Perl tips via Atom
For all those people who'd prefer yet-another-feed over yet-another-mailing-list, Perl Training Australia's Perl tips are now available via Atom and FeedBurner as well as via e-mail. RSS will follow if anyone asks nicely.

Twitter
I now have a twitter profile. Feel free to track me if that's your thing.

IPC::System::Simple v0.06
IPC::System::Simple v0.06 has been released, and should be hitting a CPAN mirror new you shortly. The new release includes:

Stepmania and Transport Tycoon
I was in Sydney last week, will be in Perth next week, and in Adelaide the week after that. As such, I've been savouring my brief time between courses. Part of that savouring has been enjoying the lovely weather and reading the Nightwatch series of novels. I very rarely read fiction, so this is a peculiar treat for me. Part of it has been spent improving my mechanical skills, as I've had to make repairs to both our washing machine (I now know what happens to the lost socks), and lawnmower (blocked air filters are bad). However one of my favourite hobbies is that of games; or more specifically, modifying games.

I suspect that I enjoy modifying games much more than I enjoy playing them. I had a great time modifying Morrowind to work on high resolution displays. My Sims 2 installation has about 110 patches installed, not including the official expansions and patches from Maxis. However this week I've had two most enjoyable steps forward with my games setups.

The first is the arrival of the last Playstation to USB adapter needed to complete my StepMania rig. I've got a dual-adapter system working perfectly, and I'm looking at playing with the quad player setup soon, although I only have adapters for three mats.

My second achievement this week is a return to one of my favourite games of all time, Transport Tycoon Deluxe (TTD). On the surface, TTD looks like yet another Tycoon game where one builds up an expanding business, but this time in transport. However for anyone who's played the game seriously, one realises that it's actually a tutorial on transport network planning. If you have an eight platform station, used for both freight and passengers, and you have trains coming in and out in all directions, how do you get everything working smoothly without a bottleneck? How can you make sure that everything still works when you need to add another line to a new city or industry? I find these problems an awful lot of fun.

To play Transport Tycoon Deluxe, you'll need the original game, which is hard to buy these days, but easy to find on-line. It's then worthwhile getting TTD Patch, which makes the game much better than the original. I suggest grabbing the latest beta, or one of the nightly builds if you want all the latest and coolest features. One then adds new graphics and features to make the game suit your tastes. Another option is OpenTTD, which is cross-platform and has a cleaner design, but is still lagging behind on the features which I really love (such as new industries and cargoes).

However I haven't actually been playing Transport Tycoon all that much. Instead, I've been modifying it. Not the core code, but still writing long strings of hex into files, building them and applying them to fix bugs I've found in some of the game extensions I've been playing with. I've started with simple things, but now that I'm starting to get the hang of things I'm tempted to do something cool, almost certainly with the Extended Cargo Scheme that's been growing in popularity.

I've got some notes on how to build an absolutely awesome TTD setup; which programs to use, which patches to apply, and which GRFs to install, both for new and more experienced players. These will go into a separate blog post, possibly with an easy installer and/or compatibility layers so you don't have to spend so long fiddling with the system.

Smack down an (Australian) spammer/telemarketer today!
I'm not fond of spam, and I'm even less fond of telemarketers. Aggressively pushing unsolicited advertising is a great way to annoy me. Recently I've become more serious about causing pain to those who'd choose to disturb my peace, and I'd thought I'd share a few ways to make it a little less desirable to be a spammer (including telemarketers).

Spam, both e-mail and telephone, is cheap, which means that it can still be profitable even if the success rate is really low. E-mail is really cheap, which is why we see so much of it. Telephone spam is less cheap, which is why we see less of it. The best way to reduce the amount of spam for everyone is just to make it less profitable. We can do that by not actually buying the products and services offered, but you're probably already doing that. The other way is to make spamming itself more expensive, which is what I'm going to focus on today.

For general e-mail spam, keeping your machines secured is the first step. Most spam is sent by networks of zombie machines; hosts that have been compromised and turned into instruments of evil. This is why you should give a damn about security even if you don't seem to think you have nothing of value on your machine; your resources are much more valuable to an attacker than your collection of cat photographs.

If you're a system administrator, then tar-pitting can make spam just a little bit more expensive, although most implementations will end up costing you some of your own resources as well. A good firewall package like FireHOL can make it easier to establish tarpits at the kernel level using up practically no resources, although this is only really useful on machines that don't accept legitimate mail at all.

If you're an Australian, and someone from inside Australia was silly enough to send you spam, you can report them to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, who have the power to put the spammer in jail. As an interesting aside, ACMA use Request Tracker to track spam complaints.

If you're having a problem with telemarketers, then the first thing is to see if there's a Do Not Call (DNC) registry in your country. Australia finally has one, and while it could certainly be improved, it's better than nothing. If you're on the Australian DNC list and receive a telemarketing call, you can lodge a formal complaint. It will help if you keep the telemarketer on the line to assist you in filling out the details.

If you can't lodge a complaint, or the telemarketer is being unhelpful, or if you just feel like a bit of fun, then it's always possible to tarpit the telemarketer. Your goal is to try and keep the telemarketer on the phone for as long as possible, since that will prevent them from calling others who may (potentially) buy the product. One of the things that makes telemarketing so cheap is that failed attempts to sell are usually very quick; you'll often discover telemarketers who will hang up on you once they realise a sale is not going to be made.

If you do choose to tarpit a telemarketer, then please be sure to do this nicely; the individual who called you in unlikely to be evil, they're just really unlucky to be working as a telemarketer. If anything, you should pity them. Remember, your goal is to make it unprofitable to run a spamming business, not to make the life of a minimum-wage earner more miserable than it already is.

A typical telemarketer tarpit goes like this: