Tag Archives: tech

Fix, or replace?

I’m getting increasingly frustrated with my laptop, and I’m once again faced with the dilemma of whether to fix what I have, or replace it. I’m right on the cusp of buying a PowerBook and being done with it, but I’m being held back by the simple matter of cost. For about $90 I can get a replacement keyboard for this laptop, and solve the main thing that’s irritating me about it. And for another $35, I can replace the power supply. So, for $125, I can solve about 90% of what bugs me about this laptop. And the alternative is spending $1600 on a new laptop, which will, theoretically, make everything better and Just Work.

I’ve been making a concerted effort this year to avoid buying technology that I can live without, or replacing gizmos that I can persuade to limp along for a few more months or years. I think that this clearly fits into the latter, and, really, I just want to replace it because it seems, somehow, easier than fixing it.

*sigh*. I guess I’ll order the replacement parts.

Signatures in Thunderbird?

For years, I have built a file of signatures, so that every email message I send has a different signature on the bottom of it. I use simple tools – just a plain text file, processed using the ‘fortune’ utility. In my mail client, I just configure my signature to be “|/usr/games/fortune signatures” and the Right Thing Happens. When I add something to the signatures file, I run ‘/usr/sbin/strfile signatures’ which generates signatures.dat in a format that ‘fortune’ understands.

It appears that I can’t do this in Thunderbird.

And all my online searching leads me to something called TagZilla, which, as far as I understand it, completely fails to do anything remotely like what I want.

With any luck, one of you, my loyal readers, will know the answer to this. Google appears not to know.

(Oh, by the way, what I ended up doing on one machine was to run a cronjob every 5 minutes which does “/usr/games/fortune signatures > /home/rbowen/.sig”. That’s not really what I want, but it’s working for now. What I’d like is the ability to have it inserted automatically, and then be able to reload if a signature is generated which is not appropriate to the message that I’m sending.

Secondary MX

A week or so ago I observed that the sole purpose of my secondary MXes seemed to be to send me spam a second time after I had rejected it the first time. So I removed all secondary MXes from my DNS zone. This resulted immediately in a lower load on my mail server, and no obvious ill effects.

Of course, the purpose of a secondary MX is to take over if and when my mail server goes down. But since most mail server will keep trying for several days anyway, it seems pretty unlikely that this is going to ever be a concern. So I’ll leave them off for now, and put them back on when I get ready to move, in case there’s an extended outage.

Meanwhile, my hard drive is spinning a lot less, and is thus much quieter.

Thunderbird and Evolution

I switched over to Thunderbird instead of Evolution, and that made a huge difference in performance. It’s still slower than accessing local pop boxes, most of the time, but I can certainly see that there are advantages. So I’ll give this a few more weeks to see if it grows on me.

Thanks for the tips, folks.

POP vs IMAP

After being told for several years now that imap is vastly superior to pop3 in all ways, today, knowing I’d probably regret it, I migrated my mail to an imap server.

It’s vastly slower, being dependent on the network for every message access. Opening my mail client takes forever and a weekend, since it has to check a bzillion folders on the server and compare them to whatever local indexes I have.

It’s far less reliable, since, when the network is unavailable, so is my email.

It is a *huge* load on the server, which was somewhat unexpected.

So, perhaps someone could tell me *any* reason why this is better?

Presumably the goal was to be able to access the same boxes with different mail clients from different places, but if this is what I have to put up with to get that tiny feature, I’m just not seeing it.

Is imap actually better for anyone? Why? What’s the advantage?

Sheesh. This is nightmarish.

Vegas here I come

I think I’m finally ready to go. I didn’t go to work, so that I could actually pack before leaving. That seems to be a good thing to do.

Registration for ApacheCon is at about 330, and there’s always a few that register onsite, so it’s going to be a good crowd. You should come.

This morning I tried Skype which is free VOIP. I talked with Eddie, and there was a little static, but mostly it was very clear. Might be good for talking to certain people in Haiti and Paraguay, although it seemed to be using a lot of bandwidth, so I’m not sure how it will work over dialup.

I’m a little perplexed as to their business model, which concerns me a little bit. The software is very slick, but if they can’t make any money at it, I’m not sure how they’ll stay above water, and then the service would go away. OTOH, something like this, I might be willing to pay for, so perhaps other people would too.

The connections are secure (encrypted) and the audio quality is good. And, more importantly, it Just Works. I didn’t have to monkey with anything, tinker with settings, or whatever. It Just Worked. Well, apart from plugging the speaker into the microphone jack and vice versa. But that’s a little hard to blame on the software.

So, go get Skype, and give me a call. I’m ‘rbowen2000’.

Electric Monks and RSS bots

I restarted generating usage statistics for my various websites. Mostly because I wanted some fresh examples for my talks next week. What amuses me a great deal about this particular website is that most of my traffic is from bots. The most frequent visitor to my website is Googlebot, followed by an assortment of other user agents, at least half of which are readily recognizable as automated processes of one kind or another. Many of them are RSS bots, reading my newsfeeds, and that’s very cool.

I was reminded of Dirk Gently (by Douglas Adams) and the Electric Monk:

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

I think Mr. Adams would appreciate the fact that it’s now mostly computer programs which are looking at the content on the web for us.

Building webalizer with –enable-dns

After searching at great length, and following many blind alleys, I found an imprecise reference to the problem that I was having. So, to save you that time, here’s the deal.

If you want to build webalizer with DNS lookup abilities, ie, using the –enable-dns flag to ./configure, you need to edit two files.

In webalizer.c you need to change

#include <db.h>

to

#include <db1/db.h>

In dns_resolv.c you need to make exactly the same change.

That is all.

Overheating

Turns out that the CPU was just overheating. Following a suggestion a mailing list, I tried to build the kernel while my laptop was sitting on a bag of ice, and this worked without a mid-stream shutdown. However, make modules failed with a compile error. Bah. But it’s progress, I suppose. Maybe before ApacheCon I’ll have APM (or APCI) working correctly.