RubLog moves over

Posted on Sunday, 25th April, 2004 by ianmacd

PragDave‘s RubLog is a nice piece of software, but is missing advanced features, such as trackback and comments. On the other hand, it’s written in Ruby, so adding features is relatively easy.

Nevertheless, I’m quite new to this blogging thing, so I need some experience with more powerful software, just so that I can come to understand this area of the Web in more detail. Working at a company like Google, home of Blogger, you’d think that I’d know all about blogging, but I’m actually pretty ignorant. I spend most of my time configuring stuff and hacking code. I may know Apache well, for example, but as for what end-users do with it, I don’t pay much attention.

Anyway, I’m going to put my few previous entries on-line here and see how well this Movable Type thing works out. One nice thing about RubLog is its simplicity. Using nothing but plain text files, its operation is very transparent. Movable Type is quite a bit different, requiring lots of non-standard Perl modules and writing data away into DBM files. It also has a complex templating and tagging system, which is going to take me some time to get to grips with. For now, I’ll just stick with the defaults.

The only adventurous things I’m doing right now are:

  • using Markdown for mark-up

  • including some Ruby code in my templates between <% %> tags.

This then gets spat out into .rhtml files, on which Apache invokes eRuby at serving time.

I have to admire the flexibility of this publishing system.

Posted in Life | Leave a comment

Media Frenzy

Posted on Sunday, 25th April, 2004 by ianmacd

The IPO

speculation

continues.

Meanwhile, some people are starting to actually write some

sane

things about

Gmail.

Interestingly, not one of my friends have even asked me for a Gmail account. I

don’t know what conclusion, if any, to infer from that. On the other hand,

Sarah’s colleagues have been going crazy to get

an invitation from me.

Posted in Google | 1 Comment

Postfix 2.1

Posted on Sunday, 25th April, 2004 by ianmacd

Postfix 2.1 is finally out and has a bunch of new

features, ranging from the potentially very evil ability to match mail on

the usual range of header and body checks and then auto-Bcc extra recipients

(imagine your company’s paranoid security personnel Bcc’ing themselves a copy

of every outgoing mail that contains a word like, say, IPO), all the way

to weapons to prevent evil in the form of [address

verification](http://www.postfix.org/ADDRESS_VERIFICATION_README.html).

Address verification is a great new feature. In short, this takes the RCPT

FROM from each incoming connection, obtains the MX for the reported domain,

and connects back in real-time with a probe to determine whether the reported

sender address is actually deliverable. If it is, the incoming e-mail is

allowed through. Otherwise, it gets a 550. A cache of both positive and

negative results is built up, otherwise this would be horribly expensive on

all but the lowest traffic sites.

Exim has had this for a while (under a different name),

but that MTA’s monolithic design doesn’t appeal to me. An MTA is too complex a

piece of software to have a monolithic design these days, especially if it runs

as root. That’s a liability I don’t need.

Don’t turn on address verification unless you have a relatively low traffic

site. Those probes are expensive, even with caching.

Posted in System Administration | Leave a comment

At least the Nazis were intellectuals. How about Bush?

Posted on Wednesday, 21st April, 2004 by ianmacd

A friend of mine directed me to the following quote this evening:

…it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is

always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a

democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist

dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to

the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell

them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of

patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in

any country.

The particular political pundit that first uttered these words was none

other than Hermann G

Posted in Politics, USA | Leave a comment

Far from the madding crowd

Posted on Monday, 19th April, 2004 by ianmacd

Sarah and I are off to Amsterdam for a week at the end of April. This will be her first Koninginnedag, so we’re hoping for mooi weer.

Sarah and I will be making our second trip to Iceland in August. Rather than touring the whole country, this time we’ll be spending just a few days in the capital of Reykjavík and then a few more in the town of Heimaey on the island of Vestmannaeyjar, located just off the south coast of the country. The latter destination will allow us to enjoy the unique thrill of the first flight of the year’s pufflings from the cliffs above Heimaey.

Punctuating those two excursions will be ten or so days on the Faroe Islands, or Føroyar as their inhabitants know them, one of the lesser visited European countries. If you’ve never heard of the place and have no idea what the islands are like, have a look at these photos.

Posted in Travel | Leave a comment