September 2003.2

Today I spent the day studying for LS3 while watching the 49ers destroy the Bears. The Niners haven’t looked that good since the days of Montana and Rice. I’m pretty pumped about the upcoming season now. Maybe they have a shot at the Super Bowl. The Giants lost but I didn’t watch the game, so no hard feelings. Too bad the Red Sox didn’t sweep the Yankees at home though. That would have been awesome. Stupid Jeter making a return and ruining the sweep. I hate that guy. Yankees still suck.

Here’s what I want to happen in the American League: New York loses the division to Boston and then falls short in the Wild Card race to Seattle. Oakland wins the West and New York fails to make the playoffs with baseball’s highest payroll. That would be sweet.

Nothing else really exciting happened today. Josh and I watched The Godfather on HBO and Desperado later on TNT. Hopefully Once Upon a Time in Mexico will be cool. I went to church at 7:30 and Cindy Yoshitomi delivered an excellent homily on oppression and bigotry. She always comes to mass well prepared and I love to hear her speak.

UCLA lost to Colorado today in a very disappointing game. The Bruins started out looking sharp, with Moore throwing crisp bullet passes to his receivers. The front four of the defense dominated the Colorado offense, sacking the quarterback repeatedly. However, the team got bogged down by penalties — over 100 yards penalized by the end of the game. When you get penalized that heavily, you simply shouldn’t win the game and the Bruins ended up losing in the closing two minutes.

I’m confident that UCLA will have a successful season this year because I saw a lot of positives in the game. Many of the penalties came from delay of game calls, which can be attributed to a new coaching staff that has yet to perfect its playcalling. Hopefully Matt Moore will return soon after the injury he suffered but until then Drew Olsen can run the team. I liked what I saw from him today, particularly the beautiful touchdown pass he threw. He isn’t as fast as Moore but he is certainly better than Paus.

During the game, Josh and I made some awesome nachos. We’re prepping for the Super Bowl and this batch was definitely Super Bowl quality. I’ll post a photo of the nachos once Adam downloads the images from his camera. They were a meal by themselves.

On Lesbianism

When asked if she would “do it again,” she squealed, “No, I would not do it,” but then added, “Maybe with Madonna.”

When asked about how her image has changed from when she was a squeaky clean Mouseketeers, Spears said, “I think I’m still clean living. I mean I don’t go home and have orgies or anything like that.”

On Politics

“Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that.”

And here’s a personal favorite from when Britney attended the Sundance Film Festival:

On Film

I finally met Professor Jacobsen today at the lab. He’s a nice guy and I look forward to working with him this upcoming quarter. Simon had me harvest half of the plants (since the other half had already been harvested yesterday) and I finished in a copule of hours. After that, he had nothing else for me to do so he let me go at 12:00. I came back, ate some hearty mushroom soup from Whole Foods and started studying for my LS3 quiz tomorrow.

Yes, I know it is exciting stuff but it has to get done. I’m taking a break from LS as I write this but now, I really must get back to gene organization in prokaryotes vs. eukaryotes. Wish me luck on my quiz.

LS3 lecture was pretty tedious today; I had trouble staying awake but it wasn’t necessarily the teacher’s fault. The problem is that I’ve already covered the material back when I was in AP Bio in high school. Professor Silver is decent, but it’s tough for me to pay attention when I’ve already read the assigned pages and had the stuff in high school.

Lab was pretty arduous today as well. We did gel electrophoresis and plasmid purification. I’ve dealt with agarose gels before back in AP Bio so the lab was as boring as the lecture. To top it off, my TA was sick and lab just wasn’t the same, since Pierre is a funny, energetic guy. I got through it though.

Afterwards, I went to Whole Foods and then Mongol’s, where I had a late but massive 4:30 feast. I got the UCLA special and piled on the noodles. The food was excellent as usual. Afterwards, I stopped by Ralph’s and picked up some deli meat, a fat block of Tillamook cheese, and Breyer’s ice cream that was on sale.

Then I came back to the apartment, hit the LS3 lecture notes and study questions, and burned Zaylin a few CDs.

All in all, an okay day that got better as the day went on. Tomorrrow I’m going to pop by the Jacobsen lab and start mutagenesis, which should be fun.

Went to the Jacobsen lab today but ended up not doing a whole lot. Originally I was supposed to harvest the Columbia 0 plants but they didn’t have a lot of seed so Simon decided that replanting would be the best idea. After that thought, my job was to start the mutagenesis, but Simon couldn’t find any more Columbia 0 seeds and Dr. Jacobsen was away from campus dealing with car troubles. I started making agarose and then Simon said I could go, since there wasn’t a whole lot to do. All in all, an extremely laid back day but hopefully on Thursday there will be more to do.

I’ve officially switched newsreaders. Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon is the killer app. It sports a Microsoft Office 2003 look with a three-panel navigation. The program is flawless and it’s still in beta. I absolutely love this program and encourage every Windows user to switch from their current program to this. It’s that good. Thanks Nick for such an amazing newsreader — I look forward to the official 1.0 release.

Adam traded in some of his DVDs for new ones after I showed him how to use Gordian Knot. He came back today with Exit Wounds, the film with Steven Segal and DMX. We fired it up at 7:30 and I have to say, it was pretty entertaining. I never would have paid money to see it in theaters but there are a couple of awesome scenes worth seeing. Notably, Steven Segal dodges a bullet from a gun pressed to his temple and later a guy takes a solid hit while the car he is swinging from slams into a row of parked cars.

The soundtrack is also quality. DMX music is abundant in the film but never in the parts you would expect. During the car chase, no DMX music. A little unexpected but funny. Tom Arnold is in the film and he has a great scene where he is in a strip club with two women all up in his face. Segal interrupts him and talks about needing to dig up information on DMX’s character, and Tom asks him if he wants to join in. Classic.

Go rent Exit Wounds and have a good laugh.

The revised guide for versions 2.61 and above has been posted.

First off, this article applies only to Dreamhost users that have a shell account. You need a shell account because there is some required UNIX scripting. The whole process took me about an hour last night but since I already took the plunge, it should only take five minutes or so for you to set SpamAssassin after having read my guide.

Richard Donkin originally posted a SpamAssassin for Dreamhost guide but it’s a little outdated. It sure helped me with the installation though. I figured I’d update the guide a little bit since at the time of this post, the current version of SpamAssassin is 2.55 — Richard’s guide covers version 2.20.

First, head over to the SpamAssassin download page. Download the latest stable release in tar.gz format. Log on to your web server and upload this folder to the root directory in BINARY format. The root directory should have some folders like Maildir, logs, etc. If you don’t have a Maildir folder, Dreamhost has a kbase post for you!

Next, download Richard’s SpamAssassin setup tar and upload it to the root folder in BINARY.

Now you’re ready to do a little bit of UNIX scripting. Make sure you have a decent telnet/SSH client — I use PuTTY. Connect to your web site via SSH (you can also use Telnet). Type the following command (make sure the file name is correct):

tar xvfz Mail-SpamAssassin-2.55.tar.gz tar xvfz spamassassin-setup.tar.gz

Check to make sure that the folders Mail-SpamAssassin-2.55 and spamassassin-setup are present in your root directory. If not, you didn’t untar the files correctly. If you can’t figure it out, I suggest praying to Google or e-mailing me.

Next, you have to install SpamAssassin in your account. Type the following, one line at a time:

cd ~/Mail-SpamAssassin-2.55 perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=~/sausr SYSCONFDIR=~/saetc make make install

You should notice the server processing a lot of files after make and make install. Don’t worry, you didn’t break anything. Actually, Dreamhost encourages you to install your own version of SpamAssassin. Check and make sure the directories saetc and sausr are present in the root directory.

Now you can move the Mail-SpamAssassin-2.55 folder. Create a folder in the root called lib. Move Mail-SpamAssassin-2.55 into the lib folder.

Next, you have to create a symbolic link to the SpamAssassin directory. In your SSH client, type:

ln -s ~/lib/Mail-SpamAssassin-2.55 ~/lib/SpamAssassin

Finally, you have to transfer Richard’s spamassassin setup files. Make two more folders in your root directory: .spamassassin and procmail. Move the .rc files into the procmail folder and the user_prefs file into the .spamassassin folder. Move the .forward.postfix and .procmailrc files to the root. If there is an existing .procmailrc file, back it up and replace it with the new one.

Send yourself a test mail and a test spam. Check the procmail log, located in ~/procmail/log. You should get output here. Also, check and make sure the SpamAssassin headers appear in your e-mail — just use SquirrelMail and check the message header.

At the time of this post, Richard’s spam.rc needed modifying. Edit the file and get rid of the -P flag. Dreamhost doesn’t allow that any more.

SpamAssassin should be all set up and ready to go. Enjoy! It works a lot better than Razor. I’ve used SpamAssassin for my UCLA e-mail for two years and it catches about 99 percent of spam, without trashing valid e-mails.