How to lose security-conscious customers.

I use ETrade to handle some of my monies. Sorry, "used."

I got a suspicious email from "E*TRADE SECURITIES LLC" <id@proxyvote.com> (one of these things is not like the other), talking about STREETTRACKS FUND Shareholder Reports (lots of caps never a good sign) which isn't a name I immediately recognized. It linked to a pdf file (because there haven't been any zero-day acrobat vulnerabilities recently or anything, right?) at an entirely different third domain (ww3.ics.adp.com). No identifying information or "proof we know you" or "proof we're actually ETrade" offered at all, and to boot it leaked (a tiny bit of) personal information in cleartext. If you want people to be able to recognize spam and identity theft, stop making legitimate emails look fake. This is not how you use email.

The Right Way to do this, of course, is how Chase does it. You get an email saying that there's Important Information waiting for you and you have to login to read it. It proves Chase is Chase, that I'm Me, doesn't leak anything to anyone, doesn't encourage clicking on third party links and doesn't encourage trusting valid-looking emails. Now I don't know if I'll bother to encourage the half-dozen other people whose ETrade accounts I helped setup to move brokerages but they've lost my account and further recommendations.

IMAP Balancing

In reference to this AskMe question I hacked up a quick little IMAP folder-balancer-doohicky. I doubt the original asker will use it but I'll link it here just in case someone else needs to balance IMAP messages across multiple folders: imap_subfolder_balancer. May need to be modified slightly to use AUTHENTICATE instead of LOGIN and will need its paths changed.

Local Portage Overlay in Darcs

I committed my local portage overlay to darcs for ease of management, and I'm now sharing that goodness with you, my (potential) reader. Grab darcs and:

skorgu@obelisklet ~/tmp $ darcs get http://skorgu.net/portage/
Copying patch 3 of 3... done.
Applying patch 3 of 3... done.
Finished getting.

Et Voila.

The digests et al might or might not be accurate depending on how closely I'm paying attention to things and most of the ebuilds are useless/out of date, but feel the price!

My first hatemail!

I'm so proud! I'm seriously considering having it printed on some nice parchment and framing it for my Me Wall. So you're really claiming that the markets are not in an unusual turmoil at the moment?

I know Republicans are supposed to be fucking stupid and easy to troll, but you're making it too fucking easy.

You should basically just kill yourself. If you haven't noticed that the markets are messed up by this point, then you are too fucking stupid to draw oxygen through your mouth.

Die in a fire, shitface.

Near as I can figure, it's referencing this comment.

New couchdb svn ebuild

Update: couchdb svn r559 changed the behavior of the --with-erlang configure call. The ebuild has been updated.

Since Noah went and modernized the build system, rendering my three-line ebuild obsolete, I bumped it a bit. I had to tweak some of the local-state info to fit with the gentoo structure and why are permissions always so annoying?

Anyway: couchdb-9999.ebuild. The ebuild's md5sum is 91c35549d1c2773ba583a4c518c960ca.

I have an 0.6.3 ebuild too, but since so much has changed since then I doubt many would find it useful.