Seeking, seizing the Kingdom

I’m using pfSense as a firewall/router here at home.  It’s working quite well, far better than my day-and-a-half struggle trying to get m0n0wall going (clue for m0n0wall devs: make an install disk!).  pfSense isn’t perfect, but it’s got some nice features.  The one feature I wish it had was the –enable-password-save build switch for openvpn.  Anyway, I went to upload an audio file to my web host this morning, and realized that FTP was badly broken.  Fortunately, I quickly found the setting that made it all better.  Under System->Advanced, enable “FTP RFC 959 data port violation workaround” under the heading “Traffic Shaper and Firewall Advanced”.  Save and that’s it.  I’m happily uploading my file now.

For those who may not know, procmail is a email processing program, very fully featured, very powerful, not user-friendly in the slightest.  Why use it?  Because it processes and sorts your mail before you go to read it, which is a fantastic thing.  But why in 17 years hasn’t someone come up with a better, less cryptic syntax for such features.  Writing my procmailrc is such a pain, getting the little-known syntax just right.  Most of the guys who write about procmail “recipies” on the web are just trying to show off their sheer “geekness”, that they have somehow come to understand a mystery thought equal to that of the female psyche (but at least there is some documentation for procmail).

When I am rich (God, please not famous), I would like to write a procmail alternative, written in Ada, of course.  Don’t hold your breath for this one.

Maildir is *much, much* faster than mbox using IMAP.  Snag yourself a copy of Courier IMAP and stop waiting for your e-mail!

Carol (whose last name shall remain… well, nameless) from Shiloh requested that I remove her last name from my blogroll. Even though her picture is posted for all to see, the last name is off-limits. Here’s to Carol, our paranoid person of the week!

Today is the first Monday after DST came to rob me of that hour of sleep I needed. The company I’m with, Singo Solution, is based in Arizona. They unlike most of the rest of the world are smart enough to ignore DST altogether, which is great for them, but now they’re 2 hours behind me instead of one.
(more…)