No service until 28th September

I am about to leave the UK for the sunny shores of Rhodes. While I am away, expect no posts, no comments moderated, and no replies to email. I am on HOLIDAY so I will not be checking my mail.

Little Miss Jocelyn

Last night after watching Spooks on BBC 3 I left the tv on for the programme that followed. This was how I chanced accross Little Miss Jocelyn.

Perhaps it's the Constant references to Nigeria, but I genuinely found this show extremely funny. After watching the show I browsed the BBC website and couldn't believe my luck to find the first 5 episodes available to play online. Wonderful.

Characters such as Ignatius the Nigerian Driving Instructor, and Mrs Omwukuopopo are inspired creations from someone who loves her culture, and wants to share it's hilarious foibles with the world. Please Please Please watch this show.

The DVD will be out soon

"Boy's own Nigeria"

Jeremy Weate has scooped the un-edited version of Alex Hanafords article in the Sunday Independant. (10/Sep/2006)

A very worthwhile read.

Fighting Spam

Off topic but I thought I'd share something with you.

Over the last three months I have been testing anti-spam technologies. For a long time I have been relying on Mozilla Thunderbirds built in Junk mail controls for all my email accounts and it worked very well until about 3 or 4 months ago when I suddenly started seeing a much higher volume of spam and much of it was not being marked by thunderbird.

So I then started investigating better ways to tackle the problem.

The Spamato project is a java application that plugs in to various email applications, (Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird included) and processes incoming messages through 6 advanced filters. After a short period of training this seemed to catch at least 90% of all spam I received. To date it has missed 7.7% of spam and incorrectly identified 2.2%. These figures are improving every day but are much better than plain vanilla mozilla junk mail filter. Everytime Spamato detects a spam message a sample of the 'Spam song' sung by the Vikings in the Monty Python spam sketch is played. I haven't got irritated by it yet!



Now just detecting spam automatically and deleting it is not really Fighting spam is it? So the second stage of my spam fighting process is to try to shut down the spammers operations. This is not easy to do on your own, you would have to identify the origin of each message, determine if the address has been 'spoofed' or not and then send complaint letters to the administrators of the appropriate networks or ISP's. That's where SpamCop comes in. The website is a little confusing but the basic service they offer is giving you a unique email address @spamcop.net where you can forward your spam. Spamcop process the messages and within a few minutes you will have a response email giving links to the processed messages where YOU can then quickly forward complaints to the appropriate people. SpamCop handles spoofed IP's and other details, and also collects details the origin addresses so that if several spams originate from the same location the addresses are placed on a black list. Spam messages processed must be as fresh as possible. SpamCop will not process a message older than 48 hours.

It takes a little time and effort but I do get a good feeling doing it, also, importantly, I have noticed a significant drop in spam. An account where I would regularly get 20+ spams per day now rarely receives more than 10 and recently I have had a number of days where I have recieved no spam At all! Once in a while I get a nice feeling after reporting a 419 spammer and I get a response from their ISP that the account has been closed down.

There are a number of theories for this drop in spam. The least likely I'm afraid is that the spammer has been arrested/shot/hung, drawn and quartered (delete as appropriate.) The most likely situation is that some spammers have deleted my address from their list because the complaints that occaisionally get through to them become bothersome. They still continue to spam everyone else.

Exams are coming

I've just submitted my final piece of coursework for my Studies with OU in 2006. I am anticipating a very high overall score for the coursework in both courses, however I must still achieve 85% in the exam to achieve the Distinction grade I am aiming for. I managed it last year with T224 but this year I have two exams and both are very technical, requiring a lot of study.

I have a few things I'd like to complete for the various projects in Nigeria while I am home, and also I am off to Rhodes next week for a short vacation. On top of that I need to find time to go and reapply for my Nigerian visa in London, and visit friends and family.

Then if I have time there's the usual household maintenance that normally occupies me here. I can see a gate that needs creosote and a lawn that needs some TLC from my window right now...

Technorati Tags: Nigeria, Open University, Exam

I've Escaped!

No I haven't, not at all really, I've just arrived back in the UK for a few weeks. I have a holiday coming up and later two OU exams to sit, so I'll be telecommuting for a while.

I had a really pleasant flight back with Virgin Atlantic, Making up for most of my pain for my last Flight. Actually I received a nice lot of Flying Club miles after the last escapade so I have already forgiven them, although a voucher or just a brown envelope full of cash would have gone down better.

I had a window seat, with a vacant seat next to me. The lady occupying the seat spied an old friend sitting in the back of the plane and joined her for most of the flight. The space next to me gave me enough comfort to sleep quite a bit, always good on a long haul flight if you can do it. Usually with a stranger sat next to me fidgeting I find it very difficult to nod off. I think I'm worried about falling onto their shoulder and dribbling or something.

We arrived in Heathrow on time and exiting the plane was a calm and civilised affair, something quite rare on Lagos flights. There were no sniffer dogs waiting to catch the drug mules, or snail smugglers, whatever they are trying to catch. And my bag appeared not 5 minutes after I had reached the carousel.

I did note the new Iris Scanning machines at the immigration section, I was hoping to register my eyeballs with the government before leaving the UK in June so that I could give these things a go, but I missed the sign for the registration desk just after the security screening and found I wasn't allowed back to give it a go. Maybe next time.

Nothing much to Report. I suspended the Data Entry procedure at 19,000 forms because the remaining forms require a revisit to field to correct ommissions and irregularities before we can enter them. We need another 4,000 to complete this phase of our contract.

In the mean time, if you are missing news from Nigeria please visit the following blogs, all of which I read daily.

African Shirts, Musings of a Naija Man, NaijaBlog

Please note this is not an exhaustive list, I am working on adding a links section to this site after I upgrade the design. sometime soon depending on Google's upgrades to Blogger Beta.