The /\/ TechDiary

When the iPhone arrived I did not really fancy it much. Circumstances would that a couple of weeks ago I had to acquire an iPhone 3GS due to some work, and hey — I suddenly understood what a revolution it was. You can easily find other phones and gadgets with better specs, but hey, this just works, and the appStore was a master stroke.

Anything wrong with it? Yeah, one thing bothers me enough to nag — that you cannot run stuff in the background. I understand their reasons – less stability to care about, and another upgrade possibility

A single occasion of blank/black screen on the iPhone 3GS was solved by resetting it (10 seconds on suspend on home simultaneously) – thanks to this post (I tried the buttons before googling, but did not realise that I should home them down for SOOOO long, and no, nothing got deleted.

The image of this post was taken with the iPhone and used in a tweet using twitterific.

Anti spam measures

spam

The following few additions to postfix main.cf:

### SPAM Prevention techniques
### http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/postfix-spam-filtering-with-blacklists-howto.html
### disable_vrfy_command = yes

smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, reject_non_fqdn_hostname, reject_non_fqdn_sender, reject_non_fqdn_recipient, reject_unauth_destination, reject_unauth_pipelining, reject_invalid_hostname, reject_unknown_sender_domain, reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org, reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net, reject_rbl_client dnsbl.sorbs.net, reject_rhsbl_sender dsn.fc-ignorant.org, check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:60000, permit
smtpd_data_restrictions = reject_unauth_pipelining, reject_multi_recipient_bounce, permit

In addition to this, I Installed postgray, a post processor to postfix, which rejects new mail servers the first few times, for a little while. Real smtp servers will re-deliver later. Spambots, it is said, are not always that patient.

Those two measures together have reduced my spam flow for a single mail account (with many aliases) from one spam an hour or more, to no spam in a week.

Virtual domains

virtual

For my new pet project I am dreaming I need to have more domains configured into my postfix installation. I first followed this blog entry about virtual domains for postfix but I saw the following errors:

Jun 11 20:51:07 d505 postfix/virtual[15433]: fatal: main.cf configuration error: virtual_mailbox_limit is smaller than message_size_limit

this was easily fixed by adding the key to main.cf with an appropriate value.

Next error was unrecognised user:

to=<REMOVED@iamdreaming.org>, relay=virtual, delay=0.02, delays=0.02/0/0/0, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (unknown user: “REMOVED@iamdreaming.org”)

Still working on it ….

It did not recognise my first alias.

Then I checked out the file /etc/postfix/virtual. That rang a bell, it provides a mapping from email@somedomain to some other email, and that was really what I needed. So I reverted the changes form above and tried out out to just provide virtual aliases.

After much mocking about, I found that the following two lines in main.cf had the effect that I wanted:

relay_domains =
iamdreaming.org
bition.net

virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

in /etc/postfix/virtual i then list the email adresses from the domains, REMOVED@iamdreaming.org etc. and their real destinations (e.g. at efef, gmail or someother).

Nice with a little sucess in just a few hours, I must admit that I have been tempted to skip having my own smtp server and just move it to some provider, but now, I think I will continue yet some.

You might expect to see:

super model Heidi_KLUM

Here for the right reasons? Then this is the picture you would expect to see:

M0 to M3 in the MOF (Meta Object Facility)

TO BE UPDATED, right now reading about DSL and EMF in a book …

I want to pick a CMS for a web service I am contemplating. Nice requirements:

1. easy to use
2. speedy serving of pages
3. nice URLs
   1. (no gets) making it easier to use with e.g. varnish
   2. not causing problems for SEO
4. Good support.
5. blog included, or nice integration with wordpress
6. good community support (comments, arcticle contribution), bulletin boards, faqs
7. possibility to let users use ids from popular sites like facebook. Is openid the stuff to use?

I googled a bit, of course, and found the practical CMS overview site, I sorted their view by rating and I picked a few candidates using my year old nose for good open source software (which seemed to follow the CMSes with a higher number of good ratings). Some of the names sounded familiar, so I had probably read about them on lwn, slashdot or similar site. In parenthesis are candidates I just remember (before seing them on the site). UPDATE (in parenthesis, my gist after reading comments from the above linked site).

1. joomla (for designers, easy to use)
2. drupal (high powered, for developers, perhaps old code not that clean)
3. website baker (very easy to use, not that many modules, probably gives you an easy start)
4. silver strite (another easy to use thingy, I think website baker may be prefereable).
5. (zope)
6. (plone)
7. (slashcode)

Will update this entry when I have experimented with one or more of them.

UPDATE:

I have tried out drupal since initiating this post. I have been so successful that I have not yet considered prioritising trying out any of the other CMSes. The site I have created is I am dreaming – a site about the dreams people have and how to realise them by sharing them in the community.

screen shot of i am dreaming front page

There is a tremendous amount of modules for drupal and so far I have only had to inpack them and the configure them through the web interface (sure enough, there’s a few I have not yet tackled, but we are speeking of leaving them be after 5 minutes of struggle because something else was easier and as interesting). This blog lists a few reasons to use drupal and lists 10 top sites (including yahoo, aol) that use drupal — impressive).

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