wonko.com

I happened to be looking at the raw headers of an email today and noticed something weird. The message had been sent to me from a local user on my server, so it had never actually left the server; however, SpamAssassin had given the message a couple of spam points because it said the SPF verification had failed. I double-checked the relevant SPF records and there was nothing wrong there, so I began to suspect there might be a bug in SpamAssassin's SPF verification routine.

I tried sending an email from my server to a Gmail address (this is a good way to test SPF records, since Gmail adds headers to messages indicating whether the SPF verification succeeded). Sure enough, Gmail's SPF verification succeeded. I also sent messages to a few standard SPF test services, and they all indicated success as well. Furthermore, mail sent from Gmail to my server didn't result in an SPF failure, so SpamAssassin was verifying Gmail's SPF record correctly, but not mine.

Finally, after staring at the email headers for a few more minutes, I realized what was happening. SpamAssassin wasn't buggy; it just didn't have all the information it needed.

When a local user on my server sends mail to another local user, the mail server only adds a single "Received" header to the message, and the "from" IP in this header is the user's IP (in this case, a dynamic Comcast IP). If the email had originated from an outside mail server like Gmail, it would have had at least two "Received" headers—one for Gmail and one for my server—and SpamAssassin would verify the SPF record by checking that the handoff from Gmail to my server came from a valid IP. But since this message appeared to be originating from a dynamic IP, SpamAssassin had no way of knowing that the message actually originated on the local server, because it had no way of knowing that the user had been authenticated via Postfix SMTP auth.

As it turns out, all I had to do was tell Postfix to add a header indicating that the sender was authenticated, and then SpamAssassin was happy. Putting the following line in Postfix's main.cf file did the trick:

smtpd_sasl_authenticated_header = yes

You know what I said before about broadband sucking in the Silicon Valley? I take it back. Comcast turned on our connection yesterday, and while they advertise it as 6Mbps/384Kbps, I'm actually seeing speeds as high as 12Mbps/1Mbps!

Maybe I just have good Internet karma.

I find it highly ironic that the most residential bandwidth I can get for a reasonable price in the heart of Silicon Valley is 6Mbps/384Kbps for about $65 a month from Comcast. In Oregon, I was paying the same amount to the same company for a blazing 12Mbps/768Kbps.

E is my new favorite text editor.

It's been around for a while, but it just recently started gaining a lot of momentum when the author made it his mission to turn e into TextMate for Windows.

In addition to supporting TextMate themes and bundles, e has an unlimited, branching undo buffer and built-in support for personal revision control, both of which are impossible to do without once you start using them.

If you write code in Windows, you owe it to yourself to try e.

1. Great way to lose weight fast. No money equals no food equals goodbye excess fat!
2. Instead of sitting in the hotel being bored, you get to spend that time calling banks, canceling credit cards, and trying to convince the DMV in your home state to issue you a replacement driver license without you being physically present.
3. Everyone in the HR department at your new job will remember you because you're the only one who didn't have any form of identification or proof of citizenship on your first day.
4. Driving a car with out-of-state plates on unfamiliar roads without a license adds a lovely hint of danger to the daily commute.
5. Blog fodder.

Yes, it’s April Fools’ Day. No, I didn’t really win $13 million. Would’ve been nice though.

On an unrelated note, today is wonko.com’s de facto birthday. That means I’ve been blogging in some form or another for eight years now. I’m amazed I haven’t gotten sick of it yet.

I must have done something to please the gods recently. Remember last week when I posted about how I’d gotten a great new job and was moving to California? Peanuts compared to what just happened. You’re not going to believe this. I hardly believe it myself. If you’re standing, sit down, and if you’re sitting, stand up:

I just won the lottery.

Saturday morning, two days after arriving in California, I was in a 7-11 buying a Coke and some snacks to take back to the hotel and I saw a SuperLotto Plus sign advertising the $13 million jackpot. I thought to myself, “Boy, my luck sure has been great lately; how cool would it be if I actually won the lottery?”

So what the hell, I bought a ticket. I pulled some numbers out of my ass. It was 3:07 in the afternoon, so I started with 3-7. My birthday’s December 18th, so I added 18. The nutrition info on the Coke listed 33g of carbohydrates and 40mg of sodium: 33-40. Then, for the MegaBall number, I chose 2, since it was my second day in California and this was the second lottery ticket I’d bought in my entire life.

I just about shat my pants when they announced the winning numbers: 03-07-18-33-40…and the MegaBall? Yep: 02.

I didn’t start screaming or anything, because I had always told myself that if I ever won a million dollars I would be cool and collected. So I just sat there calmly and quietly and tried to count to a million in my head. I got to 102 before I realized how much money $13 million is.

$13 million! I’m a millionaire! A goddamn multi-millionaire! I mean, yeah, there’ll be taxes and whatnot, but still. Jesus. This just about makes up for the cost of living increase.

Of course, now all I can think about is how much work this is going to involve. I have to get the ticket verified, I have to get a financial adviser, I need to decide whether I want the lump sum or the payments, I have to fend off the hundreds of people who are going to start begging for handouts, and of course I’ve gotta do some research to make sure those numbers aren’t cursed so I don’t end up like Hurley on Lost. All while starting a new job (yes, I’m still going to go to work).

This has been one hell of a lucky month.

In preparation for our impending move to the San Francisco Bay Area, I'm starting to look into Internet connectivity options. Do you live in the Bay Area? Do you have cable, FiOS or DSL? Are you happy with it or would you recommend something else? If you wonderful people would be so kind as to leave comments or email me with your advice, I'll love you forever.

A few months ago, comment spam finally started being a problem on wonko.com. Up until that point I had been doing nothing more than setting a cookie to weed out automated spammers that didn't support cookies. Amazingly, that actually worked for quite a while, but the spammers eventually wised up and started supporting cookies.

My solution, since I'm lazy, was to implement the dumbest Captcha in the world: a static, unchanging image of the word "pants". The word never changes. It's always "pants". Nevertheless, I haven't had a problem with comment spam since implementing it. Go figure.

You know how, when something really incredible happens to you that you had always sort of dreamed about but never thought would actually happen, there’s this adjustment period where it just doesn’t feel real? And you feel pretty much the same as you always did, but then occasionally the full realization of what’s happened hits you, just for a minute or two, and leaves you kind of stunned? That’s how the last few weeks have been for me.

I’ve accepted a job at Yahoo! as a Senior Web Developer on the Yahoo! Search team. In the coming weeks, Felicity and I will be leaving the drizzly Pacific Northwest and moving down to sunny Santa Clara, California. We’re both pretty excited.

I remember a conversation Felicity and I had a few years ago when I was feeling depressed about my job at the time, which was pretty boring and unfulfilling. She asked me what company I would want to work for if I could work for any company in the world, and I told her I’d want to work for Yahoo! because it seemed like a really fun place to work.

When I tore open the purple box containing my official offer letter and it actually yodeled at me, I knew I had made the right choice.