Evan Harris writes "I've just published a paper on a new and unique spam blocking method called "Greylisting". The best thing about it other than achieving better than 97% effectiveness in blocking spam, is that it practically eliminates the main problem of other solutions: the false-positive. There's even source code for an example implementation written as a perl filter for sendmail, along with instructions for installing, so you can get up and running quickly."

ma11achy asks: "Recently, I have been looking at making a career change from Unix Systems Administrator to programming/software development. I have a CS degree recently obtained through distance education and have been working in the field of Unix Systems Admin for roughly seven years now (in my early thirties). I have reasonable knowledge of C, good knowledge of Perl and excellent knowledge of shell scripting. Is, is there anyone out there that has made the change and could they provide any insights into what it was like for them? Am I just barking up the wrong source tree?"

Slashback tonight with more on model rocketry (and metaphysical rocketry to boot), Metallica's music online -- this time voluntarily, the fall of Ars Digita, nmap's reaction to SCO, and more. Read on for the details.

tinderbox writes "Tolkien fansite TheOneRing.net has a Quicktime clip of Gollum - and Andy Serkis - accepting the golden popcorn for Best Visual Performance at the MTV Movie Awards. It's hysterical." No joking, this is probably the funniest acceptance speech I have ever seen. Yoda had a speech for winning "Best Fight", but it wasn't anything close to this.

Mark Leighton Fisher writes "Some readers might be interested in Outstanding Objects (Developed Dirt Cheap); or "Why Don't Developers Search the Literature?" It seems like I still see a lot of wheel reinvention going on, even with the wealth of code and information now available on the Net."

Dr. Zowie writes "Perl Data Language 2.4.0 was just released; get it here. This release includes even more powerful array slicing, a complete GIS cartography package, API access to the Gnu Scientific Library, and a host of other goodies. Between PDL and its less-mature siblings Numeric Python and Octave, the established commercial languages' days appear numbered."

halfgeek asks: "I was just considering how keyboard-centric I've managed to make my setup, even under the mouse-hungry Windows GUI (no shouting; I regularly SSH to my Linux routing box for experiments, bring up VMWare when I need some X, and can't live without Cygwin). Almost everything I would want to do can be done without moving a hand to the mouse. I can open up an SSH to my server with Win+Shift+V, bring up a calculator with Win+C, run a one-shot console command with Win+0, open up the MW dictionary website to a highlighted word by hitting Ctrl+C (to copy) and then Win+Enter (to look up the contents of the clipboard). (Much of this is implemented with Perl programs and WinKey.) I also make frequent use of the volume knob and mute button built into my Logitech keyboard. If there is any good route to finding the keyboard I want with all the features I'm thinking of at a justifiable price, whether prefabricated or a wicked mod, I would just love to know about it." There are quite a few options the submitter is looking for, but it basically boils down to is this: the more keys, the better. What keyboards have you found, in your browsing travels, that have been stuffed full of useful features?

An anonymous reader writes "NewsFactor Network recently asked: Where Are All the Cool Embedded-Linux Gadgets? Well, LinuxDevices.com has just updated its answer to that question. The Embedded Linux "Cool Devices" Quick Reference Guide now encompasses 123 Linux-based gadgets and devices in 7 categories, including PDAs, mobile-phones, IP-phones, audio/video entertainment, tablet computers, gateways/routers, servers, wireless access points, robots, web-enabled cameras, telematics, industrial controllers, wrist watches, and last but not least, a DIY category: little Linux systems for projects and products. Lots of great pictures, too."

Arathorn writes "TheOneRing.net has a Quicktime movie up of just over a minute's worth of live footage from Return of The King , as shown at E3. The quality's pretty abysmal, but it gives a much-needed taster of what RoTK's going to look like. The soundtrack (such as it is) is from the final act of The Two Towers." Update: 05/21 18:47 GMT by T : Reader Adam Roben has set up a BitTorrent session as well.

Anonymous Coward writes "A useful review of Evolution Robotics' ER-1 by the boys at Techfocus. It covers: construction, customization, hardware requirements, best features, programming, durability of equipment -- and all that good stuff. One interesting factoid is that the robot can recognize objects until the object is blocked - up to 40% - by something (like a piece of furniture). Techfocus aptly points out the Orwellian implications... Another thing that rocked my world is the notion that the robot is not as much of a drag on CPU as one might suspect. TF ran the unit on an NEC Versa VXi running Windows 2000, with a 900mhz CPU and 128mb of RAM, and encountered absolutely no problems. Encouragingly, if you want to further customize your robot, why not just write a script in C or Perl -- the manual even points users toward an app primarily based in Linux. What's not surprising: it's pricey. Also some nice pictures of how the robot really looks right out of the box."

chromatic writes "Perl programmers like punctuation. Python programmers like indentation. Every programming language has its own syntax, stemming from its philosophy. What I Hate About Your Programming Language examines the issues that shape languages as they grow. It's not advocacy, I promise."

Roland Piquepaille writes "This article from Wired Magazine looks at storage with a new angle. 'Right now I am sitting in front of a whirring 60-gigabyte hard disk that cost less than $100. Do the math: If back then 10 megabytes cost $1,000, then 60 gigabytes would have cost x, where x = $6,000,000 and "back then" = 18 years ago. I'm sitting in front of $6,000,000 worth of mass storage, measured at mid-1980s prices. We have Moore's law for microprocessors. But who's coined a law for hard disks? In mass storage we have seen a 60,000-fold fall in price -- more than a dozen times the force of Moore's law.' DeLong also looks at a non-distant future when a $100 mass storage device will hold a full terabyte. He also thinks that with disk space becoming cheaper and cheaper, we'll be tempted to archive everything about ourselves, including pictures and videos. This is in fact the goal of the Gordon's Bell project, MyLifeBits. You can learn more about the MyLifeBits project by reading this NewsFactor Network article. Check this column for more details."

Call Me Black Cloud writes "NewsFactor Network has an overview of the $95.00 Gartner report titled, "Myths of Linux on the Desktop". It's a good look at several points from the perspective of a corporate user, not a home user."

Xs writes "A story over at Gamerfeed.com states that a gamer from Berkeley, California, Henru Wang, has completed Metroid Prime in 1 hour and 46 minutes! Here's the interview with Mr. Wang from Twin Galaxies." Speed records are a slightly bizarre but rather cool corner of gaming nowadays, it seems.

glengyron writes "Every Phreakers dream of Open Telephony took another step forward today when a small Australian company released their OpenPBX product at CeBIT Australia. Suddenly a massive community of programmers will be able to easily write their own Telephony applications in Perl!"

An anonymous submitter copies from the website: "MisterHouse is an open source home automation program. It's fun, it's free, and it's entirely geeky. Written in Perl, it fires events based on time, web, socket, voice, and serial data. It currently runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2k/XP and on most Unix based platforms, including Linux and Mac OSX. It can talk, it can check your messages, control the lights, program your VCR, and what is best - it understands spoken commands. It can even track your car by interfacing to a TNC. And there are 600 users and 209 authors contributing to this project. Cool, eh?"

mbogosian asks: "Recently, my broadened responsibilities have me doing some database design and modeling, and I'm happy for the new knowledge and experience, but I'm a bit frustrated about the tool selection. I know most of us have had plenty of experience with at least a handful of all the wonderful Open Source development tools out there (like GCC, GNU Make, Subversion , and Perl to name a few). My question is this: where are OpenSource design tools? I've tried what I could find on SourceForge, but (as usual?) most of the projects that sounded promising were either still in the planning stages or seemed abandoned. Of course something which allowed be to create nifty class charts and output them to UML and/or SQL would be really cool, but I've yet to find something that works (especially in Linux). What are your favorite Open Source design tools and what do you like about them?"

Scott Auge asks: "Should one be able to sue a filtering company for libel? After seeing an article top) about filtering software for sites, I decided to take a look at how mine is listed. Upon punching my site in at this N2H2 form, I see it listed as pornography. One look at my site, and you will know it is far from pornography. doesn't seem quite right to me. Opinions?"

parasew asks: "I am searching for Web-based Project Management Software, which should be (mod-)perl based, so I can enhance it or put it into an existing environment using MovableType, which is in a sort of alpha-state. I found a site about Call Center, Bug Tracking and Project Management Tools for Linux and also this short listing, but sadly they are just a bunch of projects which only come close to the kind of tool I am searching for. Gantt and Chronos, seem to be a very nice Web-Calendar packages written in Perl. I was just wondering why no one is using iCalendar (does anyone know of Perl-based Software using iCalendar), as most of the Agenda Software uses iCalendar, and even Mozilla Calendar is capable of subscribing to remote-Calendars. This looks very interesting to me. In general, I wanted to ask you Monks for the best way to do this. Should I create a new app from scratch or reusing existing stuff?"

Alex Moskalyuk writes "Ben Hammersley's Content Syndication with RSS is a step-by-step guide to implementing RSS. This standard is gaining popularity among the Web community, and some of your favorite sites might syndicate their content as RSS feeds. The new O'Reilly publication focuses on many aspects of this standard, and is of primary interest to developers, Web site designers, data architects and anyone interested in distributing their data around the Web." So if you have a steady stream of information for your customers, family, or fans, read on for the rest of Alex's review.