Archive for August, 2008

Forum Software - What are your thoughts?

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Having worked for two different competitors in the Forum Software Market, and watching over the last few months at the ranting and raving about the incompetency of these companies and others (Not by me, but by others - I can’t (for legal reasons) express my personal opinions regarding them) It’s led me to ask the question.

If you were to write your own, perfect Forum Software, what features would it have, and what would be “special” about it?

Personally, I’d like to see a Forum System that had an abstracted API at it’s core, so addon features could be added nicely. I’d also like to see that it’d be a RESTful system (or at least work in a Resource Oriented Architectural Manner)

So, tell me your thoughts…

Reading Festival

Friday, August 15th, 2008

I’ll be there ;) Gotta love winning competitions!

Can’t seem to get a decent shot… my camera doesn’t seem to like photographing these… :(

Procmail tip for Vanity emails.

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

As you know, some sites allow you to have a vanity email, (ubuntu.com, kubuntu.org, php.net, debian.org, etc) - Usually - these are setup to forward to another account.

Well, after getting fed up of people spamming my php.net email account by using the address that it’s forwarded to (which I have no idea where it’s coming from) - I eventually decided to get my revenge and write a procmail recipe to get rid of these ;)

:0:
* ! ^Received:.*php.net.*sourceguru.net
.Spam/

This will send anything that does not have a header containing both php.net and sourceguru.net in the header line, and send it to the spam folder, this means that anything sent directly to <alias>@sourceguru.net instead of <nick>@php.net will be sent to spam. Yay! It’s blocked… 5 spam in the time of writing this post.

Obviously, you have to be a bit careful with these things, there are other bits that you could add in, like checking that it was also recieved by <server>.php.net for <nick>@php.net (unfortunately, php.net’s email servers don’t seem to provide the “for” bit of it) - and some other checks. But as a basic rule, it goes pretty far (I wouldn’t send this sorta thing to /dev/null however, there might be false positives)

Also, do be careful if you decide to do this for your @ubuntu.com email address. Until Launchpad has the extra features for setting an email as an alias for your @ubuntu.com email address, and having you @ubuntu.com email address set as your preferred email address at the same time, then Launchpad can and will send emails directly to your alias address… I’ll probably update at some point with a nice procmail ruleset for ubuntu.com email addresses ;)

Hope this helps someone fight spam!

Oh, and of course, it does rely on you having a single email account for the alias, rather than just sending it to an address that you’d normally use!

Backscatter

Sunday, August 10th, 2008

Just a note - if you’ve sent me any important email in the last 24 hours, then please re-send. I’ve had to wipe my mailboxes due to a 10,000 strong backscatter of bounced email… :(

Discrimination?

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Some of you may know that I’m looking for a new job.

Well, anyway, I had a Phonecall from Kalamazoo Reynolds earlier, who, 3 questions into the interview asked.

“Do you smoke?”

“Yes”

“Ok, then please feel free to re-apply if you ever give up, we have a company policy in place that we do not employ smokers”

Is this legal?