Antispam, or inconvenience?

Today I found out that my own ISP’s (Fastweb) mailserver got into a spam blacklist. I can understand how it happened, since Fastweb has a limited pool of public IPs and everything is behind a massive NAT. I checked the web page of the organization that blacklisted the IP and noticed they want you to pay a fine of $50 to get removed. I can understand that perhaps this is due to spammers being on a rampage around, but those guys just blacklisted an entire ISP’s mail server because they didn’t bother to check.

May 17, 2006

Stress

This has been a rather stressful period work-wise. Things are looking extremely confusing on the (upcoming) paper we need to write and even a small doubt can cause huge time losses (I spent the whole morning checking to see if my analysis was correct or not while in fact it was correct in the first place). I’ve been shown a new software for microarray analysis, well, at least some brochures. I’m going to inquire about pricing (the most important part) and platform availability (I’d love if it could run on Linux).

May 8, 2006

Security breach

Today I found out that a computer running Windows had been “self-writing” words when an Internet Explorer window was open. This obviously led to the conclusion that there was some kind of malware running. I immediately unplugged the network cable but the typing continued - this is a good sign meaning that it was just some random program doing it. It only affected IE, no other programs. I wonder how it got there, I can only suspect the current user, as I never do any network-based activity there, only analysis (and I run a much safer Linux box - no Windows for me).

May 5, 2006

Continuous analysis

This week has been quite busy at work. As I finally got the two lists of differentially expressed genes that I needed, I started my analysis work. Perhaps analysis is not quite appropriate, as what I to is mostly to annotate the genes (i.e. I try to find out everything about them, or certain features I need) and to see if the lists are “enriched” by a particular feature. From this I try to see if what I see has a biological relevance, or not.

May 1, 2006

Ubuntu games

I’ve been playing a bit with Ubuntu on two computers. On the laptop, I have managed to make the email led blink when I get new mail (thanks to a tip I found online involving the use of the acerhk driver). I still need to find a way to turn it off (actually I can turn it off, just not automatically after I finish reading my mails).

April 30, 2006

Treasures of Aht Urghan

Last Monday I got the new expansion pack for FFXI, namely Treasures of Aht Urghan. After installing (and going through the tedious update procedure), I’ve done some exploring. Some remarks: The missions are either well hidden, or not particularly significant at this point: this in my opinion is a regression from Chains of Promathia, which had an extremely nice storyline; The new areas are huge. Yesterday I’ve done some exploring in the Arrapago Reef area with Sechs, Eithin and Mercredi and we took more than two hours to get to our destination (including one death, and several fights inbetween);

April 24, 2006

Cursing

I really can’t believe some people on the Internet act all rough when all you ask them is to be more polite when certain people are around. The issue at stake happened in FFXI, when someone went out with a “C****t” curse because of something. Now, Both my brother and me don’t like those kind of things. All my brother did was asking politely to avoid saying such things in public when he was around, and he got flamed by a certain person (who shall remain nameless).

April 22, 2006

Sickness

The main reason my posts here are so scarce recently it’s because of that. Shortly after the Easter outdoor trip I did, I got fever for the rest of the week (and some kickback yesterday since I was foolish enough to go to work), and it was impossible for me to stay in front of a screen for a long time. Luckily there are more holidays on sight so I think I can recover fast.

April 10, 2006

Outage

Today one of our desktops won’t turn on at all. I didn’t even see the POST lights turning on (this is a Dell computer), so I assume that the PSU is dead. I’d have already called for support but since the box has been bought in the USA (part of a bundle of our GeneChip systems) I had to request a warranty transfer (notice that I don’t even know if there’s still a warranty!

April 10, 2006

Orz!

That (which represent a person kneeling in dejection) is my thought after last night’s Final Fantasy XI run. I assembled a group to take on PM8-5, the last mission so far, and I was pretty confident we could win without too many problems. Well, I was wrong. The battle involves two enemies, who I had already seen in Zilart Missions 8 and 16. One likes to spam magic, the other has extremely annoying abilities.