I’m sick of get­ting auto­mated responses, I just don’t see the point. I don’t need an email telling me what I just did 2 minutes ago. Yes, I know, I was there too. So to that end I’ve inven­ted the Auto­mated Response Respon­der. That’ll teach the bastards.

First off, a few cau­tions: This is a bad idea, people don’t like it when you respond to their auto­mated responses, if they even notice at all. How­ever, this was — for me — more of an art pro­ject in the vein of Caleb Larson’s A Tool To Deceive And Slaughter (A sculp­ture that con­tinu­ally lists itself on eBay) than any real pro­gram­ming exer­cise. And now, on to the pro­ject itself.

You’re going to need Proc­mail for this. Proc­mail can be used to cre­ate mail-servers, mail­ing lists, sort your incom­ing mail into sep­ar­ate folders/files, pre­pro­cess your mail, start any pro­grams upon mail arrival or select­ively for­ward cer­tain incom­ing mail auto­mat­ic­ally to someone. Today we’ll be focus­ing on some vari­ation of that last one. Now, you’re going to need to install and set-up Proc­mail your­self (have I men­tioned yet that it’s a com­mand line tool?), I recom­mend Nancy McGough’s excel­lent Proc­mail Quick Start. Once you’ve got­ten that done you can get to my Proc­mail ‘recipe’.

:0
	check1 = "automated e-mail"
	check2 = "automated email"
	check3 = "automated notice"
	check4 = "automated message"

	*$ ! ^$MYXLOOP
	* B ?? check1|check2|check3|check4
	| (echo "From: you@domain.com" ;
		$FORMAIL -r -A"Precedence: junk"
		-A"X-Loop: you@domain.com" ;
		echo "This is an automated response
		in reply to your automated response.\n
		Please do not respond to this
		automated response.\n
		Thank you.\n"
	) | $SENDMAIL

Obvi­ously, the first thing you’re going to want to do here is to replace you@domain.com with your actual email address (on both occasions).

The actual code is quite simple. As you can see above, I have set up checks for the most com­mon word­ings in the body of auto­mated emails I have received, you can add, remove, or change as you wish. The next part — *$ ! ^$MYXLOOP — makes sure we’re not set­ting up an infin­ite loop here. The line after — * B ?? check1|check2|check3|check4 — simply cycles through the strings provided above and if any of them match sends the message:

This is an auto­mated response in reply to your auto­mated response.
Please do not respond to this auto­mated response.
Thank you.

It’s about time I pos­ted a fol­lowup to the first of this series about artists, pho­to­graph­ers, and cre­at­ive people that I have dis­covered while brows­ing vari­ous sites and for­ums. Today I’m con­cen­trat­ing on pho­to­graph­ers that I have dis­covered / redis­covered over the past few months.

Bo Wang
Bo Wang

Bo Wang is a Chinese pho­to­grapher cur­rently based in New York. With a BS and MS in Phys­ics from Tsing­hau Uni­ver­sity he is now study­ing pho­to­graphy, video and related media at School Of Visual Arts, New York.

He cur­rently has a show — Het­ero­scapes — at Gal­lery 456 (end­ing 5th of Feb­ru­ary), I feel that his artist’s state­ment describes his pho­to­graphy best:

HETEROSCAPES is a por­trait of China’s con­tem­por­ary urban spaces and land­scapes in a period of intens­i­fied trans­ition. Through­out the past 20 years of an eco­nomic boom, this trans­ition has shif­ted the social power struc­ture and sub­ver­ted once com­mon val­ues, dra­mat­ic­ally alter­ing the func­tions and even the con­crete­ness of land­scapes and urban structures.

Bo Wang is rel­at­ively new to the pho­to­graphy world, but I feel he will be one to watch in the com­ing years.

Con­tinue read­ing: More Artists Of Today (And Yesterday)

My Desktop

January 22nd

Desktop

I recently real­ised that I haven’t gone into any detail about my work envir­on­ment. For today, I thought I’d start with my desktop. First things first, the wall­pa­per is from a pic­ture pos­ted up on Twit­ter recently by Bryan Lee O’Malley — the author of the won­der­ful Scott Pil­grim series, soon to be a movie by the tal­en­ted Edgar Wright (dir­ector of Spaced / Shaun Of The Dead).

But recently I’ve been get­ting com­ments about the “crazy text in the top left corner” of any screen-shots I show people, so I thought I’d post up a bit of a tutorial for the applic­a­tion that makes this all pos­sible — Geek­Tool. What it does is run scripts and com­mands that you would use in Ter­minal and dis­play the out­put on your desktop.

Geek­Tool is quite simple to use. For now we will just be mess­ing with ‘Image’ Geeklets, just drag one into pos­i­tion on your desktop and you will see the ‘Prop­er­ties’ win­dow. There are three import­ant things here: Com­mand, Refresh, and Style. Com­mand is where you will enter the scripts below, Refresh is how often you want the out­put to refresh (I find 10s works well for most cases), and the but­ton below Style — ‘Click here to set font & color.’ — opens up the default Font style win­dow of OS X (which you should already be accus­tomed to).

The vari­ous scripts I’ve gathered together below have been col­lec­ted from tutori­als all over the web, I hope you find them as use­ful as I did.

Con­tinue read­ing: My Desktop

3 Months Of Movies

January 20th

Movies. I’ve watched a lot of them lately. Here are some words about some of them.

Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea
Ponyo
Trailer

This is Hayao Miazaki so it’s obvi­ously Stu­dio Ghibli so you can’t escape how good it’s going to be. Beau­ti­ful, fully real­ised yet simple and easy to watch this re-weaving of Hans Anderson’s Little Mer­maid is one of the best things I’ve ever looked at.
Luck­ily for the UK it’s hit­ting cinemas soon, although per­son­ally I’d ditch the Cate Blanchett headed dub and hold out for a sub­titled screen­ing if you don’t want to catch the Dis­ney­fic­a­tion effect of Noah Cyrus and try­ing to hard to talk to kids. Either how­ever, is bet­ter than not see­ing it though. Espe­cially if you have some kids to take with you. They’ll love it just as much, if not more than you.

Con­tinue read­ing: 3 Months Of Movies

Adventure Time

January 20th

Adventure Time

It’s pos­sible that you haven’t seen Adven­ture Time before. Pos­sible, but with over 2 mil­lion views in 3 years, not very likely. It aired once — at mid­night — on Nick­elodeon, before going on to win awards and become the inter­net sen­sa­tion that it is. Picked up by the Car­toon Net­work at the end of 2008, it’s finally draw­ing near to the date the first epis­ode airs — March 10th 2010.

Adven­ture Time is the cre­ation of Pen­delton Ward. His per­sonal web­site seems to be down cur­rently, but he also hap­pens to have a twit­ter on which he posts many delight­ful draw­ings. Other than that, I’m afraid I haven’t been able to find out that much about him.

How­ever, the voice act­ors are much easier to track down. Star­ring Hynden Walch, Jeremy Shada, and John DiMag­gio (best known as Bender from Futurama) — with guest appear­ances from tal­ents such as Mark Hamill — it’s def­in­itely off to a good start.

Fred­ator Stu­dios are the pro­du­cers of the series (as well as of the anim­ated short) and they have a ter­rific blog on which they post up art­work, story­boards, back­grounds, char­ac­ter designs, and much more. Well worth keep­ing an eye on over the com­ing months as things start com­ing together.

But per­haps my favour­ite thing about the new Adven­ture Time is the gor­geous sets (261 in total) as seen above. Designed by Ghost­shrimp and Santino Las­cano, the high res­ol­u­tion ver­sions are already in heavy rota­tion as my desktop wallpaper.

In short: keep an eye out for it, it’s going to be popular.

Dud Photos of 2009

January 20th

In 2009 I took a fair few pho­tos, some­thing like 3,000 of them accord­ing to my Light­room lib­rary (and that doesn’t include the 4 or 5 roles of film I have sit­ting on my turntable yet to be developed). Most of those pho­tos (around 2,500 I’d say) were shit, and they will never see the light of day. A few of them — des­pite vari­ous prob­lems — were still rather inter­est­ing. It turns out that when the major­ity of your shots are taken with a manual focus lens from the late ’70’s you’re going to get a lot of out of focus, over/under-exposed, or just com­pletely missed shots

So I present to you my dud pho­tos of 2009, a little white-balance here and some levels there, but they’re pretty much as they came straight out of the camera:

Building

Con­tinue read­ing: Dud Pho­tos of 2009

Updates

January 20th

There has been a def­in­ite fall off in the updates at SPK lately. Not much has been going on on the front page and vir­tu­ally noth­ing has happened on any of the oth­ers. Things have ground to a halt.

But in the real world things have been busy — or at least as busy as we’d ever like them to be. Over the last three months span­ning the end of 2009 and the begin­ning of 2010 a lot of things have con­spired to hap­pen all at once, cat­egor­ic­ally ruin­ing all fun, ever. Things like new jobs with erratic and often unex­pec­ted work hours, the dreaded fest­ive sea­son, appoint­ments with the immig­ra­tion depart­ment and the weeks of paper work con­nec­ted with them, actual pay­ing graphic design work, double flu which may or may not have been swine related but sucked either way, per­sist­ent cough­ing, self doubt, lack of con­fid­ence and the search for some kind of uni­fy­ing the­ory which explains the reason for ‘stuff.

There have been deaths. Sev­eral of them.

It’s just been that kind of three months — the kind where motiv­a­tion is at an all time low and which in an unpro­fes­sional like myself are the sort of time when you with­draw the gang plank and float adrift liked a crotchety pir­ate in a sea of ‘leave me alone’ and ‘is there any Jeremy Kyle on TV?’

But all things must pass — it’s one of those essen­tial gov­ern­ing prin­ciples of life neces­sary to mov­ing forward.

And that’s what the next few posts will be all about — passing on the things we didn’t have the time or motiv­a­tion to tell you about. It’s all about vomit­ing up the past three months onto your lap, wip­ing our mouths and mum­bling sorry before push­ing ourselves up into a stumble across the room like an unknown drunk at a party.

Classy.

We’ve had a few requests for art­icles on the site lately, and more and more of them are ask­ing about the design of the site itself. So for today I thought I would detail how I designed the header for Super­pos­i­tion Kitty. An ini­tial warn­ing: I have no idea how many browsers this works in (as my usual test­ing pro­ced­ure of using Browser Shots is no help for hover states), how­ever it should work for all the major browsers, even IE6. Secondly: This code — or more spe­cific­ally, nest­ing a <div> between <ul> and <li> ele­ments — is not XHMTL valid.

I spent a lot of time wor­ry­ing about the second part until I real­ised the valid­ity of my code had abso­lutely no effect on how the site is dis­played to vis­it­ors. This doesn’t mean you should just throw val­id­a­tion out the win­dow — at the very least it is a great way to dis­cover hid­den errors in your code, or why some­thing isn’t dis­play­ing as you think it should — but I just don’t believe it is as import­ant as I once did.

Head­ers in Word­Press are a rel­at­ively simple affair. If you want to brush up on the basics then I would recom­mend check­ing out the excel­lent Word­Press Codex art­icle on design­ing head­ers. The header for Super­pos­i­tion Kitty is based on Son Of Suck­er­fish Drop­downs, which is in turn based on the ground­break­ing A List Apart art­icle: Suck­er­fish Drop­downs. Read­ing through both of those art­icles (which I heav­ily recom­mend) will give you a good ground­ing in how to style lists as a hori­zontal (or even ver­tical) menu.

Con­tinue read­ing: Word­Press, Head­ers, And Super­pos­i­tion Kitty

Lately I’ve noticed we’ve been get­ting a lot of hits on my art­icle Good­bye Media Temple, Hello Linode, with search terms such as ‘medi­atemple vs linode’. So I thought it would be best to tran­scribe my thoughts in a little more detail below. I would also like to pre­face this art­icle with the state­ment that I was a cus­tomer of Media Temple’s for almost 3 years, and have been with Linode for 2 months now.

For the table below I have com­pared Media Temple’s ‘base’ ded­ic­ated vir­tual server to it’s nearest Linode com­pet­itor the ‘Linode 720′.

Met­ric Media Temple Linode
RAM 512MB 720MB
Stor­age 20GB 32GB
Trans­fer 1TB 400GB
Price $50/mo $39.95/mo

 
Linode comes out way in front in everything other than ‘Net­work Trans­fer’, how­ever I have found that for the few small sites that we host we rarely use more than even 50GB a month. Obvi­ously, depend­ing on what you host you may need more than the 400GB per month that this level of Linode offers, but I would be wary of host­ing any­thing push­ing that much traffic on a server with only 512MB of RAM (in Media Temple’s case). It’s also worth not­ing that Linode offers addi­tional trans­fer at the rate of $0.10 per 1GB if need be. Media Temple does not offer such a ser­vice, and will charge you $0.50 for each 1GB you are over your limit.

Con­tinue read­ing: Linode vs. Media Temple

Baltic Hackers

November 28th

For some reason, some how, the vir­tual private server that this site is hos­ted on was com­prom­ised by Baltic hack­ers last week­end. I am not sure what it is they wanted, maybe Trent Reznor or Stephanie Mayer have some irate tech­no­lo­gical fans out in East­ern Europe.

WARNING: Semi-technical talk ahead.

Either some­body took offense at some­thing we have writ­ten or they were just really, really bored, because at 16:00 on Fri­day of last week our server star­ted send­ing out massive amounts of data over UDP. I received an auto­mated notice from Linode a few hours later telling me that my server had aver­aged 6.16MB/s over the last two hours. That one spike there man­aged to use up 5% of our monthly band­width. The net­work usage con­tin­ued at ran­dom inter­vals for only brief peri­ods of time, mak­ing it quite dif­fi­cult to catch with tcp­dump, and neither ntop or iftop noticed any­thing amiss.

Keep­ing an eye on Linode’s con­veni­ently provided net­work graphs I was finally able to cap­ture the tail end of another massive out­put with tcp­dump only to reveal abso­lutely noth­ing. None of the (very help­ful) Linode staff were able to tell me just what was going on, but after a few hours came to the con­clu­sion that it was likely some­body had com­prom­ised my server and was prob­ably using it to per­form DDoS attacks. Solu­tion: delete and rebuild.

This could’ve been pain­ful if I was still with Media Temple, but Linode offer pro-rata billing (mean­ing that I only have to pay for what I use). I imme­di­ately opened up a new server and got to work trans­fer­ring my backups. Then it was time to secure it, and bet­ter than I had done last time. I am now using ipt­ables to block all ports other than www, https and ssh. I have also set up SSH public/private keys, dis­abled root login, moved ssh ports, removed vsftpd and installed fail2ban.

I could now close up my old account. Total cost to me: $0.63 in server charges and half my week­end. Hope­fully I won’t have to deal with this again, but it taught me to make sure I always have up-to-date backups and to keep on top of secur­ity. And not to piss off East­ern European hackers.

« Next

Previous »

Philip K Dick on Blade Runner.

Holotoy for iPhone.

MGS Peace Walker gameplay.

You have chosen to spend your only life this way.

Available soon: your own model Akira motorbike.

Clash Of Heroes HD announced for PSN.

How Facebook was founded.

How to draw aircraft and spacecraft, from the 70's.

Super Mario Brothers 8x8.

Simplifying CSS selectors.

The elements of programming style.

Stuff Jewish young adults like.

More Vignettes…

About Us

SuperpositionKitty is Ryan Smith & Jennifer Smith. Based in Australia, but operating out of the United Kingdom, they have been working together since roughly the turn of the century. Read More…

Get In Touch

You can get in touch with Ryan at ryan@superpositionkitty.com, or Jen at jen@superpositionkitty.com. If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions for the website, then you can contact us at collective.

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