As a half admin/half dev i always like to take the other persons point of view (which is even a good view for life), but this bloke takes the biscuit and in fact has made my and a number of other peoples life hell, this gentle man is the head of the http://www.five-ten-sg.com, and his view of spam is draconian by even the most deranged point of view, if he catches a spammer on a ISP network, he blacklists all IP address on that network, ALL IP’S!!!, WTF!!,
It turns out that someone who is hosted by fasthosts.com, has performed a “misc” offence against his spamming rules, and now all my domains have been black listed because i have the affrontory to share the same hosting provider as them, to add to this you cant request your ip address to be removed like other blacklists (there is rumours that you can with cash but i don’t have anything other than forum notes to substantiate this), and there are no contact details on the site (have to get them from whois), thankfully not many Spam agencies use his company, but enough for me to get complaints,

I thought i must be going daft but a quick goggling shows that i am by no means alone, so if you are an admin, please stop using this loonies black list (quite a lot of the black list monitors don’t even list his sites as they are classed and “unreliable and unreasonable”, but as a crowning example i give this in which he has used his position as a black list controller to black list the whole ip range of a magazine company (all associated and innocent companies included {some 127 publications}) who have phoned him up twice in 6 months to sell him their magazine.

There are levels in the fight against Spam, people, you don’t nuke a town to get one killer, you don’t ban an ISP to get one spammer.

Well UKlug has finished and i really enjoyed it, learnt a lot and took home some great things, but to put it all in bullet points

Good:
1) Some real big guns there and some fantastic speakers
2) Very well organised and venue was perfect.
3) Very good vendor turn out and we went away with a couple of them we will use.
4) Cutting edge (well as far as notes can be).

Bad:
1) I completely screwed up my session (very poor proof reading, under ran, projector was max 640×480, which was to low for my content but i had not thought to check before, overly nervy), though got more people coming up to me afterwards for thanks, questions and requests than the last one (perhaps it was out of pity)
2) I think that keeping a big gun talk for last session, would stop people like me slopping of to the pub and staying there on a warm Friday afternoon.

Neutral:
1) Faced the double edge sword of London being the venue, on the plus side its very easy for a lot of people to get too and so the official
attendance is high, but on the down side, people don’t commit to it and so drop out as work finds it easy to cancel/call back people, but what can you do about that

Exhibiting a set of suicidal tendency’s totally unlike them, members of the UKLUG organising committee asked me to do an interview with lotususergroup.org, the result can be found Here, i present this instead of anything useful i can put in a blog (i have tons of half finished articles, and stuff i should have done, but instead i have been ignoring my out of main client work, bad bad man, and instead have been swimming in a river in Yorkshire, yes it was flippin cold, i have spared you the horror of inserting an image here)

Well after an amazing time at Ilug 2008 I have decided to return to bloggin, so if you wish to blame anyone blame Matt White , Paul Mooney and co., this time instead of just fencing im going to try to give a bit back with some tech stuff and general useful bits rather than the insane ramblings that were “stickfight”, i have never the less bunged the old stuff in as old entries. so read them at your peril.

Anyway back to Ilug, it was my first serious conference (rather than a feeble excuse to bunk off for a while), and i have to say it was well worth it, meeting good people (blogs made flesh), and learning a hell of a lot, doing the session with Ben Poole was a bit nerve wracking, but i now have the bug and am on the look out for more stuff to try and do sessions on (I have to put the muppets guide for my part of the session up here, just have to neaten it up)

never realised how much effort went into such a set up, and as we were all attending for free you felt a bit guilty, so hats of to the whole crew