On my home server, I have a nfs server running and I use nfs to mount my music to my laptop. Ever since the first day the nfs mount process used to be dead slow. Today I got irritated enough to check out if this is a common problem.

It seems that this is a common enough problem. The reason is that nfs requires portmap to be running on both the client and the server side.

Links:

• Linux forums thread that gave me a clue
• Ubuntu bug
• good introduction to nfs

The youtube search does a good job of searching videos. In its search page, it allows you to search by popularity/ratings/date. I have found that videos with longer playing time are usually the ones I am interested in, however, there is no option to sort the results by playing time.

I did a bit of digging in the Youtube Developer's guide and saw that they give the length of the video in seconds. The next piece was Yahoo! Pipes. I created a pipe which would fetch videos from youtube and then passes the results through the sort operator to sort the results based on the yt:duration field. Tada! That gives me videos matching my search criteria near the top.

Links:

• My youtube search - sort by video playtime pipe
• Youtube Developer's guide
• My other pipes

RFC 822 allows people to define and use additional header fields in their emails. These fields start with X- in their names. For example, X-Quarantine-ID or X-Spam-Score. Usually these headers are not too interesting. I wanted to see if the spammers use any custom fields in the spam messages that they send out.

The complete analysis is posted here. The headers that I found interesting (i.e. the ones that occur very infrequently)

X-DSNContext

This seems to be header set by MS Exchange

X-AntiVirus: Checked,

This seems to be header set be spammers to confuse the mail filter

X-ME-UUID

Looks like header set by some mail server

X-Source, X-Source-Args, X-Source-Dir, X-Spam

These are headers set by phplist

X-Failed-Recipients

This is a header generated by exim when it handles mailing lists. Looks like some spammer has a mailing list with all his targeted email ids in it.