Community Matters

Like many other people, I just love Bloglines. I can’t imagine how else I’d keep track of the blogs I read (and I read them on three different computers, so browser internal solutions or client programs just wouldn’t work for me).

Today I encountered an annoying problem. My blogs both were down for a couple of hours due to a database issue (MySQL decided not to allow connects from the local machine as there were too many connection failures (hu???)) and bloglines got an invalid page when trying to open my feeds (basically, the WordPress error page). After that bloglines immediately stopped crawling my sites and shows the little red “[!]” behind the feeds in its display. And it appears that there is no way to make bloglines aware that the issue has been fixed and to get them to re-crawl the feed.

That seems like a bug to me. In case anyone has figured out a solution, please let me know (I sent them email, but they promise a response “within about two business days” – ahh, the problem with free services).

Thanks for visiting!
I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?

I wrote about setting up Postfix on Tiger before. But after quite a while of procrastination I decided I also wanted to do something about the flood of spam that was sent to hohndel.org. SpamAssassin seems to be the preferred method to go (if you are in the open source camp). It’s bundled with Mac OS X server – but why spend that money… it’s easy enough to set up from scratch.

These instructions are based on a posting by Kalinga Athulathmudali where he describes a similar setup, but not for OS X.

First make sure you have your CPAN setup straight. Some hints to make sure all is well are here.

Next, install SpamAssasin.
$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan[1]> install Mail::SpamAssassin
quit

Use the System Preferences of OS X to create a user named spamfilter. Give it a random password and make sure the user isn’t allowed to administer the system.

To work around a couple of issues with the way postfix deals with the return values of filters we’ll create a little script that will do the filtering.

# Clean up when done or when aborting.
trap "rm -f /tmp/out.$$" 0 1 2 3 15
# Pipe message to spamc
cat | /usr/bin/spamc -u spamfilter > /tmp/out.$$
/usr/sbin/sendmail -i "$@" < /tmp/out.$$
# Postfix returns the exit status of the Postfix sendmail command.
exit $?

Next we make sure that spamd is started whenever the system boots. For this we simply create an entry in the StartupItems – a tar file with the necessary instructions can be found on the SpamAssassin Wiki.

Now you need to make sure that SpamAssassin is called from postfix; edit /etc/postfix/master.cf with the following two changes. First make sure that smtp over inet looks like this

smtp inet n - n - - smtpd
    -o content_filter=spamfilter:dummy

and then add an entry for the spamfilter:

spamfilter unix - n n - - pipe
    flags=Rq user=spamfilter argv=/usr/local/bin/spamfilter -f ${sender} -- ${recipient}

the last line starting with flags=Rq is actually one line; this WordPress theme makes it a little hard to render this correctly.

Run postfix reload to force postfix to read the new configuration and watch your logfiles to make sure that spamd is called correctly (remember that you need to start spamd as root in the background – or you can just reboot which will take care of that as well). Your /var/log/mail.log file should contain entries like this:

spamd[???]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 49671
spamd[???]: spamd: setuid to spamfilter succeeded
spamd[???]: spamd: processing message for spamfilter:???

The final step is now to filter the spam mail from your normal mail flow. I prefer to use procmail for that. A simple entry like this in your .procmailrc file should do the trick (but that depends on the folder layout of your preferred mail client… as I mentioned before, I prefer mutt. In that case this should work:

PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/bin:.
SPAMMAIL=$HOME/Mail/spam

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*
$SPAMMAIL


With this all mail with a Spam-Level of five or more will not be in your normal inbox but instead in a mailbox named spam in your mail folder.

As always, corrections and suggestions for improvement are welcome.

Ok, we got some new information to work with:

• Cisco decided to sue Apple for using their iPhone trademark without permission.
• You can’t buy / download iTunes over the phone.
• You can’t sync wirelessly with your computer.
• You can’t load applications of your choice (with the exception of Java applets in the browser).
• Most likely that means you can’t use the email provider of your choice (again, with the exception of browser based email).

I’m beginning to be less excited – and back to wanting to figure out how to fix the few issues that annoy me about the Motorola Ming… it’s not looking that bad in comparison

I’m sure we’ll learn more in the coming days (and then again in a few months when this finally becomes available as a product). Let’s see if they allow real “tests” before then (and not just fan-boy-writeups).

And, puzzling as it may seem, it is called the iPhone, even though Cisco/Linksys just recently released their iPhone. Trademarks are fun. And apparently neither Cisco/Linksys nor Apple really own the trademark in the US.

Technology wise Apple certainly seems to have lived up to the hype. And then some. A combination of a cell phone, the wide screen video iPod we’ve been waiting for, plus maybe the coolest mobile web pad, yet. All this with what appears to be a really cool user interface and running a full-fledged OS (which is what I like so much about my Motorola A1200 / Ming). Only this is Mac OS X, which in my mind has the best user experience of all the OSs out there.

But let’s do a comparison with the Motorola Ming. Contrary to the Ming, the iPhone supports EDGE and not just GPRS, has an incredibly smooth user interface (at least from what you can tell from the demos on Apple’s site) and is integrated into the iTunes infrastructure. Oh, almost forgot. It also has 802.11b/g WIFI.

The Ming on the other hand has a Micro SD card (i.e., you can expand the memory for cheap – but admittedly that’s limited to 2GB today). It allows you to install your own applications (but see my posting on the lack of an active developer community). And is available today (well, over the internet or in stores in South East Asia) and works on all GSM networks, not just on Cingular (which is one of the biggest issues I see with the iPhone).

I guess this summarizes a lot of the differences between a Linux Desktop system and a Mac. The Linux system is much more open and flexible, easily available and comparably cheap. The Mac provides an awesome user interface in a rather closed environment; DRM encrusted, but with strong support from “premium content owners”.

It will be interesting to see the response of the market and the end users. I certainly am excited. Which doesn’t mean that I’ll buy one and switch wireless providers. But I’ll look at it.

Oh, the stock market seems to like it so far. As I write this Apple shares are up more than 8% to a new all time high.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that I posted about the number of undesirable bots crawling my site. Over the last few days suddenly the number of genuine bots has just exploded. I’m back to more than two thirds of the requests coming from bots (actually closer to 80% at this point). I’m wondering if this is normal – and if I am spending too much time watching my log files :-)

I can identify at least eight different blog aggregators scanning my feeds – Technorati takes the price for most impatient with an access every ten minutes. I see a similar number of search engines, at least two of them getting thoroughly confused by my old Blosxom sites (that I mostly leave around so that they are available for people who have linked to them). As a result these bots are searching very odd URLs that are valid but redundant. I wonder if this helps or hurts my page ranking…

738 requests from Google in a day seems just a wee bit overkill. I am not posting THAT much. And I have a sitemap that theoretically tells Google which URLs to crawl and how frequently they are likely to change. Heck, it’s a protocol that they invented!

People are writing a lot about the fact that a large part of the internet traffic is spam. I am beginning to wonder how much of the web traffic is actual end users compared to bots crawling.

One thing puzzles me. Lots of people bought the Motorola Ming (or A1200 as it is also called). Lots of people are trying to make it work better, mostly with hacks (see the majority of the postings at MotorolaFans.Com). But there isn’t really a developer community that is writing software for it and addresses the issues that people are having.

Why? Simple. While Linux is open source and Motorola of course follows the rules of the GPL and makes the necessary sources available, they are not making available the necessary tools to build your own firmware image and flash it onto the phone. So even though I see that the calendar sucks (gee – you can’t tell from looking at it if a meeting starts on the hour or half past the hour? You’re kidding me!), I can’t simply replace it. Even though there are many small fixes that I’d like to apply (the battery meter is simply terrible; charge the phone for ten minutes and it shows fully charged, only to drop down to “red – about to die” after powering it on for 30 minutes – that’s useless), I can’t fix this.

I understand the need to control the radio stack and the access to the SIM and many issues concerning the network interaction. So put those in a signed binary and have the hardware refuse to operate when the signature of that binary can’t be verified. Tivo figured that out many years ago. But give us access to the smart part of this smartphone. I bet that if Motorola did that the community would come together and create the killer applications that would make more people want to buy this rather expensive phone. Which is clearly in Motorola’s best interest.

Unfortunately, it seems they don’t get it. Maybe this would be a way to address the issues that caused their stock price to drop like a rock last week…

I have a Motorola Ming and occasionally use it as wireless modem for my MacBook Pro. If you look around, most people will tell you that GPRS gets you 28-64kbit/s with 56kbit/s being the value typically quoted. This isn’t very fast (standard analog modem speed) but should be good enough for occasional use. Yet, almost every time I try I am very disappointed with the transfer speed (and yes, my 7Mbit/s link at home most likely spoiled me).

Doing some more reading on GPRS finally helped me understand why theory and reality appear so far apart. It turns out that GPRS throughput degrades dramatically with distance to the transmission tower. Coverage drops down to 25% if the transmission tower enables the faster transmission schemes. So unless you happen to sit close to the next antenna, forget reaching decent speeds

Too bad the Ming doesn’t support EDGE. There are some rumors that the hardware is capable of doing so and that it is just not enabled in the software, but so far no one has been able to confirm that.

Who would have thought of a minivan as an accessory to a cell phone? I now do – even though the word accessory seems to imply something smaller than the device you are accessorizing; and the Motorola Ming is quite a bit smaller than the minivan :-)

We just bought a Toyota Sienna which has Bluetooth connectiviy for the hands-free speaker/microphone combo that is also used for the navigation system. I know this is the way it’s supposed to be, but given that it’s a Linux device I was thrilled to see this work without a problem.

Turn on Bluetooth on the Ming first, then select Telephone and Settings on the display of the navigation system. It will tell you to search for “Handsfree” device and to type in the passcode that it display. In the Bluetooth app on the Ming, click on search. It will find “Handsfree” and ask for the passcode. Type it in, hit ok and bingo, the phone and the car are now talking.

It does all the things you’d expect (dial the phone, even with voice commands, pick up the phone when it rings). But the coolest thing is that it even plays the ringtones that I have installed on the phone over the car speakers. Nice.

I marvel about genius in almost any area. And in the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I am typing this post on a Macbook Pro and that this blog is currently hosted on a Mac Mini. Having said that, I must tip my hat to the genius behind Apple’s marketing and their ability to get grown men (and women) to speculate on the wildest ideas of what Apple might reveal at whatever the next event might be.

This time it’s MacWorld (not sure how long the link will work – they notoriously restructure their site towards the event). And since Steve Jobs has a keynote there, the fans and fan sites are in a frenzy. Once again there will be multiple live blogs from the event, people lined up out the door at 6 in the morning to get in, and more hype and show than one could possibly imagine. Even financial analysts are now joining the speculation game and have been writing for months and months about the allegedly upcoming Mac Phone (which most of them kept calling iPhone even tough Apple doesn’t own that trademark and to add insult to injury, a few weeks ago Cisco’s Linksys launched a product under that name) .

The question is really “why do I want this?” – very often “merged” devices are mediocre in either of their personalities. Cell phones are really hard to get right – and anyone who has tried different phones knows that especially the sound quality is a major obstacle for many startup vendors to get right with cell phones. The Motorola Ming (A1200) that I have used for the last few months is just outstanding in this area. Assuming reasonable signal strength (another one of the areas where it is obviously easy to get things wrong – I couldn’t even get a signal in my house with a Samsung phone I had a while ago) the Ming sounds just outstanding. Even more impressive is the quality of its noise cancellation circuits: I can call people from the car using the wired headset that was included with the phone and most people don’t even realize that I am driving. Add to that good functionality as GPRS modem and you get a pretty convincing package. That’s the baseline that Apple has to compete with on the phone side of the equation (I’m pretty sure they can get the iPod side right… duh). And if it doesn’t measure up there, why spend a lot of money on such a phone compared to the iPod we all already have (well, an amazing number of people do) and the cell phone we are happy with.

I’m curious what they’ll come up with – and any other news that might break next week… the rumored eight core Mac Pros sound like just the image processing machine for me… :-)