moving parts of the kasper clan

SFAC WTF?

Originally uploaded by vanRijn.

How in the world can “pez man 81″ manage to be on Xbox live 3 times at once? Mind you, he is really good (and cheap as all get out), but that just seems odd to me. =:/

As written about previously, I’ve decided to let Google’s Apps For Your Domain handle all of the e-mail for my domain. What this means is that for all incoming and outgoing e-mail I’ll have them saved permanently (as permanently as 2 gigs of space allows at least) stored in GMail for my domain users and also stored on my web hosts’s IMAP server. Cool beans, yes. But what about the e-mail that I’ve been keeping on my IMAP server for the last 8+ years, eh? It sure would be nice to get all that e-mail into GMail as well so that I can take advantage of GMail’s searching.

Well, along comes some spectactular 5+year-old(?) technology by Mark Lyons called GMail Loader. It handles a variety of e-mail storage formats, like mbox, and maildir, among others. Since I have been using disconnected IMAP with kmail for quite a while, I had a nice local copy of all of my old e-mail from my IMAP server. All I had to do was put in my GAFYD MX record SMTP server into GMail Loader and point it to my dimap directories and watch it go.

A couple of notes, though… First, GMail Loader forces you to select a file in its “Find” dialog. So, for using a Maildir (like kmail stores your dimap mail in), you have to browse to a /cur/, select it, and then backspace to /. Secondly, make sure you leave the trailing “/” (slash) on the directory name. For example, let’s say you have a mailbox that you want to import into GMail from your kmail dimap cache. First, find which directory in your ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/dimap/ contains your account. Kmail happens to call my account “719735571″. My IMAP server puts everything underneath INBOX, so I have INBOX/attaboys, for example, in kmail. This translates into this directory: “~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/dimap/.719735571.directory/.INBOX.directory/attaboys”. So, in this example, point GMail Loader to ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/dimap/.719735571.directory/.INBOX.directory/attaboys/cur/SOMEFILE, then backspace over that until it reads “~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/dimap/.719735571.directory/.INBOX.directory/attaboys/” in GMail Loader’s Find text field (don’t forget the trailing slash!).

Another annoyance was that as I was importing things into GMail, half of it kept going into my Spam folder in GMail. I’m guessing it’s because the mail looks funky being of such an old date, etc. But I had to keep marking my mail that was imported as “Not Spam”. The next annoyance was that I had to keep Archiving everything that showed up in my Inbox from GMail Loader, but I guess that’s to be expected.

So anyway, I’m all done importing now. It actually does import the mail pretty quickly. Now I can use the GMail interface to my mail to search mails I’ve kept for the last 8+ years! =:)

Merry belated Christmas wishes all! =:) One of my presents this year was this amazingly sweet Logitech VX Revolution mousie. It is really cool and uber-geeky. The spin-wheel scrolling thing just gets me all excited. =:) I have yet to get all the buttons working in Linux/X, but Button8 and Button9 (the buttons near the thumb) are recognized out of the box. What I want to get working (without having to futz around with recompiling stuff) is the back/forward mouse motions (tilting the scroll-wheel left or right). A virtual beer, oh LazyWeb, to the lucky soul to point me in the right direction! =:)

As if I didn’t have enough time for all that I already have going on, I had to go and find myself a new addiction. And find it I did and quickly.

I think the twin causes for this new addiction are:

1. Searching for Bobby Fischer (a really great movie–how on earth did I manage to not see that one yet?!!!)
2. Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy” video (after I got done laughing my tuckus off, I realized that I actually do identify with about 90% of that video!!)

I’ve always loved Chess. My Dad and I used to play it as I was growing up and some of my fondest childhood memories are of my Dad and I playing Chess. I love teaching it to my kids and playing it with them. My son is actually quite good, too! There is simply nothing else like Chess. And as was said in Searching for Bobby Fischer, it’s not a thing, it’s not a game, it’s Chess. And I’ll add to that, it’s Chess: the sport of kings (you know… when they weren’t busy killing people and stuff) and really, really, really smart nerds like myself.

So this latest addition started out with me trying to find a good Chess program for Linux. I found glChess, which looks really pretty and all but is dog-slow on my G4 powerbook running Linux, unfortunately. I also remembered eboard from previous searches and fought like crazy to get it compiled and installed on my FC6 PPC machine (hint: you have to use g++34, not g++ version 4). I got eboard up and running and it actually does have some pretty eye-pleasing pieces/board graphics. And then I found this innocent little menu entry that said “Connect to FICS”. Little did I know that I was headed for yet another geekly addiction. 4 hours later, on Christmas Eve, no less, I find myself still awake at 2 a.m., my heart still racing and adrenaline still trying to find someplace to go from the several really intense matches I had tonight.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am a geek.

Free Internet Chess is SO cooool!!! And learning the archaic irc-ish commands is like discovering an ancient Mayan civilization that has been living underneath your carpet for the last 10 years. It’s geek crack-rock, I tell you! Ahh, but such a sweet geekly addiction and adrenaline rush it is. I’m hooked (not on phonics either).

Oh yeah.  Merry Christmas, all!!   =:)

I found Jerry’s SeinLanguage book in my bookshelf a while back and I’m reading through it, here and there.  This made me laugh tonight, so I thought I’d share…

I love to exercise, but I still have to laugh at it.  You go to the health club, you see all these people and they’re working out; they’re training, they’re getting in shape.  But nobody’s really getting in shape for anything.   In modern society, you really don’t have to be physically strong to do anything.  The only reason that you’re getting in shape is so you can get through the workout.  So we’re working out, so that we’ll be in shape, for when we have to do our exercises.  That’s comedy.

Family Force 5

Originally uploaded by vanRijn.

I cannot tell you how cool this CD is. You’ll just have to go check it out for yourself. I just thoroughly dig these guys. They’ve been criticized for not having an overtly Christian CD, but I’m not buying that just yet, I don’t think.

Their music is a thoroughly refreshing mix of punk, rock, techno, and eclectic funk. They’ve sweetened their appeal by throwing in big heaping helpings of self-deprecating humor and manage to poke fun at the last 20 years of musical genres. But all throughout, they are a really refreshing sound and a TON of fun to listen to and enjoy. My current favorites are (this is expanding daily):

- Love Addict (LOVE this one!)
- Lose Urself
- Cadillac Phunque
- Country Gentleman

If you’ve not heard these guys, you owe it to yourself to. Seriously, read some of the reviews here and then do your ears, brain, and smile a favor, buy the CD and crank the crunk!! =;)

I wish I would have found this very helpful post a long time ago, but such is life, I suppose. I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to do server-side filtering on my cpanel-based IMAP server for quite a while now, but hadn’t found anything official. I wrote some custom exim filters that my last web host was gracious enough to let me put in place, but that was a little hackish, since it required a good-natured web-hosting admin.

But following Pda0’s suggestions from his post seems to be working quite well thus far. I’ll quote him below…

I’ve been able to set up procmail in a per-user basis, not globally! The .procmailrc is global to a domain though.

Let me rewrite the steps:

1.- Get into Cpanel and make a forwarder to a user (lets say tom@domain.com), that forwards tom’s email to |/usr/bin/procmail

2. Repeat 1.- for each user you want to set up to use procmail

3.- Make a .procmailrc as in /home/domain.com/.procmailrc

4. procmailrc then will be called each time some user configured in 1.- gets mail, AFTER exim has done all its work.

Pretty slicque!! Works too!! =:)

UPDATE:

I did in fact get this working, though it was a little bit more complex than I thought it would be. First of all, the reason I have to use procmail in addition to the standard exim is that my webhost (hostgator) is using a really cool upgraded version of cpanel that finally does Maildir mailboxes (as opposed to the older and scarier mbox). So, if that was not the case, then you could use only cpanel’s built-in mail filtering dialog, and for the “destination” text field, just give an mbox name to put the mail in (with full path).

So, what I needed to do is for a single user on my domain, I need to be able to filter incoming mail into Maildir IMAP mailboxes. For instance, all KDE-related mail (mailing lists, etc.) should go in USER/.code.kde/, all pilot-link mailing list mail should go in USER/.code.pda/, etc. (it’s a courier IMAP server).
What I tried to do first for this was use cpanel’s built-in e-mail filtering (Mail Manager Main Menu | Email Filtering in cpanel) and assign mailboxes for some filters. This doesn’t work because cpanel/exim isn’t configured correctly to write filtered mail to Maildir destinations.

Next idea: use the email filtering dialog from cpanel to send all e-mail to USER off to procmail for processing and then use procmail filters to do the Maildir writing. Now, the way that cpanel’s email filters work is that they get written out to ~/.filter on your web host. Whenever you make a change to your filters through cpanel, that file is parsed and is used to generate /etc/vfilters/YOURDOMAIN, which is a standard exim format file. What this means is that even if cpanel’s built-in exim filters don’t work for you (cpanel only provides 6 filter expressions), you can use your own as long as it’s a valid exim filter expression. This is what I ended up having to do.

So, my first crack at this was to make a cpanel email filter for “To:” with my USER. The problem is that cpanel actually uses exim’s $h_to: filter, which ONLY looks at the “To:” header in the e-mail. This doesn’t work for mailing lists because the destination (the $h_to: or header To:) is kde@mail.kde.org (for example) and not my e-mail address. It turns out that the correct way to ask exim to tell you who it’s going to deliver the e-mail to is the $local_part: filter. But you can’t select that from cpanel’s filter list, now can you?

To get around this, simply download your ~/.filter file, edit it and re-upload it to your server. You will then have to make another change in cpanel’s email filtering dialog so that it writes your changes to /etc/vfilters/YOURDOMAIN where exim will be looking for filtering rules. The easiest thing to do is just add a new filter for Subject: “wibblewibblewibble” with action of “|/usr/bin/echo” or something silly. Add that (or any filter) and then remove it and what you’ll end up with is the filter that you manually added to ~/.filter written correctly to /etc/vfilters/YOURDOMAIN and exim should use it.

There’s a couple of other options I could have taken with this, certainly, such as asking hostgator to allow me to manage my /etc/vfilters/YOURDOMAIN (which I did on my old host), or setting up a forwarding rule instead of a mail filter rule, but this seems cleaner, etc.

Anyway, here is my ~/.filter file:

… and here is my ~/.procmail file:

Hope this helps the next poor soul who tries to do server-side IMAP filtering on a cpanel-based web host. =:)

I fought this stupid thing for a good few days with no luck (and loss of sleep, etc.) and I finally found the solution.

I’m using Google’s Apps For Your Domains as the e-mail server for my domain. First, there’s the 2 gigs of storage per user. Also, it’s a nice solution for long-term backup and storage. And I’m most interested in using GMail’s spam filters and spam training, since that’s one thing that is VERY non-simple (non-possible, honestly) with every web hosting solution I’ve seen yet.

Unfortunately, GMail doesn’t allow an IMAP interface (yet, hopefully??  come ON gmail guys!!!). I check my e-mail from multiple machines and POP3 is very unsuited for this purpose (even with the recent:username@ hack which is admittedly interesting). And I just cannot bring myself to using only GMail’s web interface. Call me old-fashioned or whatever, but I just can’t do it. I like being able to use KDE’s excellent PIM applications to manage my mail, contacts, and calendars–and most importantly, sync it all up with my PDA with kpilot. So what I wanted to do was bring the e-mail that I have coming into my GAFYD GMail account into my web host’s IMAP server. Such a simple thing to do, I thought.

I was horribly wrong.

I’ve tried a couple of routes to do this. My first thought was that I could use GMail’s auto-forwarding to push incoming e-mail onto the IMAP server. So I set up a sub-domain that I’d ask my web host to handle mail for and forward all e-mail from GMail to it. The problem was that for some reason I was getting errors like this:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

[email address]

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 550-Verification failed for < [email address]>
550-No Such User Here
550 Sender verify failed

But I couldn’t tell where things were failing. So I started looking at other options.

I tried running fetchmail on my web host and popping mail from gmail into my IMAP server. But unfortunately, my web host doesn’t allow outbound POP+SSL, so that doesn’t work. It also rules out things like using Horde+IMP to fetch mail too. I then tried running fetchmail on my home machine, popping mail from GMail and then forwarding e-mail to my web host’s IMAP server, but my web host doesn’t allow forwarding from my IP address (it knows it’s from a home cable provider). So I went back to looking at the subdomain forwarding problems.

Turns out (thankfully I found this post from a guy with the exact same problem) that the problem was that my web host was trying to verify the username that was being forwarded. Now, the funny thing is that GMail doesn’t just forward for user@domain. I tacks gunk on in the middle, so that what it turns out to be is user+caf_user=subdomain@domain. So my web host tries to verify that e-mail address, which obviously doesn’t exist in the user accounts that it knows about. The problem was that my web host used to be handling my e-mail for my domain, so it was looking internally to verify that e-mail address. The solution, as noted in that post, was to tell my web host that it was not handling e-mail for my domain by changing its MX records to GMail’s MX handlers.

Simple enough solution.  And things seem to be working swimmingly since I fixed that.  HTH somebody else out there.  =:)

As posted previously, it’s been a good 2 years with vortexhost.com, but I’m feeling the need to get more and possibly spend less.  Now, the thing that is not negotiable with all of this is my e-mail.  I can stand downtime on my website every once in a GREAT while, but if I am ever inconvenienced by e-mail problems, I’ll be looking for a new solution within the next hour.

So, what I think I’m going to try is using Google’s Apps For Your Domains and use them as my MX handler.  For web space (not as mission-critical as e-mail), I think I’m going to find a cheap solution with a decent amount of space.  1and1 seems to fit the bill (I know it doesn’t have the greatest reviews, but I’m not going to be allowing them to manage my DNS or registrar info and GAFYD should take care of the e-mail reliability thing) with a $2.99/month plan with 5G of hard drive space, iirc.

The missing piece, though, is how to clean up and deal with mail coming in from GMail, since they don’t support IMAP.  I really do not want to have to resign myself to having to use their web interface to keep my e-mail account in order.  In other words, if I have to log into the web interface every couple of weeks to delete unwanted e-mails, that’s going to get really old really quick.  The other option would be to POP everything off into an IMAP server manually and have GMail auto-archive everything that gets POP’d.  I’m just thinking that 2G of e-mail space is going to get chewed up REALLY quickly if I don’t keep cleaning it up (i.e. all the various mailing lists I’m on, etc., etc.).

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions from those who have gone before me?

My most favoritest headphones just died on me recently.  They were cheapo Jensen behind-the-head headphones, but they had amazingly good sound and fit me perfectly (like comfortable, broken-in shoes).  I used them with my iPod, and everything else.  *sniffle*  But alas, one side of the stereo headphone has stopped working entirely (which sort of defeats the purpose of “stereo”, doesn’t it?) and the faithful Jensen headphones now reside in a landfill in MA somewhere.  So I was getting all ready to go on a conquest for new headphones.  Then I realized that my iPod nano came with Apple-sanctioned mini-headphones that I’d never even opened.  I tried them out today and was once again impressed with Apple’s attention to detail and quality.  The headphones actually do have good sound, and has really cool little details that make it stand out.  Awesome.