Community Matters

So after my personal blog I now also moved the technical blog to WordPress.

As in the first case there are again a few things to point out:

• in order for existing links to continue to work (and search engines to continue to be able to find old postings), the old blog will stay online, but won’t be updated anymore. In order to get to the Community Matters blog in the future you’ll have to use the new URL http://www.hohndel.org/communitymatters.
• if you are using a feed reader like Bloglines or Netvibes or if you are using the RSS readers built into modern browsers like Firefox or Safari, you’ll have to resubscribe to this blog. I know that’s a pain, but given the way WordPress creates the feed, trying to use ModRewrite to make this happen automagically turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. On the plus side, you can subscribe to the nice new Atom feed (which most of those readers should pick up by simply clicking on that link Update: it seems that some readers want this as http reference instead of a feed reference as in the previous link – please try either).

Any problems, issues, complaints, compliments, praise, concerns for my mental health, etc… please leave a comment on the new site using this link.

This will also be the last posting to the old Blosxom blog. :-)

Wow, now that I have the blog at Intel, I seem to be writing less here again. Go figure…

As I mentioned in my personal blog, my Mac Mini died a sudden and untimely death yesterday morning. And that Mini (Intel based, of course) has been the server for both email and blogs here at hohndel.org. Oops.

While I wait for the Mini to be fixed, I decided to migrate everything to my desktop system (a G5 Dual-Core PowerMac). Getting the web server up and running was almost trivial: make the system have an alias on the correct internal IP address (the one that the firewall sends all external traffic to). Since I used that system as my internal “staging area” for the blogs everything else was already there.

Getting the mailserver set up, however, was a different experience. For the Mini I had simply paid ten dollars for the very well done Postfix Enabler. That sets up both postfix and an imap daemon. But since this was going to be a very temporary solution, I figured I’d just hack it myself (after all, I had set up postfix on Linux many many times).

Since anything on the web tends to stay around, let’s start pointing out that these comments are about Mac OS X 10.4.7 (the latest version of Tiger as of this writing).

The oddities begin with the firewall setup in the System Preferences. There are no default settings to allow smtp through (nor domain name service, which was the other internal service I had to enable, but after opening that port in the firewall that was fairly straight forward). Adding them isn’t hard, but it seems like something Apple should add a default for.

In order to set up postfix as a simple recipient for my domains and as a simple forwarder using my ISP’s relay-host was easy (just a few edits to the postfix/main.cf file) and worked right away on the localhost interface. But any connection attempt to one of the external addresses of the system failed. I checked and re-checked postfix/main.cf. And it literally took me an hour to figure out that there was a second set of entries at the very end of the file for some of the key variables under the heading THE FOLLOWING DEFAULTS ARE SET BY APPLE. And those overwrote the setting for inet_interfaces that I had changed earlier in the file (at it’s normal place in the file).

I already complained to an Apple software developer whom I know, but please, if any of you know someone inside Apple’s software team… please tell them to fix this (or at least add a pointer to that location at the end of the file in the part of the file that documents each of these options).

Needless to say, after that change everything worked smoothly. I’d just like to prevent anyone else from having to waste their time.

Yet Another Blog – this time at work, i.e., at Intel. It’s called Is this bugging you, yet? and focuses on issues around open source, both from a developer as well as from an ecosystem standpoint. Some overlap with this blog (maybe), but likely more focused on the topics that I care about in an Intel context (but certainly not expressing Intel’s thoughts on those topics).

As expected there are some rules involved when blogging at Intel that thankfully don’t apply when blogging under my own domain. Still the goals is to make this interesting, as the title might suggest :-)

Ok, I haven’t had a Dell laptop since the 11 pound Inspiron I was lugging in 2000, but still… the idea of a laptop exploding in my lap? I don’t know…

Thankfully I use a MacBook Pro as my work computer these days and Apple is quite clear about the fact that this Laptop is not intended for you lap: “Do not place your MacBook on your lap or other body surface for extended periods of time”. Thanks, folks, after seeing the article above, I just might keep that in mind…

I’ve seen these on Comedy Central a couple of times now. VW ads that I think are supposed to be funny. They aren’t even on VW’s own website, but Karen found them on Adverblog. They are so terrible that they almost upset me. If you want to make fun of Germans (or if you are a German company that wants to advertise in the US by making fun of Germans), please at least try to get someone with a credible German accent. And have a story line that at least remotely pretends to make some sort of sense or be funny.

Maybe I’m just too old.

My main blog focuses mainly on my personal life and my family – the people interested in those topic are quite clearly not the same people who’d be interested in my thoughts on technology, open source, and the communities around them. Which is why I decided to split my blog in two…