B10[mg]

I once hacked up a small Perl/Tk script called T[kV] Gids. It used to fetch information from http://www.tvgids.nl/ and print it in a "nice" format.

Unfortunately, the source site thought it necessary to change the layout, and I'm too lazy to patch it. In other words: the project died. (Actually, the only user besides me had to email me, pointing out it didn't work any more.)

And as usual, when something has been broken, you need it. So my quest for the next tv guide software started and not much later it ended at FreeGuide TV Guide. This software uses XMLTV, which in turn also uses http://www.tvgids.nl/ (and/or other sources), but luckily there are more motivated scripters at work there and a patch is already available.

I must say I like the FreeGuide TV Guide already. It has a good interface and the only bad thing I can think of, is that it's a Java app *shrug*. Still, well done though. I like it!

Poor MS Windows users suffer from a lot of virusses nowadays. But the non-MS Windows users only suffer from a lot of useless mails containing virusses.

NewsForge ran an article on trying to run these virusses on a Linux machine using Wine. The author tried 5 known virusses (Klez, MyDoom, Sobig, SCO Worm, and SomeFool) and looked at how GNU/Linux friendly they were.

Funny remarks, such as the following, make this an interesting read:

"While I have friends that collect viruses, I didn't need to bother them. I found plenty by looking through my staggering collection of bogofilter sorted mail."

"[...] it's clear that the Wine developers have a long way to go before Wine is truly Windows compatible."

Every morning, I find myself making breakfast as fast as possible, so I can check on the traffic jam situation, weather forecast and emails. Why not let my computer talk to me, while I prepare breakfast?

People who use Linux and are interested in text-to-speech all know festival. It's fun for a while, yet not too useful in my humble opinion, because I (and others) have problems understanding the text.

So I went to look for other software and found Cepstral.

The voices are audible, the "effects" are funny and it's easy to teach your voice how to pronounce words (names can be a problem). The only drawback: it's not for free (except for the demos).

My first bet was to write a script around the demos, thinking it'd be very expensive. But when I found out you can get a license for a mere 30 USD, I dropped my script and went for it.

I registered the voice "Callie" and am impressed by her. The quality is so much better than festival. Woohoo, awesome!

So, for the people who have nothing else to do, feel free to listen to Callie reading this entry :-)

festival, text to speech, cepstral

I've switched from PINE to mutt a couple of months ago and got used to it well except for the strip-from-sigdashes-on-reply. I really miss that in mutt, so I went to search for some solution again, when I stumbled on "Using email efficiently". This website could (should?) have been written by me (except for the but HTML is fine part)

After applauding the author, I noted his strip signature solution in Vim:

  map _qs G?^><CR>?^> -- $<CR>d} 

Works like a charm. But there's more. The author also wrote a nice Vim plugin (mainly for MUAs), called uri-ref. This oh-so-handy plugin helps you manage your references in emails. Nice!

At work, spam is a real problem (at home too, by the way). So I've installed some tight regulations, using multiple RBLs and other nice spam filtering goodies. The problem with this is, of course, the false positives these spam filters get; mail that we'd really like to see.

Postfix offers you to keep a whitelist through the check_sender_access option, but I'm really too lazy to type in all addresses I use, and to keep doing that in the future. So I wrote a little bash hack that will scan the maillog every 10 minutes (thanks, cron!) and grabs the none-local, delivered mail addresses. These addresses get dumped (with time stamp for reference) in a whitelist file, and get postmapped

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

DATE_INS=0
DATE=`date`

for LINE in `sed -ne 's/^.*to=<\([^>]*\)>,
relay=[^(local)].*status=sent.*$/\1/p' /var/log/maillog | sort -u`
do
   if grep -q $LINE /etc/postfix/whitelist
   then
      continue
   fi

   if grep -q $LINE /etc/postfix/autowhitelist
   then
      continue
   fi

   if [ $DATE_INS -lt 1 ]
   then
      echo "### $DATE" >> /etc/postfix/autowhitelist
      DATE_INS=1
   fi

   printf "%-77s OK\n" $LINE >> /etc/postfix/autowhitelist
done
/usr/local/sbin/postmap /etc/postfix/autowhitelist

This post is listed in the Linux category. I use FreeBSD on my servers, but I have no doubt this will work on Linux too ;)

At work, I use Mozilla Thunderbird as MUA. I'd rather use mutt but it's not going to work out. So yeah, Thunderbird isn't that bad except for the lack of Vim. But not anymore!

Thanks to the External Editor Extension I can now use my beloved Vim to write messages. How come I haven't found this extension before? According to the changelog, it started at 19 Nov 2004 (with version 0.1.2?).

Finally work is going to be bearable again ;)