operating System for the Network". I found the combination of buzzwords, warmth in the lecture theatre, and XML-like code in the slides to be unfortunately soporific, but as my network doesn't actually need an operating system I thought I'd not be missing anything earth-shattering if I slipped out early.