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Some spam bots are human

Out of curiosity I've taken a look at what kind of spam is now getting through our automated defenses. I did a little digging and confirmed a long held suspicion.

In a nutshell, I've caught a 100% human spammer and thus verified that indeed there are people in China who's job it is to post comment spam on random websites.

The attack came from 120.43.13.81, a Chinese IP.

On Jan 12th 8:53:02 he first came to our site from Google. He was searching for:

"post new comment Create new account site:.org"

Landing page:

Parallelize - a simple yet powerful high-level interface to multiprocessing

When I was developing Cloudtask, I discovered none of the interfaces in the Python multiprocessing module were powerful enough for my needs so I had to roll my own. The result is the generically useful multiprocessing_utils module in turnkey-pylib which from my totally subjective perspective provides a far superior interface to parallelization than the built-in multiprocessing interfaces.

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Basic self-documenting ReStructured Text example

For a few years now I've been using ReStructured Text for nearly all of my documentation needs and I'm loving it.

It was originally invented for Python documentation which is how I originally discovered it. As devoted fans we use it for pretty much everything. Documentation, e-mails, even legal documents!

In fact, most of our blog posts, including this one was originally written as e-mails in ReStructured text which can be automatically converted into HTML.

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Negotiating payment as a contractor (issues, tips)

Last week I shared the advice I gave to a friend who was quitting his day job and wanted to do more freelance/contract work. This week I'll share a bit of practical wisdom on negotiating payment that I figured might be useful those of you who are just getting into contracting.

The problem: contracting clients will often ask you to quote fixed bids for contracts.

Potential issues:

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Self-experimenting with Nootropics (AKA smart drugs)

A month ago I posted a summary of my Nootropics meta-research. Today I'll share some subjective results from my self-experimentation so far.

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Advice on breaking into freelance consulting, contract work, standard rates, wages and billing practices

Not too long ago, a friend told me he was quiting his day job to try going out on his own as a freelance consultant/contractor and asked for some friendly advice regarding wages and billing practices.

I may not have been the ideal person to ask, as I had never worked in the exact market my friend was going into. On the other hand, in my twenties, a few years back I did work as a computer security consultant.

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Rediscovering 19th century literature

Lately, thanks mostly to Moonreader+ TTS on my phone I've been getting a lot more reading done. To my surprise I've become a stickler for 19th century classics. Besides being free, they're old enough to have stood the test of time but not so old that I have difficulty relating to them.

Here are a handful of recommended classics I found particularly enjoyable:

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Google vs Microsoft: what's in a name?

Microsoft is a trainwreck. I used to abhor the desktop monpolist as an evil threat to standards-based open source innovation. But in the last decade they've been screwing up so badly I almost feel sorry for them. As much as you can feel sorry for a massive corporation that is.

One thing that puzzles me in particular is how Microsoft fails to grasp that their efforts to compete with Google in the search space are a pointless waste of countless billions and a lethal distraction that has allowed Apple to wipe the floor with them in the post-PC era.

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CVE-2015-0235 GHOST: reboot or restart services

A remotely exploitable, 14 year old bug in glibc has reared its ugly head: CVE-2015-0235

Security updates have been pushed out automatically, courtesy of Debian (security tracker) to TurnKey 13 installations. TurnKey 12 installations that have enabled Squeeze LTS support have also received an update.

Phone vs email vs text chats on IM (instant messaging)

Phone vs e-mail

Alon and I usually shy away from handling things over the phone because it requires coordination (especially when you have different time zones), breaks up our work-flow, and isn't self documenting.

In fact, when I'm working I usually put my phone on silent and as far from reach as possible because nothing breaks up my concentration like a phone call. E-mail I can send and reply to in my own sweet time. A phone demands your attention this very instance. Drop everything and talk to me right now!

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