...more recent posts
Epic battle with qmail today. I believe I am victorious.
From the links you hope to never need department: recovering from an rm -rf on an ext3 file system. Very interesting as this is widely reported to be impossible - most notably by one of the ext3 developers!
Youtube.com has released a javascript player API for controlling its embedded movie player on a webpage. You can even customize the player with your own chrome, user controls, custom playlists, and menus. Very nice. When do the mandatory ads before every video begin?
For my reference: tai64nlocal will convert the weird qmail log timestamp format into something readable. Takes input from stdin, so:
cat current | tai64nlocalto read the 'current' log file with readable datetimes. Wish I knew that before.
Also I added the mtrack script which also makes reading /var/log/qmail/send/current/ *much* easier (it groups message ids together so you can actually see what is happening in there.) I renamed it qmailsendlogreader.pl, so combined with tai64nlocal we can read the logs much easier using:
cat current | /usr/local/sbin/qmailsendlogreader.pl | tai64nlocal
iPhone media event going on right now. We should hear word about the SDK (software development kit - will allow 3rd party applications to be built for the iPhone.)
I'm sort of cheap, so I've been using browsershots.org to do my cross browser testing. It's not fast, but it's free. And there is a good selection of browsers. But litmus just announced pay as you go pricing. $18 for unlimited use during a 24 hour period. I'll probably give it a shot on my next job.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 has been in the works for some time now. And there has been quite a bit of debate over it. I've been following along, of course, but it's just been too tedious to report on. The basic gist was that IE 8 makes great strides toward standard compliance. Yay. But you were only going to get the standards compliant version of IE 8 if you specifically requested standard compliant rendering in your web page - otherwise IE 8 would just render your HTML in the same slightly screwy way that IE 7 did. WTF? It's like reverse quirks mode.
Microsoft's position was that if they suddenly made IE 8 standard compliant then all those web pages specifically authored to work in IE 7 (or worse, 6) would suddenly break when viewed in IE 8. And they didn't want to "break the web." I guess I see their point, but I just wish they'd do it right so that everyone could eventually move on and stop having web design be such a complete mess.
And low and behold, today Microsoft announced they are reversing themselves, and IE 8 will now render in standard compliant mode by default. You can optionally request IE 7 mode if you want, but if not you get the new rendering engine. This is going to break a lot of pages but it is a very good thing for the web in general. Way to go Microsoft. Truly a great day.
Looks like Ray Ozzie is having a good impact up in Redmond.
Wow. Beautiful fully loaded Sony Ericsson phone (Xperia X1.) Too bad about the OS, but S/E can definitely design consumer electronics that don't suck.
Two undersea fibre optic cables were cut in the Mediterranean causing a bandwidth crisis in India and the Middle East. The cause has not been revealed.
Of course I have no idea what happened, but it's sort of hard not to wonder if maybe someone was installing some additional hardware onto those cables. Or maybe it was just a ships anchor. Or swamp gas.
Geotate adds GPS tagging to digital cameras (and other devices.) Very clever. And useful. I want this.