Really. I'm not. I've just not had anything interesting to report of late. I had a very pleasant weekend, and caught the boat from Greenwich to Westminster as part of a leasurely day into town. Took about an hour, but was lovely.
Work-wise - I'm turning a blog into a forum. This, technically, is easy, but presents a whole bunch of problems in terms of security and letting people do things. So I'm having to figure out this whole permissioning thing in my head, which in a way is probably good for me in the long run.
The company is interviewing the technical grads for next year this week, so I'll hopefully be along to them to sit on "the other side" of the interviews and weigh in my opinion on who they should hire. It'll be fun :-)
As I'm sure everyone knows, I'm going to Sri Lanka at the end of April. Yesterday, everyone who's going decided to have a collection day in Canary Wharf. The idea was simple: we'll put an exercise bike in the middle of one of the plazas, start at 8am, bike in 1 hour shifts, and say we're cycling across Sri Lanka (about 140 miles, 224 km) in 10 hours. Meanwhile, other people can collect.
After turning up at 8am, we were proceeded to be rained on lots, and ignored by the vast majority of the suits swarming out of the Canary Wharf tube station. The idea was that after 9am, we'd run in shifts of collectors, so that the rest of us could go and get some work done. Thankfully, we were eventually publicised by the company's own internal publicity thing using this amazing photo (I'm second from left):
(Ok, I lost this photo. Don't tell anyone)
After that, we started to collect a bit more. I was collecting 11-12 and then cycling from 12-1pm during which time I managed to cover a stonking 28km which, it turns out, was slightly above-average for the day (not as much as 40km guy, grrrrrrrrrrrr). I was, of course, delighted that it was sunny for the whole day, except for the bits where I was collecting and cycling, when it rained. Hard.
In any case, we actually hit the magic 224km with about 20 mins to go so got a total of 232km. Also, it turns out we raised £595.01, which means it was all worthwhile :)
After reading about Richard's attempt to get his email working properly, I had a few ideas of my own to improve mail collection when you get a large amount of spam. Currently I get around 400 spams a day, which isn't any where near enough to worry me in terms of bandwidth and processor usage, but it's annoying.
Generally, I filter it out pretty well, thanks to Spamassassin. In general, every 10 minutes, the mailserver would download all the mail from my host's pop server and then run it all through Procmail. This would then send it to spamassassin which is running as a daemon. After getting the return, procmail would then drop it into my maildir, after sorting it into different folders depending on whether it's spam etc.
This was all fine and well, but had a few key problems. Firstly, the processor load spiked once every ten minutes. This is fine, except it'd be a lot better if it just burbled along at a constant all the time. Secondly, it meant that it still dumped all the spam into my inbox. Ok, it's in a different folder, but if I'd forget to clean it out in 3 months, I'm using up a lot of disk space with spam.
It occurred to me that a much better solution would be to use the mailserver as a proper mailserver, rather than a fetch-and-dump solution. So, on Saturday, I opened a ticket with my host to get them to add an MX record for growse.com pointing at my home server, and to leave the current MX records in place at a lower priority. To my mild surprise, they did this in about 5 minutes on a Saturday afternoon. Not bad, not bad at all. Essentially, what this means is that all the email will be attempted to be delivered to my home mailserver directly. If it fails or is rejected for some reason, it'll then try to deliver it to the host's mailserver.
The next decision was what mailserver to use. I'd played with Exim and Postfix before and hated them both for different reasons. Remembering that I hated postfix less, I installed that and tried to get it working. For some inexplicable reason, it failed to do even the most basic of tasks, which was deliver local mail. Despite knowing it was the endpoint for a domain, it was still trying to do an MX lookup for mail sent locally to that domain, and then failed to do an smtp connection to itself. No idea why, probably because it's a stupid thing to do. This sent me on a wild goose chase about a routing problem which meant that all ports on the external ip address where being denied inside the network, which required a static route to fix it. Feeling happy that I'd fixed a networking problem by myself (I'm learning! I really am!), I was annoyed to find it still didn't fix the problem. Eventually coming to the conclusion that postfix was shit, I decided to look at exim.
Now I hate exim. Mainly for it's documentation and lack of clarity of. It seems to be written in the spirit of "You know all about exim and mail delivery, so you're just reading the documentation for fun". Pretty useful if you don't actually have a clue. In any case, I read it, re-read it, and then abandoned it and just decided to guess at what the config variables meant. Somehow, I managed to get it to work. I have no idea how. It delivers mail, it runs it through clamav and then spamassassin, rejects mail with a spam score more than 10, and dumps it in the right place. I'm actually slightly amazed with myself about that. So now I've got a much better solution than I had before, and all I need to do to it is to tell it to file what comes in and labelled spam in a different directory, which should be simple.
I literally just checked in and printed my boarding pass for a flight that leaves tomorrow at about half one (I love BA), and I now need to pack everything in a bag small enough to take on a plane. Usually, this isn't a problem as the luggage allowance for business class people is fairly generous, but this time there's an added complication. About 7 hours after I land from New York, I'm flying to Geneva to go skiing. Therefore, I need three sets of clothes: NY-only clothes, skiing-only clothes, and clothes that fall into both categories. So I put the skiing-only clothes in a big which is now not far from Heathrow, and I'm going to have to pack NY and NY/skiing clothes in a bag which is small enough to take on the plane. This bag also needs to be big enough to fit all the skiing clothes in, as I'm going to do some sort of clever luggage/changeover/shifting/bag-swapping thing in the small amount of time I'm spending in the UK over the next 2 weeks. Still, packing is one of those things I'm quite good at, if you measure against how quickly I can do it in along with how stressed I get about it (10 mins, not very).
There will of course be lots of photos in about 2 weeks.
Next post here will probably be from the 1st class lounge at Heathrow terminal 4. :-)