Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

sa_patgen

A lot of spammers use modified words to get throuth spam filters. What they do is take a word like ‘casino’ and insert a random character into it. For example ‘ca!sino’. If you get a lot of spam with words modifed like this, then you can use sa_patgen.pl to generate pattern rules for SpamAssassin.

All you have to do is specify the score to add for each modified word match (I use 0.5) and a list of words like casino, gambling, viagra, etc. The script will output a set of rules to match modified words. You can save the output in your local.cf file or pipe it somewhere else.

sa_patgen.pl

ldap2mutt

Although Mutt can query LDAP directories for addresses directly, sometimes connectivity to LDAP server is troublesome (firewalls, company policies, etc). One way to go around this problem would be to create Mutt addressbook regularly from the content of LDAP directory. This script does exactly this. Specify which LDAP server to query, the branch where people records are, and the filter to use. Output can be redirected to the file of your choice.

ldap2mutt.pl

Getting ready for Artificial Intelligence … again

Being a lazy bastard and a horrible student such as I am, there is no surprise in that I failed so many courses in the college. I am currently standing at 3 courses left for my Bachelor’s degree. One of these three courses – Artificial Intelligence – seems to be the toughest target due to a number of arguments I had with a teacher. And there is no way there will be any other teacher for this course in the near future, so I have to prepare myself real good. It is about time that I start with my morale. :)

Not to scare myself away, I will start small. I will just put three links in this post to other web resources, that I will visit during my preliminary preparations. Here they come:

  • Website of MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is here. Maybe I will anything entertaining to read in the number of publicationis and researches there that will interest me in the subject.
  • AI on the Web – is a collection of useful links to many AI resources. I am using at as a cheat, since I decided to have only 3 links in this post. :)
  • A Prolog Introduction for Hackers – another useful article at kuro5hin. Last time I took A.I., a substential amount of time was dedicated to Prolog studying without any useful materials provided, so this bookmark should help.

That’s it. This post is my greatest advance in studing A.I. during the last two years. :)

Programmers’ talk

There is an interesting discussion at Perlmonks about how programmers pronounce their code. There are links to other nodes. Aparently, some people do even use the chess notation.

I myself cannot think of anything special about my pronounce of code symbols except for using “star” for “asterisk” (*).

Vim for Perl developers

This is my attempt to provide a clear and simple instructions on adopting Vim text editor for programming needs. I am using Perl as the programming language in the examples, but most of this document will apply equally for any other programming language.

Update: This post was translated into Portuguese by Alceu Rodrigues de Freitas Junior.

Continue reading Vim for Perl developers