Take the following ingredients:
Let it simmer for about ten years, and you’ve got the future of security.
I updated my python installation using MacPorts today, and it all seemed to go well. However, running python gave the following error:
Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec_prefix> Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>]
Searching on the web did not really give an answer, but luckily the MacPort Trac could help me, #9831 was opened over a year ago, but still not solved.
The solution is simple, but time consuming. You’ll have to rebuild your python installation (yes, again…):
mv ~/.pydistutils.cfg ~/.pydistutils.cfg.bak port -f install python24
You may have to do a port -f uninstall python24 along the way, but it should speak for itself.
Just last week I was chatting with a friend, and I sent a photo to him using his hotmail address (yes, MSN/Adium filetransfer is horrible). After a couple of minutes he got back to me saying that he still had not received anything. This seemed strange: usually everything that I send using my own mail server arrives instantly. I use it everyday and never had problems with delivery. I blamed it on Hotmail servers being probably very busy filtering and/or delivering all the junk email that they regularly get.
Then a couple of days later the same thing happened with someone else: mail did not get delivered to his Hotmail address. He also had a GMail address, which delivered instantly. So I started investigating what could possibly go wrong, since I did not get any failure emails back. The postfix’ log proved my suspicion, nothing went wrong on this side:
postfix/smtp[36741]: C9D372E03B: to=<***@hotmail.com>, relay=mx3.hotmail.com[65.54.245.72]:25, delay=25, delays=3/0.03/0.57/21, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 <466406F3.6030701@ je-ju.net> Queued mail for delivery)
Then I checked sending to a test account of my own. The message got sent correctly, but nothing apppeared in the inbox, nor in the junkbox. Even adding the domain to the trusted senders did not help one bit.
So I turned to the Hotmail FAQ pages. They have some nice pages specificaly aimed at postmasters. The tips there include checking your own mail server, and implementing SPF/SenderID (with lots of disclaimers that SPF/SenderID itself will not guarantee delivery). There is also a form where you can contact their support.
A word of warning about their support: if you have read the FAQ (like you should) you can just as well ignore their first reply and restate your question again. The first reply you get will be a pure copy & paste of most of the FAQ. The second reply suggested that I implement SPF (with the disclaimer that SPF/SenderID will not guarantee delivery), while I had carefully explained that my DNS provider does not allow that. A more helpful suggestion was to send represenative messages to randomtestacct@hotmail.com, which would help training their spamfilters.
Note that my mailserver is for private use only. My girlfriend and I are the only people who use it, and we rarely send messages to Hotmail accounts, and when we do, this will purely be personal communication. We have never used the mailserver to do any kind of commercial messaging. So there was no reason for me to suspect blocking, nor has there been any kind of warning from Hotmail.
When I checked back a day later, my test messages had mysteriously appeared in my Hotmail inbox, even those sent before I sent a message to that test account.
So everyone with a Hotmail address is hereby warned: emails to you can and will be filtered at will by Hotmail, without anyone knowing about this. You should be very careful about drawing conclusions when you are not receiving emails you are expecting…
Since about two months I have gone back to learning more about chess. I had taken some courses when I was younger, but never really played much. A friend of mine pointed me at chess.ac, a website where you can play chess move by move. Move-by-move means that there is a time limit for the game, but this is in the order of days, so you can really take the time to think about what your next move will be. And this is actually pretty good from a training perspective.
Another neat thing is that you can export the game using the PGN notation, which you can then import into the Fritz engine. Then it can analyse your play and point you at obvious flaws and other alternative moves which you might not have thought about.
Chess.ac also has teams, which can challenge each other. I have a team as well, with a couple of members, but we need more to be able to play team challenges.
All in all, it’s a pretty nice environment to play and learn. If you give it a shot, let me know, and we can play a game or two, or you can come join my team! Send a message to gobo on the chess.ac website.
Yes, the blog was kinda dead for a while…sorry about that. I have moved the server to a new machine, did a complete reinstall, and this also meant I had to put everything back for Wordpress.
I’m not 100% satisfied with Wordpress, I’m on the lookout for alternatives. My main problem was that it took a big chunk of cpu and memory, which my last machine did not have much of. The newer one is much faster and has more memory, so it is a little less pressing.
But now the blog is back up and expect some more stories soon!