Call me Coven
“…the public demands random nouns and middle initials, and will settle for nothing less.”
My Spammer Name is Coven L. Junior. What’s your spammer name? (via Kevan)
The Mail Dilemma
One of the side-effects of getting my new iMac G5 is that I now have two systems from which I want to read email. I currently use POP to retrieve my mail to the Powerbook. If I move my POP setup to the iMac, I can no longer check my mail from anywhere via the Powerbook. This is compounded by the fact that I currently have 7 POP accounts from which I fetch my mail.
Looking at the list of accounts, there are really only two that I need to access from anywhere. One is my jclark.org address which is published on this site, and is my primary address. The other is an email address provided by my broadband provider; it’s the address I use for all business transactions, including my domain registrations and hosting plan. That has to remain separate from my hosted email accounts, obviously.
So, even If I move all of the other accounts to the iMac as POP accounts, I still have to address which I’d like to be able to access from anywhere (defined as: from the iMac at home and from the Powerbook anywhere). I want to have my old mail available as well, not just new mail. I don’t like webmail; even GMail doesn’t really cut it for me.
So, I’m considering switching to IMAP. I don’t have any experience with IMAP, so I’m not sure how to judge it. The next issue is where to host it. My webhost offers IMAP, and they recently increased my storage limit, so that might be reasonable for my hosted email address. The other address is not hosted there, and I don’t know if there’s a way I could relay it. I’m aware of things like fetchmail, but I don’t know if I could have my host fetch mail from an external account and put it into an IMAP account.
There’s also the possibility of running my own mail server at home. The iMac could likely handle it, but I’ve also got an old box or two that could easily become a mailhost. The problem then becomes one of addressing, as I don’t have a fixed IP address. In reality however, my IP address almost never changes, and I’m sure I could setup a script on the mailhost to update a file on my webhost whenever it does.
The real dilemma here is that I don’t really know enough about the technologies to make an informed decision. I understand the basic differences between IMAP and POP, but I know little about IMAP or how to setup a server. Does IMAP use mbox files? I’m aware of unix-y tools like fetchmail and procmail, but I know little about them. Eventually I’m going to have to spend a bunch of time Googling and reading. Suggestions for a one-stop web (or book) resource covering all of this would be appreciated.
Site Browsing Stats, December 2004
Last month, I posted my browser stats for November 2004. It was so much fun I decided to do it again. No fancy graphs (yet), but maybe one of these days. :
Browser Hits %age
------- ---- ------
FireFox 36593 40.1 %
Internet Explorer 28143 30.8 %
Safari 9464 10.3 %
Unknown 7236 7.9 %
Mozilla 3490 3.8 %
NetNewsWire 2453 2.6 %
Netscape 1106 1.2 %
Opera 936 1.0 %
Konqueror 549 0.6 %
OmniWeb 462 0.5 %
Others 774 0.8 %
Of interest- while Firefox usage is up from 37.9% to 40.1%, IE usage is also (slightly) up, from 30.4% to 30.8%. Safari usage dropped just over 1%, and Camino disappeared. I guess Mac users just get it
One caveat- while the above stats don’t include errors (like the 403’s I’m handing out to abusive bots and a few spamtastic IP addresses, they do include all the spam that isn’t IP banned- whether my comment filter catches it or not. Maybe I’ll work on that this month.
Resolution Wrap-up: 2004
Last January 1st, I decided to break with tradition and make a few resolutions. Last night at midnight, time ran out. So how did I do? Let’s check the score. I’ll also give some thoughts for the upcoming year’s resolutions, but that will be a separate post, after I think it out a bit.
Personal
Spend a little extra time with my kids. I don’t think I do too badly at this now, but why not improve anyway?
This one’s an unqualified success.
Have at least one weekend getaway with my wife… and no children. We’ve been planning this forever, and never seem to get it done.
Another success. Sherri and I spent a weekend at a B&B near Lancaster, PA last winter. It was wonderful; we’re hoping to do it again this year.
Play more Chess (and hopefully improve).
A qualified success. I definately played more in the first quarter of the year, and I think I was even starting to improve. Since that time, however I’ve played next to none.
Write some fiction.
Utter failure… never found the time or inspiration. A good goal to keep for this year, however.
Professional
Finish every last piece of the Client Reporting project.
This turned out not to even be plausible, as business needs changed. This was a poor choice of resolution, in the future I’ll keep any professional resolutions project-nuetral.
Make the whole thing obsolete with a ground-up rewrite, using no VB (build directly in XML via Office 2003 native XML formats).
This turned out not to be possible because Micro$oft once again over-promised and under-delivered; this time promising a native XML format for Excel and delivering a crippled XML format with no support for graphs.
jclark.org
Add timestamps and notifications for comments.
New design. Something a bit less… understated.
Failure. I began work on a new deisgn, but couldn’t decide what I wanted to do. I still want to redesign for this year.
Hit the 300 posts milestone.
70% success. My first post of 2004 was number 100, so I needed to write 200 posts. I managed to deliver 142- in spite of a lengthy blogging hiatus over the summer. Big thanks to dugh for the October Blogging Challenge which helped get me back on track.
Re-organize the categories. Use permanent redirects for moved posts.
Success. For 2005, I want to think about restructuring the blog… moving away from strict categories, and using a ‘tag’ system like del.icio.us uses. This may mean a move away from Blosxom. Also, whatever I do can’t break existing URIs. Still some planning to do.
Add a second, topic specific blog. Potential topics are astronomy, chess, or writing.
I cancelled this one. Having less time for any of my other interests, let alone less time to write for this blog, convinced me of that. Instead, for 2005, I want to start writing some more personal, daily-summary/thoughts posts in addition to the more topical stuff I usually post. More on that idea in another post.
All in all, not a terrible first attempt. Later today, or during the next few days, I’ll post my 2005 list.
Happy New Year!
A happy and healthy 2005 to you all.
Merry Christmas
Here on the East Coast of the US, it’s still Christmas for another 6 minutes or so, so I’m not actually late in saying this :)
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
Site Browsing Stats, November 2004
In honor of the November official launch of Firefox 1.0, and because I happened to be looking at my site stats tonight, here’s the breakdown of the browser usage for this site, as reported by my stats package, awstats. Unknown is anything the package has never heard of, whereas Others are known browsers, too small to list separately. This includes things like wget and curl, and even 57 hits from a pre-Firefox copy of Firebird. :
Browser Hits %age
------- ---- ------
FireFox 34868 37.9 %
Internet Explorer 28008 30.4 %
Safari 10536 11.4 %
Unknown 6080 6.6 %
Mozilla 4103 4.4 %
NetNewsWire 3253 3.5 %
Opera 1744 1.8 %
Netscape 1525 1.6 %
Camino 518 0.5 %
Konqueror 362 0.3 %
Others 861 0.9 %
I’m very proud of my readers for using Firefox far more than Internet Explorer. As to the 30.4%, and you know who you are, go on. Try it. All the cool kids are doing it.
Entropy
Clark’s Restatement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics:
Chaos Ensues.
Give the Gift of Art
Looking for a unique holiday gift? Give the gift of Art, in the form of a signed photography print. My good friend Sean has opened an eBay store just in time for the season. He already has a number of his prints available, and is adding more daily.
I’m putting Moon over Charlotte on my Christmas list. This is one of my favorite photos of his. When I bought my Epson Photo Stylus 960 last winter, I asked Sean to send me a full res TIFF of this shot, to use testing the printer out. I took a 4×6 print of the picture to show to some of my co-workers. It’s been pinned to my office wall ever since, and continues to draw comments from everyone who sees it. The 12″x8″ enlargement has got to be stunning.
Oops
This is what my folder list looked like yesterday on Bloglines. As you can see, I had a lot of unread items. I’ve been slowly catching up for months, but I’m pretty meticulous about reading things if I’m subscribed (eventually). Probably the collecting bug I’ve got.
Anyway, in case you haven’t used Bloglines, inside those folders are individual feed subscriptions. You can expand the folders to read each subscription individually, or you can click on the folder to read all of the items in all of the feeds in that folder. Guess what happens if you click the top-level folder?
I accidently did just that yesterday. Realizing what I had done as soon as I did it, I panicked, and closed Firefox as quickly as I could, hoping the request wouldn’t go through (I was at work, and our web proxy is a dog). Of course, it did go through, and closing the browser was a big mistake. Bloglines now has a feature that lets you mark all articles currently being viewed from a feed as unread… but only when first viewing them. By the time I’d restarted my browser, it was too late. There are a few ways I could have viewed what I’d lost, but no way to recover the state information for future use. I even had the Powerbook running and tuned into Bloglines at the same time- I put Firefox in the Mac into Offline mode, which let me get the screenshot, and I could have used that to see what feeds I needed to review for lost items. In the end, however, I decided to accept the loss of my unread items gracefully, and start over with a clean Bloglines inbox.