The voluntary tech guy. Like Batman – but fighting downtime rather than crime.
I’ve been involved with helping a number of teams start-out with Web API development, and I always encourage them to agree their HTTP response codes sooner-rather-than-later. Personally, I’m a fan of documenting this as a flow-chart. That way, both those writing and those consuming the API have a straightforward means of knowing what to do […]
Continue ReadingAnyone who knows me knows how utterly frustrating I find the state of email today. It’s inherently insecure, absolutely relied upon, and there’s always someone who “didn’t get your email”. For larger businesses the offerings by Microsoft and the alike (Office365 for example) make sense. For me however – it’s Courier-MTA on a Debian box. […]
Continue ReadingI don’t wish this to be a rant, and I wish it to be far from fuel for the flame wars which have been burning for several decades over open source projects which transform into “mostly closed” and very non-free “products”. Read more over on my LinkedIn post…
Continue ReadingAfter months of frustration – having our outbound emails randomly fail for distribution groups (alias lists in Courier MTA terminology) – I found the cause. Our SMTP smarthost doesn’t allow multiple “RCPT TO:” commands in an email header. By default, Courier batches up all emails forwarded to the same domain name. There’s a switch to […]
Continue ReadingNearly a year since I last blogged. Phew, caught it just in time 😉 First time this year (2013) I got to drive home without my lights on. The clocks haven’t even gone back yet! Woo-hoo for springtime 🙂 So today’s topic, CKEditor and A4 paper. Mmm-hmm. Letter paper, A4, A5, in fact any size. […]
Continue ReadingI have a ReadyNAS Duo, and several Mac devices backing up to it (via the typically “Apple awesome” Time Machine feature). I recently upped the allocated disk space in FrontView to 300GB, from 120GB – which while each Mac’s Time Machine preferences said “NAS device, 300GB” – claimed the disk didn’t have enough “temporary space” […]
Continue ReadingWhat a week. What a month. What a year. So much has happened, far more than I could or should ever write about. Recently we’ve been migrating MySQL servers from one hardware to another – for anyone (me!) that finds this useful in the future, firstly “Hello, and I hope the future is better than […]
Continue Reading*sigh* It’s been for several weeks that I’ve been trying (and failing) to aquire Domain Admin status on our Samba domain. With Windows 2000 and XP, administrative access was easy. A local admin account called “administrator”, and a local policy stating who’s an administrator – all peachy. You can tell I’m not a Windows administrator […]
Continue ReadingValidation of email addresses. What a painful subject. About a year ago I looked into the possibility of using SMTP to validate email addresses. As it turns out, it’s not perfect (a lot of false-negatives) but it’s very reliable (I’ve failed to get any false-positives). The following code outlines how this works (written in PHP, […]
Continue ReadingWhile setting up Trac as our company source-code repository yesterday, the question arose of “What about cute HTML emails when SVN commits are made?”. Hmmmm. Thank goodness for SVN hooks – a wonderfully understated feature of subversion! Go to your subversion directory (that created by “svnadmin create”), and enter the “hooks” directory. Create a file, executable […]
Continue Reading