As some of you might have noticed, we had some downtime yesterday. This is due to some gentlemanly folk who decided to use the server to send out spam. I thought I had configured the mail server well, but apparently some things can go wrong. For example, the fact that the root account doesn't have a password set doesn't mean that people can't log in. Apparently my SASL service thought that by "no password" I meant "log people in with whatever", and allowed people to log in anyway.
After the amazingly successful omnisync, it is once again time to present you of another creation of the inimitable Poromenos Studios.
This time, it’s Dead Man’s Switch. As you’re probably aware, everyone carries valuable information in their heads. It might be about their work, financial information, etc. If anything were to happen to them, this information would be lost, unfortunately.
This is where Dead Man’s Switch comes in.
It is once again time to shake the world from its very foundations with my latest creation. I present to you… omnisync.
omnisync is a file synchroniser (something like rsync), only it’s not built to synchronise just files, but also anything else. It’s extensible through a simple plugin architecture, and you can have it synchronise anything to anything within a few hours.
I just encoded my Futurama DVDs to put on my iPod, but it’s a real hassle adding tags to every single file separely, so I created a script to do it for me. I had actually written this before, but I forgot it at home, so I had no option but to rewrite it.
The script (written in Python) will search the filenames for “sXXeXX” and look up the episode name on IMDB, and then will rename the file as “Show name – SXXEXX – Episode name.extension”.
Well, I have a computer architecture exam in six hours and can’t be bothered, so I figured I would realize a lifelong dream of mine, and make a program that prints “Hello world!” using curve fitting techniques. Enlisting the help of a good friend with numerous mathematical papers under his belt (ostensibly because he could not afford a tighter belt), MATLAB and a longing for procrastination, we embarked on this perilous journey.
As you may know, I bought a Macbook some two months ago, and the trackpad was broken. The pointer accelerates way too much when I move it, and that makes pointing at stuff really hard. Combine that with the keyboard-unfriendliness of OS X, and you have one big Mac hater in front of you. I sent it for service to the official Greek Apple distributor, Rainbow, but I was a bit worried that they wouldn’t do anything about it. My worst fears came true when it came back.
I discovered today that Moneygement won’t accept unicode characters when someone adds transactions by email because of the editdist module I used to check it. Since I don’t really need a fast function to do it (it’s all eight-letter words on average), I decided to write my own Python version of the function and am sharing it here if anyone needs it (because I haven’t found a Python implementation anywhere). It’s released under a BSD license with attribution, meaning that I’d like it if my name was mentioned where it is used :)
I recently got a Macbook after my last laptop broke, and I wanted to write about my impressions (well, after using it for a few days and past the initial “omg nothing works like in other OSes” shock). First, the good:
- The GUI is really pretty and feels consistent and robust. Windows (whenever I mention Windows I mean XP, I don’t like Vista at all) is quite a bit uglier, but is also rather consistent. Linux is somewhat pretty (especially with compiz et al) but lacks consistency and robustness.
Recently I found out that mail I sent from this domain (poromenos.org) was being flagged as spam by Gmail. That is odd, because I have (correctly, I believe) defined the SPF records for this domain and it should be recognised as legitimate. I researched a bit, and came to a conclusion that other users have come to as well:
Gmail flags as spam Google Apps emails coming from Google’s SMTP server. I set up a new account and sent emails from Thunderbird and from Google Apps’ web interface, and surely enough, the Thunderbird one got marked as spam.
If you want to mount samba shares with Greek filenames under Linux (Ubuntu, in particular), here's the magic command:
sudo mount -t smbfs //server/share dir -o username=guest,password=,codepage=cp737,iocharset=utf8
It took me a while to find, so here it is for posterity and for others who might need it. Ubuntu displays filenames correctly through the network without any configuration, but if you want to mount a share yourself, you need that. Same options go for fstab as well, it works the same way.
