Pandora

There is a site called Pandora that helps you find songs and artists that you might like that you don't already know. Its a great experiment in collaborative assessment, despite the fact that the only songs it found that I liked were songs I already knew.

Woke up.

I woke up, drank a stiff drink, and will now head back to bed. In the meantime, here's a pointer to an interesting LJ article on what its like to write a book, from manuscript to finsihed item.

Well, that didn't work.

I couldn't fall back asleep again. For some reason, if I wake up in the middle of the night, it can take four or five hours before I can manage to fall asleep again, and having lain in bed until now, with no sleep in sight, I figure I may as well get up. My alarm was due to go off in a few minutes anyway.

So, I got to sleep by 9:00 pm last night, and was up around 2:00 am. Thats only 5 hours sleep. Hopefully I'll be able to sleep tonight. Meanwhile I've got coffee brewing and will just go through the motions of starting my day.

More Mail Debugging.

Since I woke up just before taxlady went to bed, she had a chance to tell me that some of her mail was behaving badly. After a couple of hours playing around, it turns out that there was a place where I needed to say 'If all else fails, use the defaults' in my config.

Otherwise, Postfix tries to guess how to handle mail for domains that don't have explicit transport policies (but would be handled by the default transport policies). Up until now it has always worked because it was doing DNS lookup on the mail addresses, finding out that the only registered mail server for those addresses had the same IP address as its canonical home address and therefor checking to see if local delivery worked -- which it always did.

Now though, hendrikboom has set up a secondary mail server that handles all of my domains, not just the pooq one (which has an explicit policy). So, when mail would come in for certain addresses that used to be handled, they would bounce. This is because when Postfix did its check, it would see multiple IP addresses to which the mail could go, and would therefor conclude the mail was non-local, and would want to Relay to one of the servers on the list. Of course, most relays are forbidden, and so some folks have been getting relay rejected messages when sending to certain legal, yet obscure email addresses. (ie, webmaster@domain).

Anyway, it all seems to be working correctly now, and I'm feeling quite proud that I was able to diagnose and fix that on only 5 hours sleep, and before I'd even read the morning funnies. Speaking of which...

Hacker Detection Firm... Hacked.

There's not much I can say that this article doesn't already.

Opinmind.

There's a web-site called Opinmind which searches Blogs to get a general view of how people feel about a topic. Just to be topical, I tried a search for bush. Not only did the negative comments outweigh the positive two to one, but the following image was rated as a positive comment:




Makes me wonder what it takes to be considered negative...

Snow.

I decided to go out for breakfast as an excuse to get some exercise and to actually be up and about while the sun is in the sky. (Well, okay, I never actually saw the sun, but the grey clouds are a lot brighter right now than they are at night.)

Now, we had our first major snowfall of the season several days ago (has it been a week yet? I forget.) and it was a doozy. By now, of course, most of the sidewalks have not been cleared, and there are huge snowdrifts piled in extremely inconvenient places for anyone who is trying to get anywhere without wheels, so I knew I would have to break down and wear boots.

Don't get me wrong, the big heavy boots I own are probably the nicest and warmest of that ilk that I have ever owned, and I purchased them for just such occasions as this. Still, I hate them with an intense hatred because of their three major design flaws:

1. Big.
2. Heavy.
3. Boots.

Seriously, after trudging the two blocks there and the two blocks back, wading through the occasional patch of knee-deep snow and clambering over tall drifts, my legs were aching from the sheer effort to lift these boots on each step. Anyway, I got back safely and I plan to do some major resting for a bit to recuperate. And now you know.

Christmas present ideas.

I just found a new design of mouse which is likely to be a hit:

( Click for Picture )