jah shaka sound system

Jah Shaka has been operating a London-based, roots reggae Jamaican sound system since the early 1970s. His name is an amalgamation of the Rasta term for God and that of a Zuluwarrior, Shaka Zulu.

He started out on the Freddie Cloudburst Sound System, before setting up his own sound system. Jah Shaka events are renowned for attracting a wide audience from all backgrounds and races. Shaka believes it to be a testament to the quality of the message that he expounds in his choice of music and his Rastafarian beliefs.

Shaka stayed true to his Rastafarian beliefs during the 1980s when many other Sound Systemshad started to follow the Jamaican trend towards playing "slack" dancehall music. His refusal to compromise inspired a host of new UK reggae artists and Sound Systems such as Eastern Sher, The Disciples, Iration Steppas, Jah Warrior, Channel One Sound System, Conscious Sounds, The Rootsman and Abashanti-I. Non-reggae artists such as Basement Jaxx have also cited Jah Shaka as an influence during interviews.

On his own record label he has released music from Jamaican artists such as Max Romeo,Johnny Clarke, Bim Sherman and Prince Alla as well as UK groups such as Aswad and Dread & Fred. He has released a number of dub albums, often under the Commandments of Dub banner.

In 1980 Shaka played himself in the film Babylon (directed by Franco Rosso), operating his Sound System in a soundclash at the climax of the story. In 1989 Shaka visited Jamaica and worked with many musicians there, including King Tubby. In 2000 he suffered numerous injuries during a house fire.

The Jah Shaka Sound System continues to appear regularly in London, with occasional tours of the United States, Europe and Japan. Live footage of Shaka featured in the documentary All Tomorrow's Parties based on the musical festival, which was released in 2009.

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mail archiving system

If you're an IT manager, email admin, storage administrator or in-house attorney, you're probably grappling with how to manage email and file stores that are growing exponentially. New discovery and privacy requirements are forcing you to both know what you have and retrieve it quickly. Building a consensus on what you should do and actually doing it can be difficult.

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system.workflow.activities

How to Write a Custom Workflow Activity

Published on January 25, 2007

Normally writing a custom workflow is a common task in Windows Workflow Foundation because there are many situations that we need to apply a development process to workflows. There are several references about writing a custom workflow but I see many newbies who can't understand the process easily. In my opinion the reason is most resources try to talk about all aspects of writing a custom activity at a glance without simple examples. So I want to test my chance and write about this topic in this post and some future posts. I'll begin with a simple custom activity which doesn't have any optional or advanced part of a custom activity.

There are two general types of custom activities: basic and composite. Both basic and composite activities can work with properties, events and ... but composite activities can do something more. Composite activities can contain basic or composite activities. There are some examples of basic and composite activities in built-in workflow activities. Delay or Suspend are two examples of basic activities and While or Parallel are two examples of composite activities.

It's possible to write a custom basic activity or composite activity but process to write a composite activity is a bit longer than basic activity.

Each activity is constructed of some components but for an activity it's not essential to have all these components:

• Definition: Main definition for an activity where you define properties, events and ...
• Executer: This component defines the execution logic for an activity. For example you can use this component to run child activities in a special order.
• Validator: Validator components helps you to validate workflow information before runtime so it can let you to prevent from some exceptions as a result of wrong input.
• Toolbox Item: This component defines default values to be added to a workflow when it's being added to workflow. For example you can use this component to set a default integer value for a property.
• Designer: Designer component is all about visual presentation of a workflow and what you see when you're working with it.

Only first component (Definition) is required for an activity to work but usually other components are implemented for an activity. As you can guess from above description it's not always necessary to have an execution logic, validation logic, default values or a good visual presentation so you can ignore these components based on your needs.

In this post I just want to introduce the core by giving a simple example that only needs first and second components (Definition and Executer). I write a custom workflow activity that gets two string values: a file path a text. On execution it creates a text file and writes text value into it. Before doing anything I create a Class Library project and add appropriate references to it then create a new class file and name it CustomActivity

Alright, I begin with definition component. To design a custom activity I have to derive my definition from a base class. For basic activities I must inherit it from System.Workflow.ComponentModel.Activity and for composite activities I must inherit from System.Workflow.ComponentModel.CompositeActivity base classes. As I want to design a base activity, derive my class from

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raid system recovery

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cbl spam block

Which is the best email spam filter software and block list? As a person who logs online more than anything else, my email account is constantly being bombarded with spam emails. I receive an average of 100 – 200 spam mails per day, not even the mighty Gmail can stop them from entering my inbox.

Based on many years of experience, I’ve discovered the best way to filter out spam on a email hosting server is CBL Spam Block, as for those using Microsoft Outlook, Spamihilator is the best, not perfect but good enough to filter out 98% of spam mails.

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greymail spam

Running the Grey Mail Gauntlet

Thursday, June 14, 2007 at 8:19am by Schalk Cronjé

A while ago over at Security Insights, McAfee CTO Chris Bolin blogged about grey spam. As far as content-based analysis goes, it is a tricky area for anti-spam vendors.

Mass email can roughly be categorised into three groups:

• Real spam: the dubious pills, the get-rich-quick scams, phishing, etc. Everyone hates that, but if you have a good anti-spam solution in place you should end up seeing a very small percentage of what was sent to you.
• Mass-marketing mail: the kind of stuff your bank sends out to each one of its customers. Some of that is useful; some of it you might not care about. Usually if you ask, your bank will stop emailing you.
• Grey-mail spam: This lies somewhere between the top two. This is the stuff that cannot really be classified as spam. They have valid email addresses and even valid telephone numbers. But it doesn’t matter to you; these emails are just irritating. You really don’t want any of them.

For vendors providing anti-spam solutions, grey mail is a difficult thing to tackle. Any attempt to add too many detection rules risks false positives for good sites like Amazon. It might even place the vendor at risk for legal action from some marketing companies. This makes this form of spam very attractive to many unscrupulous mass-mailing marketeers; they’re willing to run the grey-mail gauntlet.

Don’t get me wrong: I think email marketing has its place and that it can be a very powerful tool, but it should be done ethically. There are many mail-marketing firms that play by the rules, but they can get a bad name because of the bigger group that simply doesn’t care, as long as they can make a few bucks.

To a great extent, remediation for grey spam falls outside the scope of a content-analysis engine. Although the latter can help, it needs input from the customer. Only the cutomer can determine what is unwanted and what is allowed in this case: one person’s spam is another person’s ham. Chris has listed a number of things you can do to protect yourself, but if you are already receiving grey mail, here are two good techniques for combating this:

• Blacklists
• Bayesian

Blacklists: Because grey spam tends to have a defined structure, known sender email addresses, etc., you can use blacklists. These blacklists should be created and updated by the customer and not the vendor.

Bayesian: Spam filtering might be another solution, but the problem is that it needs to be trained correctly. The training itself might be too much work for the ordinary home user. Luckily some email clients do a good job of making it easier for a person to use.

Handling false positives: Normally content rules will receive rigorous testing to avoid false positives. When customers introduce blacklists or Bayesian techniques, they are creating custom content rules. As these rules will be ad-hoc, there is a higher chance for false positives. To help with this issue, some form of quarantine system needs to be introduced. The single person at home or in a small company with fewer than 10 employees might use the rules-and-folders functionality in a decent email client to handcraft a solution. However, for any company with a large number of employees, something more structured is required. McAfee offers the product Quarantine Manager to complement some of its other mail-product offerings.

Expect to read more postings on this topic from some of my colleagues at Avert Labs.

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system administrator spam

Spam on Mailman Lists

To reduce or eliminate spam on mailing lists when using Mailman

The following steps will do two things in mailman:

1. Discard any message from an email name that does not end in "virginia.edu". (The admin of the list can optionally get a notice of all discarded messages.
2. Hold all other messages for the administrator to approve. The burden on the administrator is that s/he must approve all messages posted to the list, including those from members. But this will keep all spam (including the ones with spoofed email IDs) from going out to all members of your list. (This solution might be good for low-traffic lists where letting any spam through causes problems, perhaps by annoying a lot of people or some important people.)

What to do in the mailman admin interface:

1. Under "Privacy options..." choose "Sender Filters".
2. The first item (for the value default_member_moderation) should be set to "yes".
3. On the same page, find the item: List of non-member addresses whose postings will be immediately held for moderation. In the box, enter this regular expression: ^.*virginia\.edu$
4. On the same page, for the next to the last item (generic_nonmember_action), set this to "Discard".
5. On the same page, for the last item, set this to "yes" if the admin wants to get emails with each message from those that are automatically discarded because they are not from a "virginia.edu" address. (Might be a reasonable thing to do if there is a chance that a legitimate message from outside virginia.edu will come to the list.)
6. Click "Submit your Changes".
7. At the top of the page, choose "Membership Management".
8. At the bottom of the page, for the option "Set everyone's moderation bit, including those members not currently visible", click "yes" and then hit the "Set" button.

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