I had a funny experience yesterday.

I don’t typically use Microsoft Outlook with my home email account. But it was bundled with the copy of Office 2010 that I installed a few months ago, and I figured: heck, if I have it anyway I might as well hook it up to my personal IMAP account. So I configured Outlook, played with it a bit, then promptly forgot all about it.

Fast forward to yesterday evening. I launch my copy of Outlook for the first time in months in order to try something with the calendar, but then I get distracted and walk away from the computer. Five minutes later my cell phone gets a message from my FreeBSD server:

EMAIL SERVER HIJACKED - FIREWALLING POSTFIX

Oh. Fun.

A slight digression before I can get on with the story: I try my very best to be a good Internet citizen, and that of course means not allowing oneself to become a spam relay. Because this email server exists only for my personal use, it was simple to write a Perl script that monitors my Postfix logs and, if it sees anything grossly out of the ordinary sent out through the server …

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Ars Technica has a four-part introductory series on logic and argumentation, entitled “Getting to QED.”

In some cases, there is a way to tell good arguments from bad using what is called informal logic. This name distinguishes it from formal logic, which is used in mathematics; natural language is less precise than mathematics, and does not always follow the same rules. Perhaps more surprisingly, the name also reflects the fact that there is a lot of disagreement over what it means. Informal logic is actually a fairly young discipline, developed in the 1960s, and intended to apply new techniques from formal logic to argument and critical thinking. Philosophers are still wrestling with this application, and there are several competing schools of thought.

For all the differences, there are some core elements upon which everyone agrees. This article is a tutorial introducing these basic ideas of informal logic. In particular, we focus on deductive reasoning, which is one of the cornerstones of analytical thought. Hopefully you will come away from this article with the tools to distinguish a productive debate from an acrimonious flame war.

This should be required reading for anyone who’s engaged in debate on a mailing list …

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This guy is the best kind of crazy…

How am I just finding this now? He’s made major progress since filming that video; check out his YouTube channel for more. Seriously man, thumbs up…

I’m posting this here so I can find it again later, because this one caused a surplus of annoyance before I finally found a solution…

I have a Windows 7 x64 laptop which would randomly (once or twice a week) set the NTFS “dirty” bit on its C: drive, causing chkdsk to run at boot and find… well, no problem whatsoever. Sometimes this glitch would be heralded by a system tray / notification area message that the filesystem was allegedly corrupt, but often there would be no warning (aside from NTFS Event 55 messages in the system event log, or the output of

fsutil dirty query c:

if I bothered to run it manually), until chkdsk began its long run the next time I restarted the computer. Yeah, I know I could have used

chkntfs /x c:

to stop boot-time filesystem checks altogether, but then if there actually were a legitimate problem one day… :)

Anyway, after a couple months of this I finally hit upon this discussion on Microsoft TechNet, which in turn led me to KB 982927, including a hotfix (Fix316593). Microsoft makes you jump through some hoops to get the hotfix (you have to do an email confirmation …

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Gtk2hs is my favorite way to do cross-platform GUI programming in Haskell — and it’s the toolkit to use if you want to work through the examples in the excellent *Real World Haskell*. But the official instructions for building gtk2hs on Windows leave out some important information, so here’s how I got it all working on Windows 7…

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I wrote a little old-school Windows HTA script to delete the .DS_Store, .Trashes, and ._* junk files and directories typically littered across non-HFS media by Mac OS X:

You can download it from my GitHub account if you have a use for this sort of thing. Written and tested with Windows 7 and IE 8; I’m not sure how it will work with earlier versions of either. Standard disclaimers apply: use at your own risk, etc.

Incidentally, I think HTAs are really underrated as Windows scripting goes. More on that topic later…