B10[mg]

The all feared and loathed procmail is finally history on my system. As usual, I check things out way too late, but now felt the urge to really take a look at Mail::Audit.

I've seen that module run on Perlmonk and was surprised by the ease of use. Within a few minutes, I converted my obscure procmail recipes and added some stuff I always wanted.

My basic backup and filtering still applies, but now I've added the nice feature of informing users (once, thanks to Mail::Audit::KillDups) that I will not reply their mails for they use Google servers. It's really quite lame and easy to implement:

foreach my $h ($mail->received) {
   $google++ if($h =~ /google\.com/);
}
#...
$mail->reply(body=>$msg) 
   if not $mail->killdups($mail->from);

Now we can even report the number of google servers their mail passed ;-)

Also I now started using the Little Brother's Database for address book populating method. All incoming mails will be scanned and email addresses will be added to my addressbook. Exactly what I need (thanks Mark!).

And of course I can now easily strip attachments and dump them on my filesystem somewhere for later reference.

How I love the power of Perl (and the community)!

Mail::Audit, procmail, lbdb

The all feared and loathed procmail is finally history on my system. As usual, I check things out way too late, but now felt the urge to really take a look at Mail::Audit.

I've seen that module run on Perlmonk and was surprised by the ease of use. Within a few minutes, I converted my obscure procmail recipes and added some stuff I always wanted.

My basic backup and filtering still applies, but now I've added the nice feature of informing users (once, thanks to Mail::Audit::KillDups) that I will not reply their mails for they use Google servers. It's really quite lame and easy to implement:

foreach my $h ($mail->received) {
   $google++ if($h =~ /google\.com/);
}
#...
$mail->reply(body=>$msg) 
   if not $mail->killdups($mail->from);

Now we can even report the number of google servers their mail passed ;-)

Also I now started using the Little Brother's Database for address book populating method. All incoming mails will be scanned and email addresses will be added to my addressbook. Exactly what I need (thanks Mark!).

And of course I can now easily strip attachments and dump them on my filesystem somewhere for later reference.

How I love the power of Perl (and the community)!

Mail::Audit, procmail, lbdb

The all feared and loathed procmail is finally history on my system. As usual, I check things out way too late, but now felt the urge to really take a look at Mail::Audit.

I've seen that module run on Perlmonk and was surprised by the ease of use. Within a few minutes, I converted my obscure procmail recipes and added some stuff I always wanted.

My basic backup and filtering still applies, but now I've added the nice feature of informing users (once, thanks to Mail::Audit::KillDups) that I will not reply their mails for they use Google servers. It's really quite lame and easy to implement:

foreach my $h ($mail->received) {
   $google++ if($h =~ /google\.com/);
}
#...
$mail->reply(body=>$msg) 
   if not $mail->killdups($mail->from);

Now we can even report the number of google servers their mail passed ;-)

Also I now started using the Little Brother's Database for address book populating method. All incoming mails will be scanned and email addresses will be added to my addressbook. Exactly what I need (thanks Mark!).

And of course I can now easily strip attachments and dump them on my filesystem somewhere for later reference.

How I love the power of Perl (and the community)!

Mail::Audit, procmail, lbdb

People who know me, know that I have praised Yahoo! in the past, especially after the rise of the evil digital empire.

Love it or hate it, Yahoo! released their User Interface Library (yui) some time ago and I finally looked at it.

People who mess with prototype, script.aculo.us, and other slick JavaScript libraries really should have a look at this yui. The documentation could be a little better, yet they provide basic examples for most thingies, and there's a terrific blog (by Jack Slocum). This blog shows you more examples and offers extensions to the library.

The Yahoo! User Interface Library is released as open source under a BSD license (sweet) and free for all to use (sweet too).

Expect some of this eye-candy in my upcoming scripts/websites!

javascript, Yahoo, yui, prototype, script.aculo.us

I probably blogged about this before, and people around me have heard my rants on this many times before, yet I feel the urge to blog on this now: ignorant l-users.

For some reason, a lot of people think error messages exist only for one reason, to annoy them. Popups, other error messages, not relevant, just call B10m, he knows/should know everything.

A lot of times, I receive e-mails telling me that the email is not working. After many times, I refrain from replying "it seems to work rather well, I got your message". Those senders usually mean that some email got bounced. So of course I ask them why and they usually respond with something like: "That's what I would like to know".

So I start explaining that if they received a message claiming the delivery failed, it most likely also tells them the reason for this. Either some zealous spam filter, blacklist, or the recipient's mailbox is full (yes, that still exists too). Anyways, in 99% of the cases, it will tell you why the delivery failed and if you're lucky it even provides you with a link that explains it in more detail.

But of course they deleted that bounce report and I have to start guessing what went wrong. The tea prices on the Chinese export market, alignment of certain planets, any BOFH excuse ... it really can be anything.

Or, like I noticed today, someone claimed to get an Internal Server Error and was friendly enough to pass it on to a coworker. He forwarded it to me with the question: "What is he doing wrong?".

I have to admit, the 500 Internal Server Error isn't too descriptive to the end user, yet the least you could do is tell me when this happened, and what caused this behavior. Makes debugging and going through logfiles a lot easier. But of course, I should have known exactly what the guy did wrong...

Or what about a broken laptop? I received a phone call from someone, who told me the laptop was hanging. Rebooting didn't help, it kept on hanging. During the booting, some text was displayed, but it would hang again after that. "What the text said? Oh I don't know!"

"B10m! This stupid program isn't working! What should I do now?" For some reason, some people think that I am watching their screens constantly, which is -of course- not true. I watch it sometimes, but not constantly ;-) So, I walk over there to check out what's going on. "Please replicate that error, so I can see what's going on". And before you know it, I see an error popup, but within 10 microseconds it was gone again. "Let's try again, and try to click that OK button with a little delay, so maybe I can read parts of it this time".

Computer users please remember a few things before you call your local victimcomputer guy:

• We are not watching your screen so we have no clue what you're doing
• We usually do not know what you want a program to do
• We do not like spending evenings, even weekends on your problem
• We don't ask you to paint our house for free either
• We do have other (useless) things to do besides fixing your stuff
• We do like you to search online for a solution
• We do like to hear what the error message said, even though we know you couldn't care less

l-users, error messages

The title of this entry might seem a little blunt, yet it is how I feel at the moment. I always loved HTML and often even spent a lot of time to check out W3C to keep up to date.

The reason I dislike it is fairly simple: too much typing.

I know, I can use products such as Dreamweaver, or FrontPage, or way too many other WYSIWYG editors to avoid typing, yet I never really gotten to like them either (and yes, I do realize they don't produce the crap output that they used to do anymore). And, it doesn't solve the real problem here, that it's fairly unreadable.

Let's look at an example. For instance, when I want to emphasize something, I would use <em>something</em>. It takes me nine characters to make your browser understand that I want to put emphasis on one word.

Most browser will use italics for that emphasis. Now if I'd use POD, I'd type I<something>, a lot shorter, with the same result.

Because I'm obviously not the only one who is lazy enough to dislike all the typing/reading, people started coming up with other methods to generate ugly HTML out of more readable, workable, editable markup languages.

Currently, Textile seems to be my favorite, and I'm happy to type my blog entry in that right now. But a very reasonable other markup language is Markdown.

In Textile, I'd type _something_ to put emphasis on something, and Markdown would accept *something* and also the Textile approach. That is a hell of a lot easier to type and a hell of a lot easier to read!

Now why do we really want to use (X)HTML? Probably because changing the HTML standard would involve a lot of problems and frankly, I'm not perfectly happy with either Textile, Markdown, POD or any other markup language for that matter ;-)

Oh well, by now you should understand that I just had to write (and format) a document in HTML, which I thought would be small enough to hack directly in HTML, but turned out too big that I wish I started in Textile...

html, textile, markdown

The title of this entry might seem a little blunt, yet it is how I feel at the moment. I always loved HTML and often even spent a lot of time to check out W3C to keep up to date.

The reason I dislike it is fairly simple: too much typing.

I know, I can use products such as Dreamweaver, or FrontPage, or way too many other WYSIWYG editors to avoid typing, yet I never really gotten to like them either (and yes, I do realize they don't produce the crap output that they used to do anymore). And, it doesn't solve the real problem here, that it's fairly unreadable.

Let's look at an example. For instance, when I want to emphasize something, I would use <em>something</em>. It takes me nine characters to make your browser understand that I want to put emphasis on one word.

Most browser will use italics for that emphasis. Now if I'd use POD, I'd type I<something>, a lot shorter, with the same result.

Because I'm obviously not the only one who is lazy enough to dislike all the typing/reading, people started coming up with other methods to generate ugly HTML out of more readable, workable, editable markup languages.

Currently, Textile seems to be my favorite, and I'm happy to type my blog entry in that right now. But a very reasonable other markup language is Markdown.

In Textile, I'd type _something_ to put emphasis on something, and Markdown would accept *something* and also the Textile approach. That is a hell of a lot easier to type and a hell of a lot easier to read!

Now why do we really want to use (X)HTML? Probably because changing the HTML standard would involve a lot of problems and frankly, I'm not perfectly happy with either Textile, Markdown, POD or any other markup language for that matter ;-)

Oh well, by now you should understand that I just had to write (and format) a document in HTML, which I thought would be small enough to hack directly in HTML, but turned out too big that I wish I started in Textile...

html, textile, markdown

Still it surprises me, but somehow the terrorist threat news of yesterday still isn't known by some people (yes, I did ask them what happened to their television, radio, newspapers and Internet connection).

Anyways, it seems like mentioning the word terrorist sparks of the great insanity that security officials seem to possess. No more hand luggage and yes, fluids are illegal, but if those fluids are so dangerous, why would you combine them all?

I'm getting so tired of these security measures. Somehow no one can imagine that bare hands are more than enough to kill and overpower pilots? There are a lot of ordinary items that can be lethal (shoe laces, hands, boots, glasses (think: Godfather) and so on...). But at least fluids are now seen as a major threat. What's next? Handcuff every passenger and tape them to the seats? Thank you for flying Con-Air.

Then I noticed that Acme::Terror::UK got updated and I thought it was time to bring the world Acme::Terror::NL to protect us all from evil.

At least the terrorist had quite a good victory yesterday. The European skies were disrupted and many, many passengers were stranded. And of course, we all fear those horrible terrorists now again... Let's invade a country now, or at least free a few trillion dollars for The War on Terror, for now we know it works!

terrorists, insanity, Acme::Terror

Still it surprises me, but somehow the terrorist threat news of yesterday still isn't known by some people (yes, I did ask them what happened to their television, radio, newspapers and Internet connection).

Anyways, it seems like mentioning the word terrorist sparks of the great insanity that security officials seem to possess. No more hand luggage and yes, fluids are illegal, but if those fluids are so dangerous, why would you combine them all?

I'm getting so tired of these security measures. Somehow no one can imagine that bare hands are more than enough to kill and overpower pilots? There are a lot of ordinary items that can be lethal (shoe laces, hands, boots, glasses (think: Godfather) and so on...). But at least fluids are now seen as a major threat. What's next? Handcuff every passenger and tape them to the seats? Thank you for flying Con-Air.

Then I noticed that Acme::Terror::UK got updated and I thought it was time to bring the world Acme::Terror::NL to protect us all from evil.

At least the terrorist had quite a good victory yesterday. The European skies were disrupted and many, many passengers were stranded. And of course, we all fear those horrible terrorists now again... Let's invade a country now, or at least free a few trillion dollars for The War on Terror, for now we know it works!

terrorists, insanity, Acme::Terror

Still it surprises me, but somehow the terrorist threat news of yesterday still isn't known by some people (yes, I did ask them what happened to their television, radio, newspapers and Internet connection).

Anyways, it seems like mentioning the word terrorist sparks of the great insanity that security officials seem to possess. No more hand luggage and yes, fluids are illegal, but if those fluids are so dangerous, why would you combine them all?

I'm getting so tired of these security measures. Somehow no one can imagine that bare hands are more than enough to kill and overpower pilots? There are a lot of ordinary items that can be lethal (shoe laces, hands, boots, glasses (think: Godfather) and so on...). But at least fluids are now seen as a major threat. What's next? Handcuff every passenger and tape them to the seats? Thank you for flying Con-Air.

Then I noticed that Acme::Terror::UK got updated and I thought it was time to bring the world Acme::Terror::NL to protect us all from evil.

At least the terrorist had quite a good victory yesterday. The European skies were disrupted and many, many passengers were stranded. And of course, we all fear those horrible terrorists now again... Let's invade a country now, or at least free a few trillion dollars for The War on Terror, for now we know it works!

terrorists, insanity, Acme::Terror

I survived Wacken Open Air 2006!

Yep, August 3rd to August 5th were party time in Wacken, Germany again. And since it's almost a tradition, we went there again. The lineup didn't excite me like previous year, but it obviously did a lot of other metal fans, for this year, the festival was sold out and we could see that from the moment we arrived in the village. It was crowded!

The bands on the bill weren't all too exciting; I mean, why the hell would we want to watch The Scorpions? And what's up with Children of BoreBodom? Do the sleep there? Do we really have to see them every year?

Luckily there were bands that I wanted to see, like Ministry, Finntroll, Bloodthorn, Opeth, Emperor, and Vreid.

Only two bands really got my attention though, Ministry and Vreid the rest (especially Finntroll) were disappointing.

But oh well, it was fun (and hot!) nevertheless. Only slightly less than a year to go to Wacken 2007!

WOA, Wacken Open Air 2006, Vreid, Ministry

I survived Wacken Open Air 2006!

Yep, August 3rd to August 5th were party time in Wacken, Germany again. And since it's almost a tradition, we went there again. The lineup didn't excite me like previous year, but it obviously did a lot of other metal fans, for this year, the festival was sold out and we could see that from the moment we arrived in the village. It was crowded!

The bands on the bill weren't all too exciting; I mean, why the hell would we want to watch The Scorpions? And what's up with Children of BoreBodom? Do the sleep there? Do we really have to see them every year?

Luckily there were bands that I wanted to see, like Ministry, Finntroll, Bloodthorn, Opeth, Emperor, and Vreid.

Only two bands really got my attention though, Ministry and Vreid the rest (especially Finntroll) were disappointing.

But oh well, it was fun (and hot!) nevertheless. Only slightly less than a year to go to Wacken 2007!

WOA, Wacken Open Air 2006, Vreid, Ministry