Symphonious

So Doug is excited about how we took our first steps in a new product and how well it went. Personally, I'm impressed with the way that we presented all the usual engineering setup tasks to the client in a client focussed manner. We could have done it better by not discussing up front all the engineering tasks we were hiding behind the suggested first story, but that's okay. The first story was that we wanted to ship a distribution of the new product. It's really quite backwards to think of things that way - normally you build the product then work out how to package and distribute it, but it's impossible to ship anytime if you don't build the distribution mechanism at the start.

So hidden in that story was the following engineering tasks:

• Create a subversion repository.
• Create a build process (including managing build numbers, version numbers etc).
• Create a change log.
• Create zip file for distribution.
• Add the project to cruise control so it is automatically built.
• Adjust our "AutoDeployer" to be able to deploy the built zip file to the web site.

We also found time to pay back a bunch of technical debt left around our systems:

• Cleaned up some cruft in our Subversion repository that we don't use anymore.
• Fixed the build process for our IWWCM integration so it runs about 10 times faster and builds only trigger when appropriate - they were triggering on unrelated changes in subversion.
• Cleaned up and improved the AutoDeployer.

Not to mention, we've learnt a lot about starting new products from scratch and gotten that process up and running quite well. I guess you could say I'm excited too.

I spent some time this afternoon trying to reduce the amount of spam that gets downloaded and dumped into my spam folder. Between SpamAssassin and Mail.app's spam filters there's basically no spam that makes it through to my inbox, but the sheer amount of spam being sent to symphonious.net, then downloaded from their to my home IMAP server before finally being processed by SpamAssassin is overwhelming and takes up a lot of bandwidth and processing time. Besides, with that much spam going into my spam folder I haven't been bothered reviewing it so if there are any false positives they are pretty much doomed.

I've implemented two measures:

1. Any email with a spam score above 20 gets sent straight to /dev/null instead of going into the spam folder. That made a pretty huge difference to the amount of spam to review, but did nothing for the amount being downloaded.
2. Implemented a bunch of the postfix configuration options described at http://jimsun.linxnet.com/misc/postfix-anti-UCE.txt Hopefully that will block out the easily identified spam before it gets accepted at all and reduce the amount of email downloaded and SpamAssassin processing.

I also submitted the server to ORDB to check it for any open relay problems. Man, those guys are persistent - it's tried connecting about 20 times so far from various addresses and trying to send to different places etc. I haven't received its report back yet, but it seems to have been rejected with every attempt so it looks like I've got it all right.

Anyway, if you have any problems emailing me, leave a comment and I'll look into it.