|
Menu
- News
- Games
- Forums
- Tools
- Notepad
- About the Portal
My Projects
- TF2 Server
- The Multiwinia Ladder
- Flamebot
- GameIRC
- GuideGridTool
- BakaMailer
- SVN
Linkbox
- Xfire
- Last.fm
- Opera Unite
- My Anime List
- My Manga List
- VJ JV
|
| Stuff worth posting about - Jelco - Fri 29 Jan |
I'm lacking proper material to post about but recently there have been some developments which might have some purpose in posted form.
First, I created BakaMailer, a simple e-mail notification system that lets you know when Baka-Updates announces new anime or manga releases. They don't have this service themselves because they seem to be afraid of running out of bandwidth or something (honestly, even with a userbase such as theirs it would be quite a feat if you'd actually use up a significant amount of bandwidth with simple e-mails). I wanted it, so I made it. For those who care, the system itself is written in Python, the webinterface in PHP. Both interface with the same MySQL database. Why not do the webinterface in Python as well? While I think Python is one of the best languages out there, it isn't made to work out-of-the-box for designing websites and I couldn't be bothered with frameworks such as Django for the moment. PHP might not be the best language in existence, but for quick and dirty website coding it's the go-to language.
In other news, I'm going to be working on a leaderboard system for the open-source Worms clone Wormux. I have yet to even start the design, let alone the coding, but I'm looking forward to starting on this project and updates will be released in due time.
In life outside computers, I finished my second exam period at Uni. Two exams and one dreadful boring meeting which had absolutely not use at all. I think I have a chance of passing all my subjects, some more than others, but I'm glad it's over nonetheless. I'll be celebrating it this weekend with a full day of technical nerding for one of the associations I'm part of on Saturday, and an Enter Shikari concert in Amsterdam on Sunday (with free entrance in my case even).
One of the events I'm helping set up (a 50-person LAN party spanning a weekend in a faculty building) is drawing closer and closer, and I'm currently communicating with several parties for the networking and power equipment. Fun stuff! This event will take place from Friday 5 until Sunday 7 March. In addition to that, I have a 30 Seconds to Mars concert on Tuesday March 2nd, and my birthday is Thursday March 4th. I'm looking forward to the week already.
Talking of concerts, my schedule:
- 31/01: Enter Shikari
- 02/03: 30 Seconds to Mars
- 25/03: Airbourne
- 25/06 - 27/06: Graspop 2010 (got my ticket a couple of days ago)
- 29/06: Mark Knopfler
I love my life.
Jelco
|
|
| Like choosing a simple lock over a vault door - Jelco - Thu 24 Dec |
I've been using my @portal42.net address as my mail e-mail address for a couple of years now, but have always been too lazy to set up Gmail to use One.com's SMTP server for sending the e-mail. (One.com was my webhost since 2006 until I transferred the domain into private administration at Godaddy.com.) Gmail can insert any e-mail addres you want into the From: header of e-mails, as long as you can verify you indeed have access to that address. However, to prevent itself from getting blacklisted by spamfilters, it still inserts a Sender: header with the actual Gmail address to tell the receiving mail server that the e-mail wasn't actually sent by an official mail server for the address in the From: header. Generally this is fine but Microsoft's Outlook and derivatives portray this in a horrible manner in their layout. Instead of simply crediting the address in the From: header as the sender (like any other sane mail application ever created) it credits the address in the Sender: header and only names the other address as having ordered the mail to be sent. It looks like this:
From: address@gmail.com On Behalf Of Your Name
Yes, it doesn't even cite the e-mail address, just the name that is sent along with it. Now generally this wouldn't be such a huge problem if not for the fact that I wanted to send mail with my portal42.net address to mask my gmail address. My Google username is an old nickname which I've mostly abandoned by now, but I can't create a replacement account with my new nickname because "jelco" is 5 characters and Google enforces a 6-characters-minimum policy on usernames. Hence my desire to mask the address.
For a long time I didn't set this up properly because I didn't care enough - few people I mail still use any Outlook-ish application anyway. However, with setting up a new mail server I decided I'd give it a go and configure Gmail to send e-mail through the portal42.net server so that it can finally abandon the stupid Sender: header practice.
I've been tinkering with this for a long while and in the end it was set up properly, but Gmail simply refused to work. For those who want to get technical, I'm using exim4 on debian lenny and set up SMTP AUTH with TLS with the minimal required configuration tweaks. My test with the locally installed copy of Outlook 2007 worked fine, but Gmail didn't budge and kept saying my server was being stupid.
After about two hours of experimenting, the solution turned out to be as simple as turning off secure authentication. Not on my server's end, but on Gmail's end. Keeping in mind that Outlook authenticates perfectly fine over TLS and the exim logs didn't even say anything about Gmail trying to initiate a connection (and failing), this seems like a very strange outcome. In the end I've come to the conclusion that Gmail probably doesn't understand TLS and tries SSL instead. I'm not sure why Google did this. It seems like one of the most unprofessional shortcomings I've seen in one of Google's products in a long time (except Google Wave probably, in which the biggest unprofessional shortcoming is the reason someone ever made such a useless and overhyped nonsense product). Setting up exim to use SSL next to TLS seems like it shouldn't be necessary (most tutorials claim you inadvertedly set up SSL when you set up TLS) but I've tested it with Outlook and that confirms that currently my server doesn't answer to SSL. It's probably doable and I'll definitely look into it, but that doesn't disguise the fact that on this end, Google fails miserably with authentication support. There's a good reason everything has TLS support these days, and not only is it best practice to prefer the newer technology over the old one, many services have even abandoned SSL in favour of TLS because of its flaws. I'm not saying that my e-mail password needs as much protection as, say, the credentials to my bank account, but it's just stupid to deny one the choice.
In other news, I'm currently home alone here on the University of Twente campus. I'm going back to my parents' for Christmas and will stay until December 30th, but I'm pretty sure if I stay too long my parents and I will just get on each other's nerves again (like it was when I still lived there - moving out of the house is one of the main reasons I wanted to go to Uni so bad). Hence I'm staying here until December 25th, and in that time I've seen the entire campus turn quiet. Currently the only two left in this house of 9 are me and the house cat. What I've found interesting about these days alone is that occasionally it does feel somewhat lonely. This is interesting because until a couple of years ago I was a loner who wouldn't mind being alone up in his room for days. I knew high school changed a lot about me but it hadn't really dawned on me that it'd be this big a difference that I actually miss the company of some housemates after just a few days. I guess that while these are not the most interesting days I've ever spent here, I'm thankful for the experience.
And just to break away from the melancholical spirit: after some stress testing yesterday done by my friends from the Introversion community, we found out my Team Fortress 2 server suffered from the occasional lag. It seems to be solved just about entirely, so if you have some time to spare you're welcome to try out the server! You can connect to tf2.portal42.net:27015 in Steam and it'll do the rest for you.
Jelco
|
|
| Mostly done - Jelco - Sun 20 Dec |
After a rather weird weekend with friends and some issues with transferring my domain, the new server is now officially in use. I've also launched the Team Fortress 2 server which I've been wanting to set up for experimental purposes for quite a while now. (Not that it's going to be a server with a lot of downtime due to lots of fiddling, I just want to see how much it takes to form a community around such a server.)
E-mail sent this afternoon may have gotten lost when the domain's MX records pointed to the wrong servers, but that's been solved now.
At last the transition seems to come to an end.
Jelco
|
|
| On the move... - Jelco - Sun 20 Dec |
For the small number of people who still check up on this site regularly, here's a small message to let you know Portal42 is moving home. The new server is currently working properly in the EvoSwitch datacenter, the only thing left to do is transferring the domain from the current host (One.com) towards my domain-only host (GoDaddy) and setting the DNS records correctly. This will probably take a couple of days to sort out completely, so there's no real practical reason for this post just yet, but at least it's a good opportunity to put up another post of sorts on this website.
I'm currently busy moving another important website to the new server, namely the Multiwinia Ladder. I'm currently halfway moving the thing, it will probably go back up tomorrow afternoon. Fortunately, most of the moving proves to be easier than expected, although working with altered hosts files to configure domains not yet moved by DNS has shown to be pretty confusing at times. At least it's fun work and some good experience.
Jelco
|
|
| Status update - Jelco - Sun 20 Dec |
Well it's been a little quiet on this front lately, for which I apologize. Life has gotten a little busy, with me finally having subjects in Uni which I can't finish solely on prior knowledge (that's what the first quarter was), becoming active in a couple of committees and, since two weeks, a proper job of 10 hours a week. This website will get slightly more active though, or at least I hope it will be.
If all goes right, the new server for this website and the Multiwinia Ladder will be placed in the data center next Wednesday, after which it'll take about a week to move this website to that server. The Ladder will take slightly more effort but should be moved about halfway through december (if only because the old server is permanently taken down on the 12th). I have some new material which will be launched shortly after the new P42 goes live, so stay tuned!
Sadly I've decided to abandon hope of finishing the Graspop and USA post-mortems since I simply don't have the motivation to dedicate that much time to either anymore. If I feel generous I might post the Graspop post-mortem in its current state (finished up to Friday) but it's not really conclusive so it feels a bit wrong.
More news will probably follow soon!
Jelco
|
|
|
