I could get used to this…

Mail.app in 16:9 ratio, without resorting to previously reported hacked binaries.

Instead of studying SQL notes as I was supposed to, I’ve just spent the last few minutes writing and testing a handy little script which automates my personal method of upgrading WordPress, using rsync to copy over only the updated files from a WordPress release to my blog installation.

Perhaps it will be useful for someone else as much as it will be for me.

Now, I have to go make up for the time I’ve wasted as I distracted myself…

Dear God are people stupid. There is too much crap about this online as it is, so my thoughts are brief:

1. US Trademarks don’t apply outside of the US. They have to be registered in other places, like Ireland and Europe. Stupid Americans.
2. I really doubt Tim O’Reilly was directly involved. This is a PR mess, I doubt the guy who founded the company runs the PR Dept
3. Idiots who voe to stop buying O’Reilly books are clueless. This is a simply a PR mess, they still publish good tech books by knowledgeable authors. They just need better PR people
4. Enough about Web 2.0 already, who gives a damn, it’s just a buzz word.

Hmmm,

Today started off so well, I was feeling good, and thought I might get some work done. Maybe even clear the elusive milestone I’m currently stuck on (damn utmp behaviour!!).

But no, recent DMA related errors with a FreeBSD 6 server acting as my broadband router escalated. Initially, a replacement disk looked like a solution, but much tinkering later and a few disks later, it seems the problem is the onboard IDE controller of the box instead, which has left me up the creak with no replacement available…

After much hair pulling, I’ve begrudgedly resorted to using my wireless AP as a router. No IPv6 connectivity, my nicely subnetted network is in disarray, and worst of all, I’m stuck using NAT. I feel dirty…

😐

Multiple Email Identities in Mail.app

The main gripe I’ve had with Mail.app seems to have been there all along, but undocumented (as far I could could tell). All you have to do to have multiple email addresses connected to a single email account is comma seperate them in the “Email Address” field under Accounts in the Mail.app preferences. Why is such a simple thing so hard to find on google?!?

In a slighly related area, I’ve started to play around with High Priority, as recommended by Suw in the pub this evening. It’s a nifty way to filter iCal To Do items into a Menu Item, complete with priority and due date filtering and my personal favourite, it can highlight items by calendar colour. 🙂

I’m also going to play with Fuhgeddaboutit for a few days, to see if I find it useful…

So, now that I’ve actually started to get somewhere with my fyp, things are good. Admittedly, it’s due to be demonstrated sometime in the first few weeks of April, so there’s only so much time left, but with a bit of luck and a lot of coding throughout March, I should be fine. 🙂

In the last few days, I’ve been trying to devise a message format for when I send messages between my client and server. Then, Mr Coady gave me a good idea. There’s a draft JEP which is how to use OpenPGP with XMPP (otherwise known as Jabber). I’ve looked into it a bit, and XMPP looks like the way forward.

So, thinking about it, I guess my project is now becoming a Jabber client/server of sorts, where by if you are able to log into a system running my (soon to exist) server, then you are effectively authenticated into a Jabber server. Since my client is going to be rather similar to write(1), it’s going to pass XMPP messages to the server running locally. Then the server can make the decision if it should deliver the message to the recipient local user, try to find the designated server on a remote node, or I guess, find say a little known Jabber network.

Now things are getting interesting… 🙂

Hmmm, after a little poking with Asterisk this afternoon, I finally managed to get my Cisco 7960G IP Phone to play nicely with Asterisk. I can now make outgoing calls using my Blue Face account.

Incoming calls are another matter. They appear to reach my Asterisk server, then die after 1 ring, which makes me suspect I’ve a kink in my Asterisk config which isn’t “patching” incoming calls to my phone. :-/

Since I’ve probably spent a bit too much time poking Asterisk over the last few days, since I have a number of other things to be doing instead. So, I’ve given up and consulted the Blue Face support guys themselves to try and work out where the problem is.

Once I get it sorted, I plan on posting my sip.conf and extensions.conf configs online to try and assist others trying to set the same thing, even though my configs are mainly based on Martin List-Petersen’s SIP proxy config, with some details taken from Blue Face’s Asterisk Setup Guide.

Ever since I first heard about SPF, and some of it’s much argued flaws, such as hosts who redirect mail to offsite locations, I haven’t really been too keen to enable it.

A few days ago, it was disussed on SAGE-IE, which included a comment from Justin Mason, which didn’t condemn SPF.

So, I went off to refresh my knowledge with SPF this morning. Since I run SMTP-AUTH on all my MX servers, as a trial, I’ve added an SPF record (which I generated quite easily with the SPF wizard) to my conall.net domain, which only I use for mail anyway.

I’m interested to see if it has any noticible affects. If it works, I’m tempted to enable SPF on my conallobrien.com domain, with the hope that I might be able to reduce the no of failure reports from spam I see going to my catch-all address.

As many Unix or Linux users with a Mac know, Mac OS X’ Terminal.app doesn’t play nice with GNU’s Screen on a Linux or Unix server, mainly manifesting as backspace not working.

There are lots of fixes online (eg macosxhints) which cite incompatible termcap settings as the cause. Their solutions are efectively copying the OS X termcap settings into ~/.termcap/ on the remote server. I’d rather not resort to doing this, since I use screen on multiple servers to do all sorts of things everywhere.

Through some simple experimentation, I discovered it’s simply a simple tickbox setting within Terminal’s Window Preferences. Just enable the setting as highlighted here