The Mac story begins
Posted on April 26, 2006
Filed Under Mac, Tech | Leave a Comment
It’s kind of official now: My MacBook Pro is on its way. I’ve ordered it, paid for it, so all I have to do now is wait for it to arrive.
Update on saturday the 29th: it’s being sent out. Expected arrival: this week.
Links for monday the 24th
Posted on April 24, 2006
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Portable OpenOffice.org - too bad it’s Windows-only.
My Journey to Macintosh - A Mac Newbie Blog, just what I need! - subscribed
MacBook Large
Posted on April 24, 2006
Filed Under Mac, Tech | 3 Comments
While I was busy deciding about my MacBook Pro purchase, Apple released a 17″ Macbook Pro today. I’m not getting one that large, it won’t fit in my backpack. But it’s still cool.
About my decision: I am getting the 15″ version. I do care about the possibility of suffering from a whining noise, but I’ll just go through several tech support phone calls if any of that happens.
I wish I could say here that I ordered the thing already, but I don’t. Well, I do, but not entirely. My payment bounced because I hit a limit on my credit card. Need to fix that first, so the order will complete probably somewhere this week. I hope.
Becoming a Mac user means that I will start reading more Mac related web sites and blogs, and subscribing to some feeds. Milo already suggested a nice one: Macupdate.com. What else do I really need to start visiting regularly?
Speaking of OPML and outlines…
Posted on April 24, 2006
Filed Under Blogging, Tech | 2 Comments
Does anyone know what happened to activeRenderer? Using Radio, I really liked what it could do. Would it work with OPML Editor?
MacBook Pro: do or don’t?
Posted on April 23, 2006
Filed Under Mac, Tech | 2 Comments
So here’s the issue: I have a laptop, and it’s getting old. Very old. Falling apart-old. For instance, every now and then, the thing won’t boot normally, because of some harddisk problem. This usually means I have to do some fsck-repairs, reboot and hope for the best. Also, I have less time when running on just the battery than when it was new.
Of course, if it’s just this, and I think it is, it can be fixed by just getting a new battery and a new harddisk. But the laptop is over two years old, and who knows what the next failure will be. Also I have never liked the fact that it weighs about 4 kilo’s, which is kind of heavy to be just carrying around all the time. So I decided I needed a new laptop. A fresh one, with new technology, a slick design, good features.. And I chose: a MacBook Pro.
There’s just one problem. I’ve been reading several blogs, forums and news sites, and a lot of them report about a whining noise when the MacBook is on, making work on the laptop a lot less comfortabe. Also, it tends to get too hot to put it on your lap.
These complaints, which seem to be very serious, make me doubt whether I want to buy a MacBook or not. A lot of people have the problems, so chances are I will too. And Apple doesn’t seem to care about it either, because I can’t find a public statement about it anywhere. I don’t know if they’re busy fixing it, or recognize the problem at all. So, when I buy one, will I be able to use the thing comfortably, of do I have to return it to Apple to get a new one, over and over again, until it’s finally fixed?
Still doubting..
Links for wednesday the 19th
Posted on April 19, 2006
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Community Creators, Secure your code! - About Cross Site Scripting, a subject that’s been ignored to much by web developers.
Black Belt Productivity - Encouraging higher levels of productivity through the use of Getting Things Done.
The next Ubuntu (after Dapper Drake) will be called Edgy Eft.
There will be a BloggerCon IV.
Technorati’s index is outdated
Posted on April 19, 2006
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It seems Technorati isn’t regularly refreshing its index. It noticed it today when I did a search for ‘blog.breuls.org’. My blog doesn’t get linked to much, so old links stay in the results for quite a while.
That’s not the problem, though. I thought I saw some new links, so I checked them out. Clicked on the link, and started looking for my name, or a link, or, well, whatever that’s got my URL behind it. Didn’t find a thing. I checked some more results, visited some of the sites I already knew had a link to my blog, and again didn’t find any links.
It’s not uncommon for links on a blog to disappear from the front page, or to be removed from a favorites list or a blogroll. It’s also not uncommon for sites to disappear altogether, but it would be nice if Technorati noticed that and adjusted the index. At this moment, they don’t, so I can’t trust the results they provide.
Links for monday the 17th
Posted on April 17, 2006
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AJAX Resources for beginners - for when I’m tired of using ready-to-use libraries and want to build it myself.
The Hows and Whys of Degradable Ajax - because everything with Ajax should still work without Ajax.
Top Ten Best Designed Weblogs - great for inspiration
Content:encoded in RSS feeds
Posted on April 17, 2006
Filed Under Tech, Web development | Leave a Comment
When testing my self-built aggregator (more on my Dutch blog, I will write about it in English when the time is right), I noticed that the feed of this blog doesn’t provide full text. I like to have full text, so I went to the WordPress Options to enable it. To my surprise, the radio button next to ‘Full text’ already was checked. So I opened my feed to look at the source.
Turns out, WordPress doesn’t use the description element to put the full text in. Sure, there is a description, but it contains no more than a summary. The full text is in content:encoded, an element similar to description. Why is that? I’ve seen several blogs use that specific element, and never have I seen just one advantage of using that element from a separate namespace instead of the standard RSS-provided description. Someone once told me it can be used to put non-encoded HTML in, enclosed in CDATA tags, but why not just encode it and put it in the description? Except for the encoding, there’s no difference. And you can put the CDATA in the description as well.
Now I have to make a decision for my aggregator: when there’s a content:encoded element, as well as a description, which one do I use? The fact that I have to make that choice is wrong. It should be clear what to use, without having to compare elements.
Ubuntu package updates
Posted on April 16, 2006
Filed Under Linux, Tech | Leave a Comment
I’m looking for a page on the Ubuntu website that tells me which software packages have recently updated. Or something like that. I can’t seem to find such a page. Surely there must be something like that, but where is it?
Passing the HELO check with Postfix
Posted on April 14, 2006
Filed Under Linux, Tech | 1 Comment
I run several webservers in a pool. Guided by a loadbalancer, they serve over 2 million pages a day, so they’re quite busy altogether. One of the applications running as webserver-service sends mail to users. That’s fine, because with PHP/Apache and Linux, that’s easy to do.
However, my server logs keep on showing errors concerning these sent e-mails. They get bounced back by mail transfer agents who are very strict in their spam control. The messages all point to this page., saying my server did not pass the HELO check.
With the HELO check, an SMTP server can check whether the sending server is properly configured, and thus reliable. It does so by reading the HELO name the server sends, and checking if it’s a valid hostname or IP.
While the explanation is quite clear, it didn’t help me much. It gives some suggestions on how to fix my problem, but the configuration options for Postfix are missing. That’s why I’m posting them here, for Google to find.
In your main.cf file, find the myhostname setting. By default, it will have something like localhost.localdomain as its value. (That’s what caused my servers to not pass these helo checks, because localhost.localdomain is not a valid hostname.) Change the value into something that can be resolved to the server itself, like the actual hostname of the server. In my case, one of the servers has aphrodite.fok.nl as its hostname, so I changed the setting into:
myhostname = aphrodite.fok.nl
Save the file, give a postfix reload command, and you’re good to go.
