mehblog

There is a new version of wordpress out, 1.2.1 . It is a bug fix release I believe. I was able to just copy the archive straight into my wordpress folder and all is well. Admin system tells me I am now running the new version.

Recent reports on slashdot et al seemed to suggest that Microsoft’s Sender ID initiative was dead in the water as it had been rejected by MARID. It seems however that this was perhaps not so accurate.

I have only recently found out about SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and it sounds great. I run a number of servers for clients and I know how much spam is flying around out there and how hard it can be to filter it out. If SPF can limit the amount of spam that is coming from spoofed addresses I think this will be an enormous breakthrough. On the surface at least, it should force spammers to use their own machines to send out their noxious effluent. That should make it easier to block them.

In theory anyway.

In the next few weeks I’m planning on getting SPF and postfix working together and relaying some domains through it to see how it works. Fingers crossed.

I recently switched to debian for my linux box at home. I have previously been using redhat (various versions and variants). Most of the boxes I work on and manage are redhat based in some way so I had become familiar with the way it is laid out. So, I recently installed ddclient to update my dynamic dns records at dyndns as I am on DSL at home with a dynamic IP. In the installation instructions one is told to use chkconfig to ‘turn on’ ddclient as a service. The problem is that (as far as I am aware) chkconfig does not exist on debian. Hmm. So a bit of searching led me to the debian policy documtent, which explains the debian equivalent of chkconfig, i.e. update-rc.d . That doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as chkconfig but it does the job. Specifically check out this page<-nextpage-> for info on how to use it.

In my case I just ran update-rc.d ddclient defaults (after copying the file ddclient from my distribution folder to /etc/init.d ) and it created symlinks from /etc/init.d/ddclient to the various init folders. I suppose I should really have choosen just the runlevels I needed but it was early and I hadn’t quite woken up …

hth.

Following on from todays revelations that various sites are spreading malware via IE, I’ve just updated my xp pro box to service pack 2, rc2. So far so good. Apparently this patch secures IE against this particular vuln. I must say I’m happy with the improvements so far. If you want to update to sp2 rc2 then you need to update your windows update client here: and then just do windows update as normal. Easy.

I’ve just updated wordpress here form v 101 to 1.2. A few hiccups (should have checked where the tar file was headed…) but everything seems ok now. Some cool new featues too…

Russell Beattie is back, posting away on his blog after a bit of a break. Good stuff.

I’m looking at writting some apps for the Linux desktop at the moment, probably using wxPython, but one thing that has been really confusing for me of late is the various toolkits for the two main linux desktop environments, namely Gnome and KDE. So, as a bit of an aid de memoir for myself, QT is kde and GTK is gnome.

Recently a discussion has begun about the future direction of the Linux desktop. Well perhaps ‘started’ isn’t the right word, but this article written by Havoc Pennington seems to have sparked off something of a blog war between himself and Miguel de Icaza. The crux of the discussion seems to be about what platform the future linux desktop is going to be based upon. On the one hand one has Mono which is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s ’.NET framework’, and on the other hand we have Java. And of course the current C/C++. Now, to be honest until recently I was pretty much ignorant of what all the fuss was about, but having read numerous blog posts and articles I am beginning to get it. It would seem that each ‘alternative’ has its benefits and drawbacks (like most things in life I suppose). Java has a lot of momentum behind it, and is backed by companies such as Sun and IBM. So there is a lot of support for it. However, as Java is not open source it can be troublesome for some developers, particularily when you add the GPL into the mix. Mono is completely open source and is backed by Novell. However, many open source developers are reluctant to use Mono as it is perceived as being linked to Microsoft, i.e. an OS implementation of a MS product. And there are lots of people who are nervous about the multitude of patents that MS holds with regard to .NET. Understandable I suppose. I have used java on and off over the years but I am certainly no expert. I quite like java in many respects. I hadn’t ever tried Mono though, so I downloaded it and installed the CLI and the compiler onto one of my boxes (a pleasantly painless experience I might add) . I compiled a simple HelloWord script and compiled it. It ran just fine. I then copied the binary to one of my Windows XP boxes which has the latest version of the .NET runtime on it, and the binary ran just fine there too which was pretty cool (ok, I wasn’t exactly stretching things with this example). Apparently the start of the binary file holds instructions for windows to run the file through the .NET VM or something like that, so on windows you can just double-click the file and it runs properly. Neat. Going beyond the HelloWorld example, there is GTK# for writting GUI applications. The Mono project is using GTK# instead of windowsForms as I believe a lot of the patent issues involve the windows forms classes, so using GTK# avoids the whole problem. Right, this post is getting very long and is turning into a review(ette) of Mono which wasn’t the intention. More later …

Hope everyone has a great day remembering their Irish roots. ;) Most notably today is my Dad’s birthday. Happy birthday MPD!

Hans Nowak has written what can best be described as a wrapper for wxPython which is a Python port of wxWindows, an

open source C++ GUI framework to make cross-platform programming child’s play. Well, almost.

Almost indeed. As someone who is new to python, and also to wxWindows, Hans’ wax is a godsend. It wraps up all of those nasty, hard to remember apis in nice simple objects. So, I should finally get around to doing some of these GUI projects on my list.