My First Week August 31, 2006
Posted by Phillip in : geek , add a commentSo I have now been employed by Novell for four full days. My first week was very, very easy. I traveled on my first day. So other than being stuck in an airplane for 2+ hours next to a 300 lb. sweaty guy, it was an OK day. I *did* have a 45 minute call before I got on the plane, so I guess I did work a little that day. Days 2, 3 and 4 were spent in a training class. I knew that I was going to be going to this class before I even had my formal offer from Novell. I was excited about it when I first heard. It sounded a little touchy-feely, but I was not going to judge! The title of the class is “Strategic Selling/LAMP training” — My idea of what “LAMP” is and the instructor’s idea turned out to be quite a bit different. It turns out I was not learning about the selling points and strategy for providing Open Source / Open Standards solutions built around Linux, Apache, Mysql and Perl/PHP. NO! I was there to learn “Large Account Management Practice”.
So it was probably unfair to the instructor that I started out a little disappointed, but to my amazement I actually enjoyed the class. I think the material is going to be very helpful when it comes to designing and providing solutions for my customers. I am excited to start applying what I have learned.
Anyway — Moving on. Tonight is my last night in Provo and when I get back, I have an offer on my house to review. Hopefully it will be a good offer and we can offload the old homestead and get moved up to the Austin area. We are going to try to roll up there in the next few days and find a new place. From the looks of it, their housing market appears to be flooded, good for me! If we do sell the house, we have a lot of work to do in a fairly short period of time. We don’t have ANYTHING packed and no place lined up to stay. Oh and I don’t have any time off work scheduled. I’m not too worried about the last point though since everyone at Novell (everyone meaning the 5 people that know me) is aware that I am relocating to Austin.
I’ll keep all (3) my anxious readers posted!
postfix+mysql+dovecot=w00t August 28, 2006
Posted by Phillip in : geek , add a commentDuring the entire process of migrating my blog and mail to a new home. I decided to set up a real mail vitural hosting system. Since I was going to be using a server that belongs to a friend, it seemed like the nice thing to do. Anyway, I found a fairly decent howto that described how to deploy just such a system with postfix as the MTA, mysql as the auth backend and dovecot as the LDA. I have used postfix before, and I touched dovecot in the RHCE, so I figured why not! It turned out to be a little tricky as the howto had some significant errors in it. Luckily, after some troubleshooting, I managed to get it working. I even devised a method for doing smtp-auth against the “centralized” mysql database. All and all, I was pretty happy. I went ahead and installed dspam while I was at it to see if I could cut down on the amount of communication I get from the Nigerian Prince that wants me to help him claim his $100000000000000000.00.
The only thing I am missing now is a way to filter my mail into different folders. It is for this reason that I absolutely love cyrus — sieve is probably the best server-side-sorting software out there, IMHO. So I started my google-expedition this morning in search of a way to do server-side filters with dovecot. Much to my surprise and cause for great rejoicing, there a sub-project of dovecot called “dovecot-sieve”. Currently, you can only get the source via CVS. That just means it’s good right?
I saw someone wearing a shirt last week that said “I’d rather be compiling” — I would rather be installing.
*UPDATE*
dovecot-sieve fails to compile! This is a major blow… I am going to have to dig into this a little more, but I am a little discouraged.
A seemless migration! August 24, 2006
Posted by Phillip in : geek , 2 commentsSo I recently learned that since I am departing Rackspace, the price on my server will go up significantly. Since I am a cheap-skate, I have migrated all of my content (blog, email, etc.) to a new location (thanks Cormack!). If you are reading this, it went well.
$100 Laptop August 21, 2006
Posted by Phillip in : geek , add a commentI was browsing CNN last week and came across an article on the $100 laptop. For some reason, the whole concept of a computer, more to the point — a laptop, for $100 always catches my attention. I have read the specs on this $100 laptop and, while I had already come to the conclusion that I could never use one, the article just solidified it.
Here is what *really* did me in:
Yup. That’s a crank on the side. I guess I am just incredibly spoiled with my MacBook Pro and all, but I just couldn’t ever use one of those.
It’s nice they run on linux, but seriously, it has a freakin crank-handle on it!
This just in! August 18, 2006
Posted by Phillip in : geek , add a commentI am digging this:
oh SNAP!
Amused.
Posted by Phillip in : geek , add a commentJust about every morning, I begin by checking out the latest CoolSolutions from Novell. I have done this for the past year and even managed to have one of my own published. At any rate, this caught my eye this morning:
I followed the link and read a short tip about how when you delete an application object through ConsoleOne it doesn’t always remove all traces of the app. Interesting stuff if you are into that sort of thing.
I thought ConsoleOne was “The App that Won’t Go Away.” ;-)