Monthly Archives: December 2001

Email Upgrades

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I’ve recently been working on a project for client that includes incorporating virus scanning and spam blocking. Read on to learn how I’m ridding myself of spam and virii.

The first step is to get the necessary software. Here is a short list of the programs that I have used (how I tied them together is something I won’t say since the client IS selling this as an ASP).

  • Spam Bouncer: A complex set of procmail scripts created to do high level spam checking and even some virii checking.
  • Amavis: A virus checker that replaces the qmail-queue program to check all incoming and outgoing mail. It relies on a some sort of external virus checker (I’m using a commercial one) to actually check the mail, but works great. It quaranteens the mail and then sends notices to recipient and sender.
  • Qmail: Wouldn’t be much of an email system without a MTA. DJB, despite being a raging asshole, has created what I believe to be the best MTA out there.

This is a good start to ridding yourself of spam and virii. Spam Bouncer works fairly well, however it requires some detailed setup and is VERY restrictive in its default setup. Amavis is just beautiful and I highly recommend it. If you have any questions feel free to email me questions.

Northern Michigan

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So I traveled to East Jordan (about 45 minutes northeast of Traverse City) to visit my parents and little brother. I traveled through hell to get up there and ended up sitting on my ass the whole time. I did watch the Dune miniseries though – some of the best SciFi I’ve seen yet.

A flock of movie reviews

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I’ve been watching a few movies these past few weeks and thought I’d pass on some of the better ones. Read on for more details.

First up is the movie “Ocean’s Eleven” starring a whole slew of headliners. George Clooney and Brad Pitt give outstanding performances in this genuinely great movie. Somehow they manage to put together a great movie without violence, a ton of “F” words, or any sex. A must see.

Next is “Vanilla Sky” starring Tom Cruise as a playboy who is disfigured in a car accident. This movie keeps you following a single plot until the very end when the entire movie comes rushing at you in a matter of only a few minutes, much like “Fight Club” and “The Sixth Sense” did. Another amazing movie to see.

Finally, is the movie “America’s Sweethearts” starring Julia Roberts, Kathrine Zeta Jones, John Cusack, and Billy Crystal. It’s your typical John Cusack movie (boy is madly in love with some girl), but manages to be different than the rest (the pinnacle being “High Fidelity”). A great date movie.

Moving

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I’m in the middle of moving right now and thought I’d post before I went offline for the next few days. I’m moving into the fraternity house, which should be interesting. I’ll be back online on the 27th of December. So everyone have a happy holidays!

VIM vs. VI

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As you probably know VI hasn’t been around in ages, rather VIM with VI settings is used. I was always torn between the two and finally settled on VI because 1.) I was too lazy to make my own .vimrc catered to my needs and 2.) its copy and paste wasn’t screwed up like VIM’s seemd to be. Read more about how I rectified this.

First off you need to decide what’s right for you and your needs. I program mostly in PHP and HTML. I didn’t like VIM syntax highlighting, but the benefits of using it are evident (ie. it will highlight correctly spelled functions reducing dumb spelling errors).

Another problem was the cut and paste was always fux0red in VIM. There are settings to rectify this I found out. You will also want to set your tab settings to your specific tastes (I use two spaces). Another thing you might want to think about is setting VIM to use SPACES for tabs instead of the evil ‘t’ character.

So here were my desires ….

  • Eliminate the cut & paste problem
  • Set my tab width to 2 spaces
  • Use spaces instead of ‘t’
  • I wanted to be able to backspace as much as I wanted while in INSERT mode
  • I wanted simple unintrusive syntax highlighting

Here is what I came up with – feel free to use it for yourself … 

set noautoindent
set backspace=2
syntax on
set expandtab
set foldmethod=marker
set tabstop=2

hi Comment    ctermfg=Red guifg=#80a0ff
hi Constant   ctermfg=Gray guifg=#ffa0a0
hi Special    ctermfg=LightGray guifg=Orange
hi Function   ctermfg=DarkCyan guifg=Orange
hi Identifier ctermfg=DarkGreen guifg=#40ffff
hi Statement  ctermfg=white guifg=#ffff60
hi PreProc    ctermfg=Gray guifg=#ff80ff
hi Type       ctermfg=white guifg=#60ff60
hi Ignore     ctermfg=black guifg=bg

Day 3

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Operation Train Kitty To Use The Toilet is moving into day 3 and all seems to be going well. Crash seems to be catching on quick – we are already in the last stages of the training process. I can only hope that everything turns out ok. In other news you can view my auctions on eBay here. I’m selling components for a MAME Box, a Nokia phone, and soon to be a few random boxen I have laying around.