I just watched Unconstitutional. It ended with this question: what are we fighting for?

Most people would say we are fighting for our freedom. That would include our freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom from the government detaining us for no reason, freedom from our government using their power to steal our property.

Yet our response to attacks on us is to turn around and restrict many of those things we say we’re fighting for. People who are Muslims in this country have been beaten in American Federal prisons, held for nearly a year with no charges filed. People who are exercising their right to protest find themselves under FBI scrutiny.

For those of you that have not yet seen Unconstitutional, you should see it. If you are thinking it is like Fahrenheit 9/11, think again. This is not a stick-a-microphone-in-a-politician’s-face-to-make-him-look-stupid movie. This is a movie loaded with first-person interviews and actual footage of events. They interviewed a Muslim family fleeing oppression in Syria who had three family members held in terrible conditions — in Seattle — after 9/11. They showed footage of a Washington, D.C. police unit infiltrating a peaceful protest during Bush’s inauguration. The parallels to the Japanese internment camps years ago are startling.

This is something we should all be MAD about.

I’ve been running Postfix on all my servers for many years now. Postfix has proven to be fast, stable, and reliable.

I’ve had some complaints, though. The main one is its filtering support. It doesn’t support filtering during the SMTP transaction. (Well, OK, recent versions do, but not very well.)

The other problem with filtering is that all of the plug-in filtering solutions stink. I am using Amavis, which is the best of them, but it still uses about 40MB of RAM for each new message, and is rather unstable.

So, I’m trying out Exim. It appears to be much more configurable than just about anything, though its queue manager is not as powerful as Postfix’s. From what I’ve read, Exim has the same peak throughput as Postfix, but a gentler ramp-up curve. That’s fine with me.

For me, the killer app for Exim is exiscan-acl. Spam and virus checking at SMTP conversation time, and a RAM overhead of about 1/80th of Amavis.

I found the Spam Filtering for Mail Exchangers HOWTO to be quite helpful. There is also an exiscan tutorial out there.

So far, I’m really liking it, though I’m having a small problem on my Alpha.

An ancient Roman skin cream has been found in perfect condition and scientists have managed to replicate it. Apparently this has been a mystery for some time.

Tin on your face, anyone?

OK, so I’m a little slow updating the links. Marty’s blog has moved to martymorrow.blogspot.com. And read his harvest prayer while you’re at it.

After the first presidential debate of the season, Slate has called Bush the King of Denial on their homepage. Their article ends with this gem:

Tonight he scoffed, “If I were to ever say, ‘This is the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place,’ the troops would wonder, ‘How can I follow this guy?’ “

Exactly, Mr. President. If you were ever to give them the correct assessment, they would ask the correct question.

I don’t know whether to laugh or go hide from the black helicopters. The Air Force has made plans to take down neutral satellites.

I made some major changes at www.complete.org today. This is the first re-implementation of the site in five years.

The first thing was getting rid of Zope. It is a huge memory hog, each process (and there are usually 5 or more) consuming over 50MB. Upgrades are painful as well. Modifying anything is a headache since I can’t just hack a file on disk.. I rewrote most of the site in PHP and used its command-line interface to generate static HTML files from it. It’ll be possible to have dynamic files in there too if I want later on.

I didn’t choose PHP because I like it. Actually, I think PHP the language is a terrible one. It suffers from all the problems of Perl, if not more. It doesn’t ever complain if you use a variable that’s not been defined; it just assumes its an empty variable. You may never know of a typo until something obscure is broken.

I chose PHP because it has a lot of stuff written for it and because I already have PHP code running on the machine.

I also completely eliminated Apache 1.3, so Apache 2 is the only Web server (aside from PyGopherd) still running on the machine.

A lot of work, with little visible changes, but it’s all faster and nicer now.

A light bulb in Texas has been shining continuously for 96 years. But apparently it has a second-place finish to one in California that has been on since 1901. There’s some pride in the light bulb world, I guess.

Cooking For Engineers is a fun and interesting site. They have various recipes and information. A fun read.