Posted by Ceri Davies Fri, 09 Sep 2005 21:56:00 GMT
On another note, we bought one of those orgasmatrons and, far from being the best, most wonderful head-massage experience ever, it’s horrible. It’s like having someone close an umbrella on your head.
Stef, on the other hand, thinks it’s brilliant.
Posted by Ceri Davies Fri, 09 Sep 2005 21:36:00 GMT
I like to send mail direct from my home network for various reasons, not least being that I used to work on my current ISP’s mail servers and I know that they are in and out of blackholes these days like Hawking radiation. By sending mail directly from my dynamic block, the results are at least somewhat consistent.
Some may suggest changing ISP, but I am happy with every other aspect of their service, and there is no guarantee that any other ISP won’t run in to the same problems at any point in the future. Exim makes it easy for me to maintain a list of domains that do require me to use my ISP’s smart host, and even has the decency to read it dynamically, so it’s little hardship for me to:
echo painintheass.net >> /usr/local/etc/exim/smarthost.domains
for those domains that do need it.
Occasionally, however, I run into problems whereby the recipient that I am trying to mail won’t accept mail from me or the upstream smart host at the ISP. In the past, that has meant that I’ve been stuffed, which would normally be the would-be recipient’s problem, but every so often I really, really want to send them the message.
This just happened twice in the space of ten minutes, so I worked out how to get exim to relay mail via smtp.gmail.com:
First, enable POP for your gmail account. You do that in the “Forwarding and POP” section of the settings. Strangely enough.
Next, add a domain list to your exim configuration:
domainlist use_gmail_domains = /usr/local/etc/exim/gmail.domains
This domain list will hold the list of domains to send via gmail, one domain per line. If you don’t have any to add now, create the file empty with touch(1) so that you don’t forget later. Exim won’t complain either way.
Create an authenticator. Note that although we’re using the plaintext mechanism here, we’ll force TLS in the transport so your details will not get transferred in the clear:
gmail_login:
driver = plaintext
public_name = LOGIN
client_send = : YourGmailUsername@gmail.com : YourGmailPasswordNote that in a default exim configuration there are usually no authenticators, so don’t forget the begin authenticators statement if this is your first one.
Add a router:
send_via_gmail:
driver = manualroute
domains = +use_gmail_domains
transport = gmail_smtp
route_list = "* smtp.gmail.com byname"Add a transport, forcing it to use AUTH and TLS:
gmail_smtp:
driver = smtp
hosts = smtp.gmail.com
hosts_require_auth = smtp.gmail.com
hosts_require_tls = smtp.gmail.comThat’s all it requires. You may now need to lock down the permissions on your configuration file to stop anyone reading your username and password from it. Advanced exim users can work out how to put this information in a separate file easily enough.
Posted by Ceri Davies Sun, 10 Jul 2005 20:17:00 GMT
I picked the first three courgettes today, and the last time I posted I had only just planted them out. Lazy old me.
Posted by Ceri Davies Sun, 22 May 2005 17:22:00 GMT
Peas and courgettes are in (the peas actually went in two weeks ago, but I forgot to note it here).
As I watered in the last courgette today, I could hear my neighbour Matt being told by a friend that “they reckon there’ll be another ground frost this week”. Well, “they” had better be mistaken; it is practically June for crying out loud. That is all.
Posted by Ceri Davies Sun, 15 May 2005 13:42:00 GMT
After nearly 12 years together, Phill and Julia got married yesterday in a beautiful ceremony during which certain male members of the audience were moved to tears.
Thanks for the honour of being there, guys.
Posted by Ceri Davies Sun, 15 May 2005 13:32:00 GMT
Colin Percival finally presented his paper on HyperThreading and information leakage via caches, a problem that is clearly hardware related and operating system non-specific. Secunia, among others, instantly misinterpreted (or plain didn’t bother to read) the paper and issued a FreeBSD specific advisory.
Colin must be really annoyed; I know I am.
Posted by Ceri Davies Sun, 01 May 2005 13:26:00 GMT
My seedlings have finally worked out what month it is and begun sprouting; those are the courgettes but everything else has got the idea at the same time. It is rather late, but perhaps this year won’t be a total loss after all.
Posted by Ceri Davies Thu, 28 Apr 2005 19:40:00 GMT
Quick braindump:
Heard about these crazy “pro-life” pharmacists on Radio 4 last night. Arrogant pro-life-the-way-I-say-so idiots.
Tiger is released tomorrow, and since this is a blog I have to list the new features I think might actually be useful:
Xgrid: apparently it’s absurdly easy to cluster Macs now. Xcode’s distributed compilation was neat, but this looks great (proviso the lack of documentation today; we’ll see tomorrow)
Inkwell: I shyed away from tablets because they looked like a pain in ass to use. No longer
Xcode 2.0: Remote debugging looks nice
That’s pretty much all. I’m sure that the other enhancements are great, but I won’t be rushing out to buy it on the strength of this.
Buying a house == PITA (yes, still)
Where is FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE? Well, there is a networking regression that needs working out. We have a pretty lengthy list of new features too. There’s an upgrade I can recommend.
Update: The aforementioned bug has been fixed, and FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE should be unleashed on May 9th.
Posted by Ceri Davies Sun, 10 Apr 2005 18:06:00 GMT
My 29th birthday yesterday was lovely; Stef baked me a cake, I had good presents and a big pile of us went to the pub before heading back to ours afterwards.
In the pub, Phill said the sweetest thing to me: “Of the really cool things that have happened to me in the last five years, meeting you was one of the best”. Now, there was some beer involved here but it was sincere and I was extremely touched. When he followed with “and if I was that way inclined, I think I might even try to bum you”, I was totally lost for words.
Posted by Ceri Davies Wed, 06 Apr 2005 18:37:00 GMT
Have been really busy of late with the house purchase and the paperwork and actually turning up to work involved, but was happily proved wrong about the rugby (at last, we really do kick arse again) and have secured myself a 5 perch allotment which I’ll be posting more about later. I’m still around though, so there’s no need to worry about the warning here.
I’ve been using Mac OS X on and off for about 2 months or so now, and have been slowly getting to know AppleScript (last time I used a Mac OS was just after 9 was released) - this was cool enough, what with the ability to record a script that kind of does what you want and then edit it to improve it/see how it works, but I’ve just found a feature named Folder Actions that deserves a note here. Folder Actions allow you to assign an AppleScript that will get invoked when a file is added to a folder, a file is deleted from a folder, or when a folder’s Finder window is opened, closed, moved or resized, i.e. pretty much whenever you like. Holy shit! This has some immediately obvious applications but has massive potential.
Discoveries of this ilk continue to astound me.
