August 2003 Archives

I've got everything on my new server at serverbeach now, things seem to generally be working.

I'm sure we'll run into a few things that need fixing, but for the most part it's working. Yay!

IBM has release a beta of their optimized compilers for Mac OS X!

I've been a little quiet lately.

I just moved to a new place -- I'm renting a nice big house with my buddy Larry, and moving in and all of the little chores that come along with it have eaten all of my time.

On top of that, I've got less than a week to get everything from my old server to the new. It's currently served off of a SpeakEasy DSL connection in my old apartment. I love SpeakEasy -- I can't say enough good things about them, but unfortunately the new place is strategically located about 18,000 feet from the CO which means about all I can get is IDSL. Last thing I want is ISDN speeds after having 1.5/384.

SO, instead I'm getting a regular residential Time/Warner cable modem and colo'ing an entirely new box over at ServerBeach.

So far I'm very happy by ServerBeach's service, and in the long term I'm better off. (This way I've got guaranteed power and availability and all that stuff, and faster burst speeds for the occasional Slashdotting.) It's just a lot of work, and right when I should be unpacking. (heh)

Expect things to get a little choppy in the next couple of days. I've got most everything moved over but there's a point at which I need to turn off service on the old machine and turn it on on the new. There's bound to be a short period where DNS isn't resolving things right, no matter how short I make the time-to-live.

See you soon on the new server!

I got a great response from the call for help on getting KDE working with Qt/Mac. Thanks to everyone who mentioned it. And hello to folks linking from Linux.Ars. It's kind of funny that particular section is linking me... although I use Linux daily, my blog is mostly about Mac OS X. <grin>

I've had offers of help from Ian Reinhart Geiser, Holger Schroeder (of KDE/Win32), and many other folks. Thanks!

Right now it looks like most of the people interested in working on it are getting their dev environments all set up. I expect a decent amount of hacking to start happening this weekend. Jarvis Cochrane (who, in fact, offered to help before I asked!) is going to be merging everything we've got so far into one mega-patch that we can all start working off of.

Again, if you want to help out (or just watch), feel free to join the list.

TechTV is coming to our office to film a spot on our company. I'm told I'll be one of the interviewees... Wish me luck!

[Update]
OK, so apparently I was mistaken. They're gonna be interviewing management. :)

So I just upgraded my procmail rules to use a variation of this setup, and I must say, I'm impressed. It's very good at catching stuff, so far, and it's automated to a much stronger degree than what I previously had.

Basically, it does this:

1. Check against white/grey lists -- if it's OK, pass it through.
2. Run it through bogofilter and/or spamassassin -- if it's OK, pass it through. If it's not, add it to the bogofilter training as spam.
3. Run it through procmail filters to push mailing list messages to appropriate filtered folders.
4. Only if it doesn't match any of the previous, pass it through to TMDA. If it's OK, TMDA will deliver it, otherwise it will request a confirmation.

So far it seems to be working OK. I'm doing a little tweaking to avoid the confirmation as much as possible, but it seems to work great so far. I really dislike the idea of the confirmation stuff, but the way things are nowadays, I don't see another way to get the leftover SPAM that keeps getting through.

Training bogofilter is great, also, if there's false positives in my Junk folder, I move them over to my "whitelist" folder. I then have a cron job that will automatically run each message in the whitelist folder through the "ham" (non-spam) filter which trains bogofilter that it's OK.

[ Update ]
Even better, I made a "filtering" IMAP folder in my mail that contains "white", "white-domain", "grey", "grey-domain", "black", and "black-domain" mail folders. Then I made a script that goes through those folders and automatically adds any messages in those folders to the corresponding TMDA folder for future white/blacklisting, and addes the mails to the bogofilter "ham" or "spam" config. Sweet!

[ Update ]
I've written a more detailed description of what I've got, along with a tarball of my procmail configs and scripts, to the TriLUG mailing list. If you're interested in seeing how exactly I implemented it, look there.

Sam Magnuson (the Trolltech dude who did the initial Qt/Mac KDE port) is dead busy and hasn't had the time he'd like to work on it. He'll be available for questions a bit, but I'm taking another whack at the port myself. I'm incredibly busy for the next month or so, so I'm looking for people willing to help out. I've already had one offer from someone who's started in on it. The goal this time is to get something basic working, and to the point where the KDE folks will accept it (at least in a branch).

I'm thinking this is a good time to revive the KDE-Darwin mailing list. If you're interested, go there and say "hello" to the list. Don't be shy, there's probably only 10 people on it. <grin>

I've gotten a decent amount of kdelibs building using Sam's previous patches as a reference (they're too old to apply cleanly, KDE CVS waits for no man). If anyone else wants to help, I'll make sure my changes get put somewhere so people can give a hand.

Happy hacking!

I've made a Qt/Mac build of fung-calc. I'd like someone to try it out; it built (and runs) on my 10.2 machine, but crashes on my 10.3 machine (whether I use the 10.2-built version, or build it fresh on 10.3), so I'd like someone with 10.2 to confirm it works OK.

If you're willing to give it a shot, please download it here and comment if it works (or doesn't) for you.

I know this is a bit off-topic for the normal fare on my blog, but there's a great commentary on the SCO case and IBM's dealings at GrokLaw. I found it pretty enlightening...

So I've got the vacation pictures up now. This is the unabridged version, I hope to have a writeup later, but with moving it will probably be some time.

No pictures yet because I took a ton. It's gonna take some time to organize them and stuff. I've caught up on a bit of e-mail in off-moments, but don't expect much from me for a couple more days. Short version: Montreal and Quebec City were great, DefCon was cool, and Vegas is, well, Vegas. <grin>