February 2008 Archives

Ralph Lawson's doing an all-nighter tomorrow at the Sub. I am positively wibbling in anticipation.
Me and Koof went to Leeds ages ago to see him at Basics, but didn't have the foresight to check whether or not he was actually playing that night. Needless to say he was, in fact, not.

I refuse to be disappointed twice.

If you need to find me, I'll be the guy in front of the DJ booth alternating between jumping around a lot and meerkating over the plexiglass to try to find out just where the fuck you get records like that.

I've sorted out the account signups for this here blog, so you should be able to sign in / retrieve passwords etc. now. See below if you're really interested in what the problem was. The blog software has also been upgraded to the latest stable release, but it shouldn't make any difference from where you're sitting. Anyway, normal people can stop reading.... now.

(I'm posting this, because I've seen a number of people on forums who've had the same issue I did, and none of the threads were answered. Hopefully Google will pick this post up.)
The main problem with the signups was that the return address hadn't been specified in MT, so the emails weren't being sent out to external addresses. Unfortunately, MT doesn't appear to email errors to the admin, so I didn't know about this until Koof pointed out that he couldn't sign up. Once that was fixed I created a new account with my work address as the email address, but the email bounced off the Exchange server with a 500 error for an invalid Return-Path.

MT (on Linux at least) sends mail through the sendmail utility (Postfix in my case) as the webserver user, so it wasn't setting the envelope address sensibly. This meant that everything appeared to be coming from the (unresolvable) local-network hostname, which was correctly rejected as invalid by the remote side. To fix this you can set up Postfix to re-write the envelope headers by editing /etc/postfix/generic, and adding, e.g.:
webserveruser@localhostname.localdomain webmaster@example.com
Then add:
smtp_generic_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/generic
to /etc/postfix/main.cf if it's not already there, then run:
postmap /etc/postfix/generic
and
killall -HUP master
to make the changes stick. Once that's done, mail from the webserver user will appear to come from webmaster@example.com and all should be well.

Dan of the legendary Dan's Data has got himself into an Internet fight with some idiots who really don't want you to see their marketing bumph. You can read about the whole amusing mess here, then here, and finally (for now) here.

Here at ILikeJam we like Dan, and so have heeded his request that the bumph be made available far and wide.
I give you the Firepower Pill marketing PDF. Long may the Streisand effect continue.

Holy Jesus, My ISP sucks. They were recently bought out by the dreaded Tiscali, and it's all gone down hill since then. I'm currently throttled down to ~70kB/s, which is a tenth of what I was getting before. That's when I'm connected at all, of course. The last two Sundays the router couldn't authenticate, so no Internub for me.

It's not all bad news, though. No Sir.
Turns out the exchange my phone line hangs off is available to Be, so I can get some obscenely fast ADSL on the go. According to my calculations, I should get around 14Mb/s downstream, with a following wind. That's about twice what I was getting before Pipex fell on its arse, and about twenty times what I'm getting right now.

In short, Pipex/Tiscali can bite the big one. I'm grabbing my MAC and putting my Nike Airs on.

For some reason I'd never actually watched a Woody Allen film, but I always found the quotes attributed to him deeply amusing so I got the DVD of Annie Hall.
I was expecting it to be a bit underwhelming - y'know, largely average with occasional moments of vague mirth. It's been described as a 'quintessential masterpiece' which, to be honest, makes me think of 3 hour Art House epics where no-one does anything, and the crescendo of the whole affair is a 2 second cut-away to a completely unrelated scene in a swimming pool*.

No chance. The man's a genius. I nearly laughed my ass clean off. Rent it, buy it, whatever. Seriously.

In other entertainment related happenings, I'm guilty of indulging in some pop-indie type music in the form of MGMT - Time to Pretend. I think it's the synth that's doing it for me.
To atone for my sins, I've signed up for Fabric First to get Fabric CDs delivered direct to my place of residence on a regular basis. Good Times.

* - Sorry. I used to watch a lot of obscure films at obscure times on obscure channels, drunk, changing phase from early to nigh shifts.