Monday, 5th July, 2004

tra la la

Minor server-cockup update: Got postfix working (sorta) Not sure if it's accepting mail from the outside yet, and also haven't a clue why my DNS has just gone phut

more coffee I think...

...

I should explain exactly why I'm doing this I think. It's true that everything was working OK ... well actually, that's not true. MacOSX 10.2 Server was a bit shitty to be honest. Some of the Unix implementations were pants — and the AppleMailServer was absolutely rubbish. On top of that, the sharepoints were fscked as well.

With Panther Server, everything is fab and groovy (almost). The reason I had such a headache with postfix yesterday (and this morning) is cos I'd already replaced the standard mailserver with a version of postfix I got via fink.

So Erin got confused as to which instance of postfix she was supposed to be using.

What I've done this morning, is to go through and strip out any reference to the instance is /sw that there was, sort out the alias databases and the virtual tables, and it seems to be all happy. I still have a bit of a hiccup with mail looping — if I set $myorigin to $mydomain rather than $myhostname then she complains that the mail loops back to herself — but all I've done is set up a virtual domain with my main domain name, and at some point I'll configure address masquerading...

...confused? Yeah, me too

But, in my defence, can I just say that I was astonishingly surprised that my webserver, MySQL and everything else upgraded without any hitch whatsoever. And the shares are all set up fine. So yay!

...

It's a gorgeous day today I had a bit of an odd start to the morning — I had a really bad dream and woke up with a fright at 5am, then couldn't get back to sleep. When I did eventually, I had another bad dream involving Freddie Kruger — which was a bit poo.

But seeing as how it's so beautiful out there, and how I've managed to get today's task #1 done, I'm going to sit out in the yard for a bit (and lament on how messy and yuk it is out there)

Then I'm going to attempt task #2 — which is a lot easier (if a lot scarier) than task #1.

And then I'm going to wear a dress

(actually, maybe not — there's someone coming round later and I don't think being in Princess Mode™ would be a good idea)

...

Random photos, inspired by Biscuit:

aw Look at Biscuit — she's cross cos I just took all the bedding off the bed to wash it...

...not to be outdone, George (predictably) climbs into a box:

...

Right, I was going to try and link these two trains of thought together in a fantastic, and seamless link. But I can't be arsed

Food:

(Or rather, how to make a meal costing 27p)

OK, first thing is to go to the supermarket late in the evening. That way you'll catch the reduced-price bread. I just got myself a lovely loaf for 25p, and although it's wholemeal (yuk — hippy-crap) it's just as good as the 80p loaf that was on sale a couple of hours ago.

Secondly, you have to suspend all snobbish tendancies and buy cheapo 'economy' stuff. Baked beans (oh crap — you can see where this is going can't you?) cost about 11p, and corned beef costs about 39p.

Toast the bread, stick half of the corned beef into a tub with half of the beans, microwave it for two minutes and then pour it onto the toast ... hey presto — corned beef hash on toast

(OK, so it's not really corned beef hash, but it was very yummy)

And what's more, you've got enough to make tea the next night too pats self on back

...

Actually, I can tie these thoughts together — on the way back from the shops I was thinking about genericism. I was musing over the idea of buying stacks of cheap food, decanting it into containers and not bothering with the idea of branded foods. Which got me thinking about brands in general. Now, I know that Kellogs Corn Flakes are better than Sainsburys Economy Corn Flakes (Katie, ssssh. Corn Flakes are fab ), but are they really £1 better?

Take my cat-food for example. Now, if I go to the shops, I can buy Iams in nice big orange bags, all lovelyly branded or I can go to the pet shop round the corner, buy Iams in bulk in clear plastic bags, and get it at about a third of the price ... hmmm

I have a little mental image in my head you see, of a kitchen full of containers with Stuff in them — but no brands.

So, my enthusiasm for genericism is great — but it has one major big anomoly.

Apple

Would I even dream of buy a computer that didn't have a piece of fruit with a byte (LOL) out of it on the side? Not on your life

So yeah, my theory is flawed. But then again, I'm probably a flawed person, so actually my theory fits quite well

Kylie writes:

Have you ever tried Tesco value beans ????

Someone from down South writes:

Postfix probably needs a good tweaking and I'll look at it when I can. Got a lot of spam coming through at the moment 'cos none of the tweaks that were done for Sendmail are working with Postfix.

DNS server seems to be answering queries at the moment though.

Oops, I've blown my cover now! writes:

Can you say "Barbie pink teeny string bikini?"

http://www.coffee.co.uk/images/SarahPink1.jpg

Hee hee — Nice bikini

Actually, I've been doing quite a lot of spam-control on it this evening. I stuck in some smtp restrictions — nothing major, just non-reverse-dns blocking and a RTBL. And I'm half-way through installing SpamAssassin, so things should get a little better

Can I just give a quick example of how lazy I am though? I needed some software that's on a disk in a box somewhere in this house. But I couldn't be arsed to go look for it, so I'm downloading the 600MB disk image from Apple's servers