- 1811 Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tounge
Some proper swearing in here.
Never Let It Be Said
That I can’t admit when I’m wrong.
Someone (and I suspect it was the estimable Ms Bidgood, but if anyone else would like to claim responsibility, I may be wrong – I know several of you disagreed with me) has sent me a photo/postcard. The front shows two men and a donkey. The back reads:
Thank you so much for saving my donkey, my livelihood and my friend. When I felt that Moti was not walking properly, I got worried as he is the only source of income for my family. I rushed to Brooke hospital, where the Brooke staff helped me immediately and treated my donkey. Now I am again able to fulfill the needs of my family through my lovely animal. Thank you for supporting the Brooke Hospital and helping me and donkey.
A post-it note attached simply reads: “A good reason to give to animal charities?”
Yes. Yes, I would absolutely agree that it is, and have just made a donation to Brooke myself. You can find them at http://www.thebrooke.org/ if you would like to make one yourself.
(Also, just for the record: I’m completely pro charities like the WWF. Biodiversity has huge benefits to humanity.)
Links for Wednesday February 22nd 2012
- LDA/Sieve – Dovecot Wiki
Might be a better option than Procmail. - ICO website traffic impact of cookie opt in | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
So this is kind of a big deal, it's relevant at work, and basically if you operate a web business in the EU and want to know how busy your website is, you're fucked. This graph will be useful in explaining to our clients just how fucked they are going to be when they come into compliance with this law.
Notes on Setting Up A mailserver
Incomprehensible tech gibberish to most of you, laughably simple nonsense to others, I just need to dump this lot someplace, so I remember it if/when I need to do this again and/or when I come to make tweaks over the next few weeks.
- Postfix/Dovecot related confusion over having same domain in localdomain and in MySQL. Remember to set up so that localdomain is a domain you don’t need.
- Remember: /etc/pam.d/smtp
- When adding new domains, remember to add them to /etc/amavis/conf.d/05-domain_id, or SpamAssassin won’t run on them.
- Most of the useful SpamAssassin settings have been redefined at User level. This was on purpose. Don’t forget.
- You have self-signed the certs. When budget permits, replace them with something proper.
- TODO: Test PHP-IMAP, and look at Postfix for post-delivery filtering.
- Remember to check regularly for security updates.
Links for Tuesday February 21st 2012
- Future Perfect » The Handbag Paradox
"Bag mapping is a useful exercise to become acquainted with the norms of a society – what we do or don’t decide to carry being a reflection of our selves and the environment in which we live and work." I remain on the quest for the perfect bag, which is one exactly like the one I have now, but 3-4 inches longer and perhaps an inch wider and deeper.
Links for Monday February 20th 2012
- Reading A Book More Than Once Has Mental Health Benefits | The Mary Sue
According to this, I should be nigh unbelievably mentally health at the moment, having just spent a few weeks re-reading a stack of books. - Introducing Playfic – Waxy.org
One for the "when I've got some spare time" file. If it really is as easy to generate interactive fiction as the example here makes it look, then I might take a serious stab at it one of these days. - Why Mass Effect is the Most Important Science Fiction Universe of Our Generation | Pop Bioethics
So anyone that's spoken to me in the last couple of weeks knows I'm a bit obsessed with Mass Effect. This article does a really good job or articulating a lot of the reasons why. It does contain (generally broad picture) spoilers (with one or two specifics), so if you haven't played them, and think you might yet do so, you should avoid it until you have. But if you have played it, or aren't planning to, and are at all interested in SF, or in issues regarding representation of minorities in media, or in the potential of games as storytelling media, then I recommend reading this.
Links for Wednesday February 15th 2012
- High Scalability – High Scalability – Tumblr Architecture – 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter
One of the web developers – Tumblr's journey from their initial technologies to what they've got now, and where they're going. Fascinating reading if you understand the tech. - Ninja Blocks | Building blocks for the Internet of Things
EEEEnteresting. I can see some flaws with it – ethernet? really? And where're the API docs? But this is all open source stuff, so an iteration or two from now, and something based on this could be a lot of fun, and very practically useful.
Links for Monday February 13th 2012
- The Perpetual, Invisible Window Into Your Gmail Inbox – Waxy.org
Andy Baio writing about the dangers of authorising apps to look in your Gmail. I am pretty careful about this stuff and I don't really *use* my gmail (it's a dump address that I've got more or less just so I can access Google's other services), and I *still* had a bunch of apps authorised to use it that I looked at and had only the haziest recollection of ever authorising, so I've cleared them out. The odds are that none of them are malicious, of course, but it's only going to take one service to get bought out by someone less ethical than it's founders for things to start going wrong. It's not just gmail, of course – we're all getting very used to authorising one website to see what we're doing on another one, and is should be part of anyone's personal security practice to review which websites can see what where on a semi-regular basis, just like you should all be changing your passwords regularly, and using a password manager. You are all doing that, aren't you? - Start 2012 By Taking 2 Minutes to Clean Your Apps Permissions
I likned to this only a couple of weeks ago, but it’s very useful in light of the above, so I’m re-linking it. A list of popular web apps, with links that will let you manage what other web apps have permissions to use them, so that you can easily make sure that nothing has permissions it shouldn’t.
Links for Thursday February 9th 2012
- Fountain | A markup language for screenwriting.
Markdown like syntax design for screenplays.
Links for Tuesday February 7th 2012
- Learn HTML & CSS – a book that teaches you in a nicer way
If anyone I know is looking to learn HTML and CSS, or even just improve a shaky grasp of it, then I really can't recommend this beautiful book enough. Too many build your own website books are both too technical, and too hideous. This book is starts from absolute first principles, and is a joy to look at. I don't need it, and I'm still thinking of buying it, that's how nice it is.