Saw a great banner on "the greatest .nl forum of all ISP and webhosters" …

What’s that, a USB card reader with a dedicated server in it? If so, this could be a great solution for cooling and rackspace issues…

testing.bitlbee.org is back since a few days… on a machine owned and hosted by yours truly. After the project suffered loss of their main testing public server due to hardware failure I stepped up to offer new hosting; as soon as the files were recovered from the other machine the server was put up again. Feel free to use it (or my other IM server, running stable bitlbee, at im.codemonkey.be) for all your Bitlbee needs. Happy IM’ing!

Okay, that may be a slight overreaction, but there’s surely a surge of new versions fixing security holes these days ;(

Via IRC, a project started by the Openminds people to demonstrate and test Ruby-on-rails (+ Google Maps) at Barcamp. It’s a Euro bill tracker, where people (like myself) enter serial numbers for their Euro bills, hopefully that same bill will come into other people’s hands who will also use the site and boom, a Euro bill flightplan is born. Some rough edges still have to be cut, but it’s already Web 2.0’ish as it is 😉 Let’s start tracking!

Update: Woopsie, forgot to mention the URL, it’s 7bills.eu ofcourse 😉 

Prepare for another blog storm… first a nice tip I found on this page …

Sometimes I use mutt to read my mail, which nicely autodecrypts and checks pgp/gpg signatures. But then I’d need to retrieve everybody’s public key, like the Ubuntu security etc (which I couldn’t find anywhere by the way), but no more! gnupg now automatically retrieves keys from the keyserver you specify just by adding keyserver-options “auto-key-retrieve” into ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf.

I don’t know if this makes it any less secure though… but WorksForMe(tm) 

Today is talk like a pirate day !

A few weeks ago I discovered pandora.com, a site like last.fm which is probably somewhat more well-known.

You enter an artist or a song, and based upon that the site creates a radio station with similarly sounding music. They have some bizarre but at the same time cool licensing going on which doesn’t allow you to listen to the exact song you want, can’t skip back in the list, and only skip ahead x times per hour, but I’ve created a few stations (Tiga, 2 Many DJ’s, Tiesto and Vitalic), they have a pretty varying bunch of tunes… Songs you don’t like you can vote down and they probably won’t be played again. Songs you like can be voted up and will return. Been using it at work for background music for quite a while now.

Oh, by the way.. you have to live in US to be allowed to use it. Hey Beverly Hills (*cough* 90210), here I come 😉

I’ve been working on upgrading my mail gateway setup to something a little more decent, and as of tonight (in my new testsetup) I’ve implemented relay recipient maps in postfix. Should be way better the gateway mailqueue and also for the internet as a whole, since I won’t be generating any more blowback like I am doing now (when mailing to a nonexisting address, the gateway accepts the mail, tries to deliver, then creates a bounce message and tries to deliver that one, usually trying to email nonexisting users or innocent bystanders whose From: address was forged). Also implemented some SNMP polling for queue size, more to follow. Yay. 🙂

 PS: Thanks to DaViper for providing me with a virtual machine and a subnet to host my off-net DNS and Mailgateway on, much appreciated!

Hmm, not too many updates lately. Been wanting to write some stuff for a while now but haven’t really had the chance, and I wanted to do it right. Anyway, expect some more articles Real Soon Now(tm) 🙂