Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

Spam against depressions

Don’t we all hate those annoying spam mails? But today I have some good news for you: Just read them and use them to get a good-morning laugh. Just as I did this morning out of this mail:

Dear Bank of India client,

We are contacting you to inform you that on February 20, 2010 our Account Review Team
identified some usual activity in your account.In accordance with User Agreement and to
ensure that your account has not been compromised,access to your account was limited.
Your account access will remain limited until this issue has been resolved.

I spare you the rest of it, as obvious it’s trying to get me to fill in a form and send all information possibly available over to some obvious fraudulent group. But that’s besides the point and I hope everybody knows that.

What made me laugh here was the fact that their ‘Account Review Team’ got alerted because I used ‘my’ (actually non-existing, but that’s a detail) Bank of India account for ‘usual’ activities (remark on the word USUAL). This makes one wonder if it’s really THAT special for a bank to have a client not involved in illegal activities? Or why else would my usual behaviour trigger their alarms?

Anyway: Thanks spammers for this good-morning laugh! Keep ‘em coming my way please!

openSUSE Factory / Compiz 0.8.4

Doubtless you’re all aware that openSUSE 11.2, as great and up to date it is with many packages, was shipped with an outdated version of compiz version 0.7.8. The reasoning behind this was that some patches for NOMAD just were not able to be forward ported in reasonable time. At one point I started fixing / backporting some fixes from 0.8.4 to 0.7.8 and was granted maintainer status for the compiz packages, which is a great honor to me. Nevertheless, this happened too late in the 11.2 release cycle to include more recent packages. We were already in version freeze and I could never get this through.

But the good news: development of openSUSE 11.3 started and not much longer, all compiz related packages have been updated to their latest and greatest (hopefully) version. The development project X11:Compiz in the openSUSE BuildService already has fully built packages, which I tested on my Factory installation. In order to target a larger audience for testing, those packages have also been forwarded to openSUSE Factory. So if you’re running Factory and Compiz on it: be prepared for this update.

Should you happen to see any bugs, feel free to report all of them in Bugzilla (component and product are pre-selected with this link).