Mailman chronicles

ok, so you know mailman? But how to fetch a subscribers list without using the admin interface?

Mailman does not use a database nor does it store a list’s subscribers in some plain text format. So how to start? I searched the mailman mailinglist archive and didn’t find a clue. I looked a bit at the code, but it’s hard to get started if you’re not into python. 😉
By searching the mailman dir I found a .pck file.. It’s a pickled file. 🙂 This seems to be the Python term for serialization. So I found a mailinglist in its pickled state which seemed to contain the subscribers. Mmm, okay, let’s download the mailman source and find the usages of the pickle library.. Got it! 🙂 So hooray, fire up that python eclipse plugin that I’ve been eager to try out on a real piece of code, open up those nice python references and let’s unpickle!

Ehrm.. wait a second.. Apparently, downloading the source code can reveal other interesting parts of mailman. Like, for example, a script that lists all subscribers? =)

Another lesson learned with open source projects: FIRST download the source, before you try to hack it in yourself 😉 Okay, looking at the mailman installation dir would have been sufficient too, but who likes to search some custom installed linux distro over some crappy remote connection? 😉

There is still one step to do: how to get that script’s output on a webpage? One could try cgi or php for example. I looked at how mailman does it, but I guess it uses some precompiled ‘trusted’ executables for that hooked up to apache. After writing a php script, I realised it wouldn’t run on a normal user account, d’oh 🙂
The problem is not the mailman script itself, but the mailman databases it tries to open. The pickled mailing lists are only readable for users in the mailman group. I didn’t want to open a security hole (everyone has already enough spam), so I set up a cron job which executes the mailman script and puts the output readable to the normal user. It is not as cool as having the actual data, but having it on a daily basis is sufficient.

Belgian government fights spam

The Belgian government have set up a web site to inform its citizens about spam and how to avoid it. I think it’s a good initiative as it states some truly useful information a lot people probably don’t know. 🙂

On the first page already (probably the only page most people read ;)), they state 4 basic rules (which I support 100%):

  1. Be careful who you give your address to.
  2. Don’t reply to dubious emails.
  3. When publishing your address on a site, make sure it is ‘camouflaged’.
  4. Protect your computer: use a firewall and virus scanner.

I think they deserve praise for the way they managed to condense the whole spam story and what you can do about it in just one informative page. 🙂

If you understand Dutch or French (what about the German speaking Belgians? :)), read on here.

GoogleToolbarNotifier.exe

You may have noticed you have this process running, even if you’re not using Internet Explorer (I want to distance myself from any IE usage by saying I installed the toolbar for my parents :)). This post explains everything in detail. It’s an agent which tries to keep google as the default search engine. You can simply disable it in the toolbar settings by unchecking the item “Notify me on settings change”.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work in my case… I disabled the checkbutton on all 3 user accounts. I did notice I have a slighter newer version than the one on the google system blog: I have 4.0.1020. This version is even not documented yet in the Google Toolbar Changelog?? I decided to uninstall since my parents probably don’t use it anyway. 😉

Need For Speed Carbon

If you enjoyed the movie The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, or more accurately put: if you liked the cars and stunts with it (because there isn’t much of a story ;)), then you definitely have to check out the demo of EA newest descendant in the NFS family. The game features the same principles as the film, except, you get to try it out yourself now! 😉

I didn’t expect it to be as much fun as the latest NFS:MW, trying it out though proved me wrong. 🙂 Especially the canyon duel mode, similarly to the climax duel at the end of the movie, turned out to be quite a challenge. Though it seems to be highly dependent on your car choice too. Drifting with the lancer evo was a peace of cake, while winning the canyon duel seemed to be easier using the brute force chevro camaro. I didn’t try it out, but I guess, consequently, that street racing will be the easiest with the exotic car (Lamborghini) then. 🙂

They also added some extra feature they call autosculpt, which is probably a killer feature for all those car modders out there. It allows you to manually finetune several parameters of each body part. For me though, it’s useless, since I won’t invest time in it if it doesn’t affect race performance. 😉

The game engine seems to have generally remained the same as they used for NFS:MW. Which, certainly for me, isn’t a bad thing. I was pleased with its graphics and it still runs on my hardware (not full quality of course). 😉

Euhm, what else.. Soundtrack is excellent, as always. 🙂 Ah, maybe one downside: the whole game is set in a nightly environment, so no racing at high noon. :S

If you’re tired of the demo, try out this demo add-on which enables a few more cars. 😉

nfs_carbon3 nfs_carbon nfs_carbon2