Mark’s Tech Blog

Well, I am getting a bit better at it now. But the wind wasnt strong enough to really get going nicely.

And just for good measure – I woke up at 6am and took some photos of the sunrise – it was awesome.

My folks were still at our holiday house and they saw a boomslang.

It then went for a drink of water in the pipe whilst the birds were looking on.

And then it had a standoff with the mongoose! I have never seen or even knew it was possible for a Boomslang to inflate itself.

Finally, Matt sent me some of the Video! This is me, yes, i can actually go!

Yeah, its quite shallow!!!

Greg losing his kite!

We finally managed to get to Langebaan at around 2:30pm. (It’s definitely a male thing, not being able to arrive anywhere on time) After buying more kit… I also had to buy a second skin because it looks like someone is trying to strangle me with the rash on my neck. Greg had to get a new wetsuit and Matt a new board. Its not a case of ‘I want’ anymore. Its migrated to an ‘I need’ situation!

Weather Report:
Wind: 22knots at 3pm. South. A little gusty but really good wind. Cross onshore. 24degC.
Kite: 12m2 Naish Boxer – overpowered – needed 9m2

The Pics: First one is from left to right, Myself (Mark), Matt, Greg

Teaching Matt or rather Matt flying the kite and I am going for a drag:

This is me starting – up first time!

This is me starting – up again!

Well, after all that. I only got to Kite for 30mins. Because i managed to rip the kite to shreds. I hit the water after a wipeout and it split next to one of the struts – about a 1m split. So its off to 2nd Wind to get it sorted out this week before my next weekend.

We went kiteing again on saturday to Muizenberg – wind was excellent. Around 16-18knots. Never seen such good wind there! Unfortunately i came short a few times with the onshore wind! Pics coming shortly.

Masses of entertainment was provided to the crowd on the beach, who ran up and down after all the kites, even following Greg’s into the car park! This is not a sport for the weak hearted!

Weather Report:
Wind: 18knots at 2pm. SouthEaster. REALLY good wind. Straight Onshore.
Kite: 12m2 Naish Boxer – good power

I managed to break myself severely on the beach a few times. I have a great bruise on my left leg. More photos are available at a price…

Bruise update: it looks more horendous than ever! – I managed to mangle myself on Saturday on my board when crashing onto the beach. Ripped my wetsuit as well. Seems i was providing the entertainment for the people on the beach.

Pic from Saturday:

Pic from Sunday evenin:

This last weekend, Kevin (our instructor), Matt, Japie, Amie, Susan, Janet and myself did Scuba courses.

ClanStewart - old shipwreck between Simonstown and Glencairn. Saturday 1pm dive.

Transvaal Wreck dive - 33m down – my first ‘deep dive’ – part of my Advanced course. What fun with 2m viz. I also had a nice bit of sea sick in the 6m+ swell off Smits Winkel Bay. Oh how i hate being nauseous on a boat in massive seas. Matt saw a Nudibranch, I saw some nice soft corals! Kevin and I (my buddy for the dive) managed to not see anybody else on the whole dive – there were 13 divers in total. Well they could have been 5m from us and we wouldnt have had a clue!

Ark Rock – Simonstown

After receiving ridiculous amounts of stock, viagra and various other image spam we have tested and implemented FuzzyOcr on some of our work servers. The aim is to scan every message that comes in with a GIF or JPG attachment using optical character recognition software and cross check the resulting words against a list generated by us.

So this is how we went about installing FuzzyOCR and various required application for use with FreeBSD, Matt Simersons Mail toaster and Spamassassin.

1. Update the ports tree
   
cd /usr/ports
make update
pkgdb -F
2. If you arent running the latest SpamAssassin (3.1.7 at the time of writing this) I suggest you upgrade
   

   portupgrade -f `pkg_info | grep razor-agents | cut -d" " -f1`
   portupgrade -f `pkg_info | grep p5-Mail-SpamAssassin | cut -d" " -f1`

3. INSTALL REQUIRED PACKAGES - this can take a while
   

   portinstall -m WITHOUT_X11=yes graphics/netpbm graphics/ImageMagick graphics/gocr devel/p5-String-Approx security/p5-Digest-MD5 graphics/libungif

4. Download FuzzyOCR

   mkdir /usr/local/src
   cd /usr/local/src
   fetch http://users.own-hero.net/~decoder/fuzzyocr/fuzzyocr-latest.tar.gz
   tar zxf fuzzyocr-latest.tar.gz
   cd FuzzyOcr-2.3b
   cp FuzzyOcr.cf /usr/local/etc/mail/spamassassin
   cp FuzzyOcr.pm /usr/local/etc/mail/spamassassin
   cp FuzzyOcr.words.sample /usr/local/etc/mail/spamassassin/FuzzyOcr.words

5. Edit the wordlist as you please and add any works you require.
   Words can be matched loosely or strictly depending on your requirements. Making it too lose causes false positives.
6. Add the following lines to v310.pre

   # FuzzyOCR - performs fuzzy Optical Character Recognition on spam images
   #
   loadplugin FuzzyOcr /usr/local/etc/mail/spamassassin/FuzzyOcr.pm
   loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Timeout

7. Edit your /usr/local/etc/mail/spamassassin/FuzzyOcr.cf - change all /usr/bin/ to /usr/local/bin/
   - adjust the rest of the file to match your requirements. Alternatively download it from here: fetch -o /usr/local/etc/mail/spamassassin/FuzzyOcr.cf http://www.rsaweb.co.za/rbl/FuzzyOcr.cf
8. Restart spamassassin: /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sa-spamd.sh restart
9. Check that Spamassassin is running: ps ax | grep spam
10. Check the logs to make sure no errors from Spamassassin:

    tail -f /var/log/maillog

11. Check the FuzzyOcr logs to make sure no errors. But first enable debugging by setting "focr_verbose 2"
    - remember to set it back to 1 after testing
    

    ee /usr/local/etc/mail/spamassassin/FuzzyOcr.cf
    
    # focr_verbose 2
    
    tail -f /var/log/mail/fuzzyocr.log

12. Thats it - check that your mail is getting scanned. Add any words that aren't being detected and that should be it!