jik's home page

You've reached the home page of Jonathan Kamens.

You can contact me at jik@kamens.us. My public GPG key can be found here. I'm on Mastodon.

If you benefit from any of the many things I've put out into the world, you can support me on Patreon.

Tools

The Jewish Holidays and Event Scheduling page will tell you everything you need to know to avoid scheduling events on dates that will conflict with Jewish holidays.

I maintain a pretty useful comics aggregator.

Projects

Free software that I maintain or dabble in includes:

• PenguinDome, a simple Linux Mobile Device Management system
• Coal Mine, a periodic task execution monitor
• todoist-fetch.pl, a simple script for backing up and restoring todoist data, as described here.
• crateify.pl, a simple cloud backup mechanism described here.
• Send Later 3, a Thunderbird add-on for scheduling emails for later delivery.
• The Enhanced Priority Display Thunderbird add-on
• The Reply to Multiple Messages Thunderbird add-on
• The Folder Pane View Switcher Thunderbird add-on
• Undigestify, a Thunderbird add-on for splitting RFC 1153 digest messages.
• delete-s3-bucket.pl, a Perl script for deleting Amazon S3 buckets.
• A tweaked Wonder Shaper script for making Vonage work better on slow / heavy utilized Internet connections (see my blog for more info).
• Mailman_mimedefang_fix_footer (documentation), a tool for using mimedefang to move Mailman message footers from a separate body part into the text and HTML body parts of messages, so that all users see them.
• close-books.pl, a Perl script for archiving old transactions from a GnuCash XML file (hopefully this will become moot at some point when GnuCash finally switches over to a real database backend!).
• Geneal2gedcom.pl, a script for converting Jim McBeath's genealogy data file format (used by jimmc.roots and geneal) into GEDCOM format.
• An enhanced resource usage monitor for OpenHosting.com VPSes, so that you don't go way over your commit level without realizing it.
• XRN, a NNTP News reader for the X Window System
• bogofilter-milter.pl a Sendmail::Milter script for integrating bogofilter into sendmail.
• p4pr.perl, a script to emulate in the Perforce Software Configuration Management System the functionality of "cvs annotate" or "git blame".
• Emacs VC mode support for Perforce, an integration between GNU Emacs and Perforce which allows you to use the native Emacs SCM commands on files controlled by Perforce.
• The move-newsrc package, which helps transfer a .newsrc file from one NNTP server to another
• The MIT Athena delete/undelete package, a set of utilities to replace rm and protect the user from accidental file deletion
• xscreensaver, yet another UNIX/X screen-lock program (but probably not the “xscreensaver” you're familiar with!)
• clean-mqueue.pl, a short but sweet Perl script for interactively scanning the messages in the sendmail queue and deleting or quarantining unwanted ones.
• download-helpscout-mailbox.py, a script for downloading the conversations, customers, and attachments from a Help Scout mailbox

Affiliations

I belong to the MIT Student Information Processing Board (well, at least, I'm an alumni member).

History

Some of the projects I've worked on in the past are:

• I created the news.answers newsgroup and most of the other "*.answers" groups and moderated them for several years before recruiting a team of moderators and handing over the task to them (I'm the "moderator emeritus" of the group now).
• I created the rtfm.mit.edu Usenet FAQ archive, as well as the mail server interface to it, and maintained them for several years (now, they're maintained by the MIT SIPB).
• I was the first person to volunteer to act as a neutral third-party vote collector for any Usenet newsgroup creation vote whose proponent couldn't or didn't want to run the vote, using vote-collection code built into the rtfm.mit.edu mail server, long before the Usenet Volunteer Votetakers organization was created.
• After Cancelmoose[tm] started cancelling spam on a large scale, I was the first News administrator to do so under my own name (as opposed to anonymously). The software used by many of the current spam cancellers is based on software I wrote.

Publications

Some of the publications I've worked on are:

• While working for MIT's Project Athena when it still had "Project" in its name, I wrote a parody of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" called "Atlas' HDA". Be warned: If you never worked for Athena, you'll probably miss many of the jokes.

  Of course, I was inspired by the parodies that came before mine, including "Alice's PDP-10" and "MIT's AI Lab". It seems that parodying this song is a long-standing tradition at MIT.

• I wrote the "FAQ: How to find people's E-mail addresses" Usenet FAQ and maintained it for several years; it was then maintained by David Alex Lamb for a while, who greatly updated and improved it. I believe it's currently unmaintained and hasn't been updated in years.
• I wrote the "Mail Archive Server software list" Usenet FAQ and maintained it for several years; it is now maintained quite well by Piero Serini.
• I wrote the "How to find sources" Usenet FAQ and maintained it for several years; it was subsequently maintained by Kent Landfield.
• I wrote the "Welcome to alt.sources!" Usenet FAQ and maintained it for several years; it is now being maintained and posted by Olivier M.J. Crepin-Leblond.
• I wrote the "How to become a Usenet site" Usenet FAQ and maintained it for several years. It is now being maintained and posted by Chris Lewis.
• I wrote the "Welcome to news.newusers.questions!" Usenet FAQ and maintained it for several years. It is now being maintained and posted by Leanne Phillips.
• "Retrofitting network security to third-party applications -- the SecureBase experience", UNIX Security IV Symposium, Santa Clara, CA, October, 1993.
• I worked on the MIT Course Evaluation Guide (CEG) for a couple of years. Just when I got to know the system they were using to store all of their data, they decided to change it, so that's when I decided to pursue other interests. The CEG is defunct and has been replaced by The MIT Office of Academic Services' Student Subject Evaluations.

Miscellaneous

Check out this glossary for definitions of some of the Jewish terms I use in these pages.

Click here for a brief history of my efforts to keep spam out of my inbox.

I use bogofilter to filter my email. It does a very good job (except when it doesn't; see that brief history I just mentioned for details). This graph shows the volume of spam I receive per day and how much of it bogofilter blocks automatically:

This shows the percentage of spam blocked each day:

I also filter incoming email using the Spamhaus ZEN blocklist. Here's some history of how much email it blocks:

Note that a blocklist blocks SMTP connections, whether or not those connections would have actually tried to send email to valid local accounts, whereas bogofilter blocks email messages to real users. This is why the number of messages blocked by Spamhaus is so much higher than the number blocked by bogofilter — most attempts to send spam are sent to invalid email addresses.

This document was last modified on $Date: 2023/03/10 18:32:45 $.