Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

Family Force 5

Friday December 8, 2006

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): – Read more…

Life in General

Cpanel Web Host and IMAP Email Filtering

Tuesday December 5, 2006

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 Read more…

Google, KDE, Life in General

Using GMail Hosted With Your Hosted-Elsewhere Website

Sunday December 3, 2006

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 Read more…

Google, Life in General

Moving Moving Parts

Friday December 1, 2006

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 Read more…

Apples, Google, Life in General

Apple’s Exceptional Attention to Detail

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 Read more…

Apples, Google, KDE, Life in General, Linux, Movies, Music, Video Games

Warning: a brain dump followeth: Blockbuster has sweetened their deal by allowing in-store trade-ins of online-rented movies. This, to me, blows NetFlix out of the water, since NetFlix does not yet have a brick-and-mortar presence anywhere (?). And, because we signed up with Blockbuster a while ago, we still get to keep our 2 free movie-or-game rental coupons per month too. Pretty cool! As a result, we’ve been watching tons of movies as of late, including the Indiana Jones trilogy (forgot how good they were!!). I’ve been a busy little beaver over the last few weeks, OSS-code-wise, anyway. Adriaan and I have whipped kpilot into shape proper-like, it seems. I’ve spent a decent chunk of time twice now and merged Read more…

Life in General, Open Source

Hello, I am an Open Source Developer

Wednesday November 1, 2006

Zack Rusin‘s blog post from a week ago really resonated deep within me on a couple of points. His post, titled “Disappointing”, was written in response to some negative feedback he got from some mis-guided souls who were commenting on one of his earlier posts about some very impressive Qt graphics results he’d shown. While blog-commenters behaving badly is not something new, certainly, nor is one (very) talented Open Source developer having to set said folks straight, that’s not what caught my eye. I was truly impressed with the benchmarking results that Zack reported with Qt, compared to some of the other toolkits, but that’s not what caught my eye either. What jumped out at me most was his definition Read more…

Apples, KDE, Linux

SUSE 10.1 On A Powerbook

Tuesday October 31, 2006

So, no, it’s not nearly as easy as it should be; it’s not nearly as easy as it is in kubuntu; and it has consumed the last few days of my life. But I’ve gotten things working for the most part and since I’ve been utterly unable to find any help on ye olde ‘net about the problems I faced, I’ll post some of my pain and learnings here… For starters, things sort of worked out of the box on my 15″ Powerbook with SUSE 10.1. You DO have to be VERY careful during the disk partitioning steps of the installation. For some unexplainably silly reason, by default, SUSE’s installation wanted to format my OS X partition. So watch out Read more…

Life in General

Blogging From My Treo

This would be a test, then, of wordpress, plogit, and manual dexterity of man hands and really tiny keyboard buttons!!

Life in General

Fix for Linux PPC, IBM JDK, and Moneydance Bug

Saturday September 30, 2006

Wow. You know… I’ve worked around this annoyance for FAR too long… I’d blogged previously (5 months + ago???) about a bug that affects Moneydance with IBM’s JRE/JDK (you know… the ONLY one that you can find for Linux PowerPC!!) with online transaction downloading. So I decided to poke at it a bit again today and what do you know? I found a solution! As it turns out, to solve the moneydance problem with SSLContext and IBM’s JRE, change $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/security/java.security like this: # diff -pruN java.security.original java.security — java.security.original 2006-09-30 16:09:38.000000000 -0400 +++ java.security 2006-09-30 16:11:48.000000000 -0400 @@ -48,11 +48,11 @@ # # List of providers and their preference orders (see above): # -security.provider.1=com.ibm.jsse2.IBMJSSEProvider2 -security.provider.2=com.ibm.crypto.provider.IBMJCE -security.provider.3=com.ibm.security.jgss.IBMJGSSProvider -security.provider.4=com.ibm.security.cert.IBMCertPath -security.provider.5=com.ibm.security.sasl.IBMSASL +#security.provider.1=com.ibm.jsse2.IBMJSSEProvider2 +security.provider.1=com.ibm.crypto.provider.IBMJCE Read more…