Slicehost Blogroll

Projects ≫ How-To's ≫ Zen Garden

2008-08-28T12:36:56+00:00

Isn't that nifty...

Projects ≫ How-To's ≫ God's Eye

2008-08-28T12:35:29+00:00

Projects ≫ Creations ≫ Storytime Bookmarks

2008-08-28T12:33:40+00:00

Fun bookmarks made from formica chip samples

Projects ≫ Creations ≫ Measuring Tape Bracelet

2008-08-28T10:47:33+00:00

Measure up!

Writers’ Resources: Elite Guard Dogs

2008-08-28T07:13:56+00:00

If you’re interested in writing about thieves at the top of their game, you might find it interesting to know how the super-wealthy protect themselves. For example, a German shepherd from a security services firm will cost $40,000. What kind of face-ripper does that buy you? Here’s what one customer says…

“We have a little girl who wants to play with our dogs–constantly. She crawls in their cage and rubs their belly. We call our grandson ‘crocodile guy’ because he likes to get them down and pry open their mouths. The dogs are totally sweet.”

The journalist adds: “The dog gently nudges my hand, licks my fingers and, though we met only a couple of hours ago, he obeys my every command. All the while his vibrant eyes beam up at me, dancing with loyalty and love. An absolute angel.

And then, bless his heart, when I point to that young woman across the room, he rushes toward her and tries to rip her arm from its socket with a ferocity forged in the fires of hell. The angel is a devil dog, too.”

The Wrath of Farrakhan

2008-08-28T04:01:58+00:00

Living Color put together this pretty hilarious blend of Star Trek and Louis Farrakhan.

Your Title is Bad, But You Can Fix It (Part 7)

2008-08-28T03:48:55+00:00

Cadet Davis reviews and revises the titles of 30 manuscripts submitted to a writing workshop. This will help you evaluate and improve your titles.

Above Average

Uncommon Law. The word “law” effectively identifies the niche. This title also shows enough of the premise to interest readers, I think, particularly if the reader would be impressed that the author knows what common law is.
Even the Undead Taste Good Sometimes. This one had flavor and made interesting use of generic words (good, sometimes and undead). It also successfully identifies a desperate-feeling mood (which probably makes this a better title than something like The Delicious Undead). But this could be smoother. To start, I’d recommend revising it to Sometimes Even the Undead Taste Good.
Potions and Snowballs. This is a headscratcher, but I’ll admit I’m interested. Snowballs is unexpected and creates a fun tone. Potions establishes a magical-fantasy setting. If I were revising this, I would probably add a third item to the list to suggest where the plot is headed. For example, if this were a wacky Indiana Jones-esque fantasy, I might recommend something like Potions, Snowballs and the Water Bottle of Destiny.
Imperialism By Any Other Name. Like Uncommon Law, this title effectively identifies its niche and target audience. If you like politically-themed fantasy, you’d probably like this story. It lacks the flair of the previous three titles, though.

Acceptable

Winging It. This is a pretty clever title for a book about a plane of vacationers and a journalist crashing onto a mythical island with winged people. The title also has a hint of desperation, which helps. However, I found this title acceptable rather than above average because I felt that it gave off an overly fantastical vibe. If I hadn’t read the synopsis, I would have assumed that this story was about nonhuman characters in a fantasy world, like a coming of age book where a dragon learns to fly or something.
Catching Rays off Pretty Beach. This title is manifestly superior to last week’s Twenty-Six Perfect Days. To me, the phrase “Pretty Beach” suggests that the author is offering his commentary on a superficial beach-town.
Alien Spawn. This is a thoroughly mediocre sci-fi horror title. It works because it identifies itself as sci-fi horror, but it really needs more style.
The Swarm Queen. This is better than Alien Spawn, but still short on flavor.
Forbidden Temple. This is a mediocre Indiana Jones-style title. Forbidden strikes the right tone, but you can do better than “temple.”
Devil’s Den. The word “Devil” identifies the niche, but “den” is the weak point here. What’s at stake? Why should we care?
Filthy Blood. This is an interesting visual, but I don’t think it says enough about the story to interest readers. It doesn’t place the story’s setting well enough. Are we looking at a story about blood magic, the Holocaust, demonic pacts, etc?
Cupid’s Arrow. I think this is a fairly effective name for a romance, but I’d like to know more about the characters involved. Why should we care about whether they fall in love?
The Poison Gods. I think the word “poison” is a fresh adjective for gods.

Awful (but Fixable)

The Gray. I have no idea what the gray is, or what sort of story this is.
Ironspear. Unless Ironspear is a spear that’s made of iron, I have no idea what it is either. Invented words do not lend themselves well to titles and this is no exception.
Lord of Aphilia. What sort of place is Aphilia? Why should I care about it, or who governs it? Fictional place-names don’t work well in titles, either.
The Shambles of Love. I don’t think that shambles is the right word here. The title literally translates into something like The Ruins of Love, which doesn’t seem to make sense. The author may have meant to use The Shackles of Love, which would be interesting although a bit cliche.
The Deep Blue Sea. This is a prepackaged phrase that doesn’t work. Why should we care about a sea that’s deep and/or blue? Those adjectives are horribly boring.
Among the Shattered and Debris. This seems very awkward. “The Shattered” is a plural noun, but “Debris” is a singular noun.
Twins 1-3. I have no idea what’s going on here. Next!
The Construct Wars. I don’t know what a Construct War is, or why I should care about it. This is an example of a phrase that would probably only make sense to someone who has already read the book. That’s a poor way to entice prospective readers. They have not read your book.
King Sulaman. Who’s King Sulaman? Don’t know, don’t care.
Junkyard. What kind of junkyard? What’s going on there and why should I care?
Send Back. What’s being sent back? To whom? Why should I care? What’s at stake?
Winter Redemption. Who’s being redeemed? Why should I care?
The Rememberers. This has the same problems as the previous four titles but has added awkwardness. Instead of “Rememberers,” I’d recommend something like “Memory-Bearers.” But even that would be awful. What’s being remembered? Who is remembering it? What’s at stake? Why should we care? This title doesn’t get close to giving us enough to care.
Baba Yaga and the Story of Valentine and the Dark Night. This is far too long. First, I don’t know who Baba Yaga is or why I should care about him. Second, the word “story” is obnoxious and insults the audience’s intelligence. (”Dark” also made our list of words that should not be used in titles). Third, what the hell’s going on with “the Dark Night?” Aren’t nights dark by definition?
The Square Triangle. This is a head-scratcher, but it didn’t take me anywhere interesting.
Rain. It is extremely hard to make a one-word title compelling. The word “rain” doesn’t give us anything specific about this story.
All the Myths are True. This needs far more style.
The Rectifier. This is far more pretentious than “The Fixer” or “The Problem-Solver,” and even those titles would have been awful. What problems is he rectifying? Why should we care?
P ill(ness) [sic]. I have no idea what the hell’s going on here, but it surely does not speak well of the author.
Brotherhood of Baphomet. I think Baphomet is an invented name. Why should I care about his brotherhood?
Turnover. This is too ambiguous. Are we talking about a basketball turnover, an employee leaving one job for another, or something else entirely? What does “turnover” mean and why should we care?
Wailing the Night. I don’t know what this means, or what kind of story this is, or why I should care.
Scratch. One word titles don’t work, sorry. This is no exception.
The Endless Abyss. Too bland. Aren’t abysses typically endless?

Projects ≫ Creations ≫ Pixie Balm

2008-08-28T00:12:04+00:00

Projects ≫ Creations ≫ Cute P.j.'s

2008-08-27T23:23:43+00:00

Polka Jammies

Projects ≫ How-To's ≫ Marble Effect Beads

2008-08-27T22:55:25+00:00

Pretty, Easy Too Make Multicoulered Beads

Projects ≫ Creations ≫ Knit Record Handbags

2008-08-27T22:53:57+00:00

eco-friendly and cute way to recycle your old records!

Projects ≫ Creations ≫ Fimo Snail

2008-08-27T22:53:14+00:00

Snailll

Welcome Michael Bradley

2008-08-27T22:29:14+00:00

This week we’re excited to add another member to the Slicehost team – Michael Bradley. He has a technology background and recently relocated to the St. Louis area after doing service work in Haiti. Mike will be working with customers via email and chat, mainly on the weekends. Stop in and say hello!

Projects ≫ How-To's ≫ Ring Storage

2008-08-27T17:09:51+00:00

Ring Storage-Make it before Buy it-Sweater Surgery Style

Email - setting a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record

2008-08-27T09:30:51+00:00

Spam. No one likes it. No one wants it. No one needs it. However, it is there and is likely to be there for the foreseeable future.

All we can do as responsible mail server administrators is to ensure we are not part of the problem by not running an open relay and locking down our services as much as possible.

One tool that can help our legitimate email not being classed as spam is to set a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record in our domain's DNS zone.

Sender Policy Framework

A SPF record is a DNS TXT record and is added to our DNS zone in the same manner that A records and MX records are added.

I started the article with a commentary regarding spam email. A common method spammers use is to forge the sender address in the email. Thus, they send email from their mail servers but with your domain as the sending email.

Not good.

The SPF record (remember the record is associated with the domain) specifies which mail server(s) the domain uses to send mail.

It does require the server receiving your mail to check the SPF record to ensure it complies with the domain records but the majority of public mail servers (such as your ISPs mail servers, google mail and so on) will do so.

Having said, that I do not guarantee every ISP complies with the SPF policy or, even if they do, that they do so correctly.

If the receiving server complies with the SPF policy correctly, and the sent email does not conform to your domain records (i.e. comes from an unknown server), it will be marked as fake and either deleted or marked as spam.

One thing to note is that the SPF record allows mail to be quickly assessed by compliant recipients as the checks are completed from information in the header of the email. That is, before the body of the message is loaded. This saves a great deal of time and resources if the mail is a forgery.

Setting SPF

To correctly set the SPF for your domain you need to think about a few things such as:

From what server(s) will mail from the domain originate. The answer may not be as simple as 'from my Slice of course!'. If you are sending mail from your workstation via your ISP's mail servers, you may want to consider their servers.

Perhaps you use Google Apps for their mail services.

All possible (legitimate) sending servers need to be taken into account.

How do want non-legitimate mail to be handled? Do you want them to be rejected out of hand with no questions asked, or do you perhaps want the message to be classed as a 'soft fail', meaning the email will be subjected to further scrutiny.

Example

Let's say we have listed the following as details for our mail on demoslice.com.

The Slice itself (i.e. the incoming MX details also send mail).

Google mail.

We also want to ensure that no other mail servers are authorised.

The TXT record would look like this:

v=spf1 mx include:aspmx.googlemail.com -all

Let's go through each one:

v=spf1

This sets the SPF version being used

mx

Allows the domain's MXers to send mail

include:aspmx.googlemail.com

Included in our list of authorised sending servers are the google mail servers

-all

Any servers not listed previously as NOT authorised. This will produce a fail and action will be taken according to the receiving mail server's own policy (i.e. delete it or mark it as spam, etc).

The 'all' setting

The final setting shown above - the 'all' setting - is an important aspect of the record and has 3 basic markers:

-all

As already explained, this means that any server not previously listed is not authorised - no questions asked.

~all

If mail is received from a server not previously listed, mark it as a 'soft fail' - this allows the mail to be scrutinised further.

+all

Allow any server, anywhere to send mail from my domain. Naturally, this is a very silly setting and should never even be considered.

demoslice.com

So, back to my domain.

I have given it some thought and I know that all I need is to send mail from this Slice. I won't be sending mail via Google or via my ISP.

I also want to ensure that no other mail servers are authorised.

As such, my SPF record is going to be quite simple:

v=spf1 mx -all

It is a sparse record but suits the needs of this Slice perfectly.

Naturally, you will want to consider all options for your Slice needs. Perhaps an '~all' may be better for your domain.

Do give it some thought and plan carefully what your mail needs are for the domain.

Adding the record

So now we have the record we want to use, we can go ahead and add it to the DNS zone.

Log into the Slicemanager (https://manage.slicehost.com).

Select the DNS tab and then the 'records' link for your domain.

Click new record.

Select TXT from the drop down and enter the details as shown in the example here:

So that gives us the record for the demoslice.com domain.

More information

There is a huge amount of data on the Sender Policy Framework and I highly recommend reading more on the subject to get the most from this policy and to reduce the chances of your domain being used by spammers.

A good site is http://www.openspf.org/.

Summary

Setting an SPF record for your domain can help in reducing the chances of a spammer using your domain name in unsolicited emails.

Research carefully what mail servers your domain is likely to use and plan how you want any non-authorised email to be handled.

PickledOnion

Postfix - checking for an open relay

2008-08-27T09:30:48+00:00

Open relays are a bad thing - they allow anyone to send email from your mail server: it doesn't check that it is authorised to send mail from the mail address on the third party email.

In plain English that means that anyone can send email via your Slice IP from any mail address. This tends to annoy people and your IP will end up on blocklists and your legitimate email will be banned.

Postfix

By default, postfix does not run as an open relay. However, this does not mean we should be lax in our security checks.

Luckily, testing for running an open relay is very easy to do from the command line.

There are also online services that can conduct checks for us.

Command line

The first method we'll look at the is testing from the command line. This does use a third party service to check for us (you can check using telnet and attempting third party mail addresses, but that is a long and tedious method).

Anyway, log into your Slice and enter:

telnet rt.njabl.org 2500

After a few seconds, the service offered by njabl.org will start to test your mail server for running an open relay.

The results are quite lengthy so I won't post it all here. However, all being well, you will see output similar to this:

>>> MAIL FROM:<"relaytestsend@rt.njabl.org"@mail.demoslice.com>
<<< 250 2.1.0 Ok
>>> RCPT TO:<relaytest@rr.njabl.org>
<<< 554 5.7.1 <relaytest@rr.njabl.org>: Relay access denied
>>> RSET
<<< 250 2.0.0 Ok
>>> MAIL FROM:<relaytestsend>
<<< 250 2.1.0 Ok
>>> RCPT TO:<relaytest@rr.njabl.org>
<<< 554 5.7.1 <relaytest@rr.njabl.org>: Relay access denied

Check all the output carefully. Do ensure you are not allowing any relay access.

Browser

There are many dozens (hundreds?) of open relay testing on the net.

To browse them and to find out more about open relays simply enter 'open relay test' into google.

Anyway, one such service is this one:

http://www.abuse.net/relay.html

All you need to do is enter your mail domain in the "Address to test:' field.

In my case, I entered 'mail.demoslice.com'.

At the time of writing, the service conducts 17 different tests and gives a summary of each test.

Happily for me my results were as follows:

All tests performed, no relays accepted.

Nice.

Summary

By default, postfix does not run as an open relay. However, checking for one is very simple and help reduce your Slice IP ending up on a spam blacklist.

As with most articles, there is a lot of background information and technical aspects that are not covered here: there simply isn't the space.

However, the basic checks should be conducted as soon as you install and setup any mail server.

PickledOnion

Postfix - using Telnet to test postfix

2008-08-27T09:30:46+00:00

So far, we have sent test emails using a local client such as Thunderbird, Outlook, Mail and so on.

However, there is no real feedback from these clients as to how our mail server responded - did it respond with the correct details? Note that it is possible to send/receive mail with details that are not 100% correct - leading to issues down the line.

Let's look at telnet to check the server responses to mail requests.

Telnet basics

Telnet is the most basic mail client. It does the same thing as the bigger clients you use on your workstation (such as Thunderbird, Outlook, Mail, etc) - it sends mail.

However, instead of being wrapped in a nice GUI it is a command line tool that can be used to diagnose our postfix installation (and to send mail!).

This is a primer for telnet. I won't be going into great detail of the why's and the how's of every aspect of telnet and the responses we (should) receive.

Setting up mail servers can be a complicated issue and there are some incredible large and detailed tomes and manuals available for those who need to get into the minute detail.

However, following the articles will allow you to understand the basics and know what to look for should you want more detail.

Email details

When you send an email you can use the analogy of physically posting a letter:

You greet the postman. You hand over the envelope which should have the address (recipient) and the sender's address - inside the envelope will be the actual letter, or the data.

Going with that analogy, we need a way of authenticating or confirming all those details.

Greeting

We'll start of the sequence by connecting to the mail server and greeting the postman.

On the Slice enter:

telnet mail.demoslice.com 25

This starts the telnet session on port 25.

You should receive a 220 response:

Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.demoslice.com ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)

Good.

Next we can greet the postman:

HELO test.demoslice.com

Note the test subdomain doesn't exist - it is simply a way of greeting the mail server.

The mail server should respond with a confirmation of who it is:

250 mail.demoslice.com

Envelope

Now we have greeted the postman and got the correct responses we can start to fill out the envelope for our letter.

We start by letting the server know who the sender is:

MAIL FROM:<paul@demoslice.com>

If the mail server accepts the sender address, you will get another '250' output:

250 2.1.0 Ok

Good.

Now we can sort out to whom we are sending the letter:

RCPT TO:<demo@demoslice.com>

We are hoping for a 250 response:

250 2.1.5 Ok

Again, good news.

You can add more recipients - unlike a physical letter, the same email can be sent to multiple recipients.

Data

Now we come to the 'meat' of the letter: the data.

To start the main body of the message:

DATA

The response is fairly sparse:

354 End data with <CR><LF>.<CR><LF>

Now you need to enter the subject and the body.

Note you need to physically type the word 'Subject:'

Subject: test message

Press enter/return and then you can type the body of the message:

This is the body of the message!

As when we used the 'mail' command in a previous article, we need to enter a single period (.) to indicate we have finished the body of the message.

As before, we are rather hoping for a 250 response:

.
250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 9620FF0087

Nice.

Quit

Well, we're done with telnet for the moment so we can quit:

QUIT

This will dump you back at the bash prompt:

221 2.0.0 Bye
Connection closed by foreign host.
You have new mail in /var/mail/demo

Ooh!

I have new mail in /var/mail/demo

You have mail

Let's use the 'tail' command to read the end of the mail file:

tail -n 15 /var/mail/demo

That particular command parses the last 15 lines of the /var/mail/demo file (which is where our mail is kept).

If you don't see all of the mail as shown below, you can adjust the number of lines to, say, 20.

In my case, the output was as follows:

From paul@demoslice.com  Wed Aug  6 10:33:20 2008
Return-Path: <paul@demoslice.com>
X-Original-To: demo@demoslice.com
Delivered-To: demo@demoslice.com
Received: from test.demoslice.com (localhost [127.0.0.1])
        by mail.demoslice.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 9620FF0087
        for <demo@demoslice.com>; Wed,  6 Aug 2008 10:28:43 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: test message
Message-Id: <20080806103059.9620FF0087@mail.demoslice.com>
Date: Wed,  6 Aug 2008 10:28:43 +0000 (UTC)
From: paul@demoslice.com
To: undisclosed-recipients:;

This is the body of the message!

Well that's pretty cool.

Details

It goes without saying (even though I am going to say it) that there is far, far more to it than the basics shown above.

It is simply impossible to go into all the details of what is possible with email headers and messages, encodings and the details of telnet.

However, this introduction should show how mail works and what steps are taken when mail is sent and received.

Perhaps you can begin to see why some legitimate mail may be seen as spam email - if any of the steps above failed or gave the wrong response then warning flags are raised.

A wrong hostname will mean mail sent from the Slice does not identify itself properly. Improperly formatted addresses or message bodies can raise eyebrows and flags.

Summary

Telnet is a very simple mail client and can be used to diagnose our postfix install.

Controlled via the command line we can see if the responses from our installation are correct.

Once done, we were then able to read our mail.

Although that is well and good, it would be a bit of a annoyance having to read our mail from the command line. As such, we will look at pop and imap access in later articles.

PickledOnion

Postfix - MX records and receiving emails

2008-08-27T09:30:43+00:00

So far, we have prepared the Slice, installed postfix and had a quick look at the postfix main.cf file.

From that solid base, we can send mail and we know it all works according to plan. Now we can move onto receiving emails. To do that, we need to create the correct MX records and open port 25 in our iptables firewall.

Single domain

Remember that at this stage we are dealing with a single domain. In the example articles I am using the domain 'demoslice.com'. You would, of course, replace that with your main domain.

MX records

Although there are existing articles on creating MX records (see here), let's have a quick run through of what we need.

Keeping with traditional naming conventions we need a subdomain named 'mail' (thus giving mail.demoslice.com). and the MX record for demoslice.com pointing to that subdomain.

Please refer to the article shown above for details of how to add the records to the DNS panel in the Slicemanager. However the two records will look like this when being created:

A Record

MX Record

You may note I entered the figure '10' in the Auxliliary information section when adding the MX record.

It is possible to have multiple MX records and have multiple mail servers for your mail. The way a request works out which one to use is based on this figure: The lower the number the higher the priority.

I entered '10' as I don't know what the future will hold. I may set up a 'super' mail server and want to give that one a higher MX priority, As such, when I created records for the 'super' mail server I would enter '0'.

A little 'future proofing' never does any harm.

Dig

Once the records have been created they can be checked using the 'dig' command.

The moment the records have been created, you can check them on the nameserver itself. This saves waiting for the records to propagate only to find you made a mistake.

So, to check the 'mail' subdomain is correctly entered on the Slicehost nameserver:

dig mail.demoslice.com @ns1.slicehost.net

The section we are looking for is:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
mail.demoslice.com.     86400   IN      A       208.75.84.20

Looks good.

Now we can check the MX record for the demoslice.com domain:

dig demoslice.com MX @ns1.slicehost.net

The answer:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
demoslice.com.          86400   IN      MX      10 mail.demoslice.com.

Again, that is correct.

Iptables

When we set up the Slice we created a simple firewall using an iptables script (please see the Slice setup article for details).

The common port for receiving mail is port 25 and base setup didn't have that port open.

If you tried to send mail to the domain you would get an undeliverable notification.

Using the same files from the Slice setup article, let's open the iptables test file:

sudo nano /etc/iptables.test.rules

To open port 25, we need to add the following just after the 'Allows all outbound traffic' entry:

# Allows postfix to accept incoming connections
-A INPUT -p tcp --dport 25 -j ACCEPT

Note the line starting with the '#' is not compulsory but I find commenting a file makes for much easier administration at a later date when you have no idea what you entered.

Once done and saved, we need to make the new rule set active:

sudo iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.test.rules

The port will now be open but it's always good practice to check something so important:

sudo iptables -L

Amongst the output is the new line:

ACCEPT     tcp  --  anywhere             anywhere            tcp dpt:smtp

So now we can accept smtp connections - it is named smtp as the default port (25) has been opened.

To save the final configuration to the script that is executed on a reboot, you need to be root rather than just use sudo:

sudo -i

The command is:

iptables-save > /etc/iptables.up.rules

Once done, exit root:

exit

Done. We now have the correct port open in our iptables firewall.

Complete

Now we have the Slice setup to receive mail for our domain.

The next article will look at the telnet package to conduct some final tests on the setup to ensure postfix is sending the correct identification details, we'll also take a look at checking the email from the command line (future articles will look at pop and imap access).

Summary

Setting the Slice to receive email for our domain requires the correct DNS entries and an open port in our iptables firewall.

Once done, the Slice can receive email.

PickledOnion

Postfix - basic settings in main.cf

2008-08-27T09:30:39+00:00

Following from the postfix installation article, we can now look at the main.cf file and see what the settings are and what they mean.

Note that at this stage we are dealing with a single domain for our email needs. Later articles will look at multiple domains and virtual users.

Modular

One of the key aspects of understanding and administering postfix is that it is designed to be a modular package.

By that, I mean that the base installation itself is fairly small and the vast majority of the 'usual' mail administration, such as anti-spam and anti-virus, are actually conducted by third party packages like SpamAssassin .

Although those particular aspects are for a later article, we can begin to see the modular nature of postfix when we look at the main.cf file.

Many settings refer to other files on the Slice. This setup can, at first, seem slightly confusing and the initial reaction may be to hard code the data rather than reference another file with a single word in it.

I would advise sticking with the modular premise of postfix and editing multiple files for what may seem like one simple setting.

It makes a lot more sense when we start adding multiple domains, users and aliases to our setup.

main.cf

So what is this main.cf file?

Let's take a look:

sudo nano /etc/postfix/main.cf

I won't paste it here as we are only going to look at one section of the file but you can see it consists of, roughly, three sections.

The first consists of several settings such as smtpd_banner and biff. The second has settings for TLS parameters - more of which in later artcles.

The section we want to look at is the last one and looks like this on the demo slice:

myhostname = mail.demoslice.com

alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases
alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases

myorigin = /etc/mailname
mydestination = mail.demoslice.com, localhost.demoslice.com, , localhost

relayhost =
mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8 [::ffff:127.0.0.0]/104 [::1]/128
mailbox_size_limit = 0
recipient_delimiter = +
inet_interfaces = all

Note that some of the settings already have the hostname from the base postfix installation.

Settings

Although some of the settings may be self explanatory, let's go through some of them so we have a better understanding of the nature of postfix and what we can do with it at this early stage.

myhostname

Having harped on about the modular nature of postfix, it is only natural that the first setting we come to is hard coded...

Anyway, this was set during the postfix installation when we entered the domain name we wanted to use. This also matches the Slice hostname.

aliases

Aliases are ways of delivering mail to different users without having to set up dozens of different accounts.

The default settings in the main.cf are good and reference another file:

alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases
alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases

Have a look at the file:

sudo nano /etc/aliases

You will see a list of names followed by 'root'. In these instances, mail delivered to the first name will actually be delivered to the second name.

We don't need to setup the postmaster, news, webmaster, abuse, etc users for postfix as mail delivered to those names will be sent to root.

Using the same syntax, we can have all mail for root delivered to our admin user by adding this line:

root: demo

Remember, 'demo' is the main admin users for this Slice.

You may notice that there will be up to three changes in delivery destination:

Mail sent to 'mailer-daemon' is sent to postmaster.

Mail to postmaster is sent to root, and we have just added that all mail sent to root is sent to the main admin user 'demo'.

You are, of course, free to adjust the aliases as you see fit, but instead of changing all the 'root' users in the file, it is easier and quicker to add the one line as shown above - this also makes for easier migration/administration at a later date.

If you have changed the aliases file you must then refresh the aliases database or any changes will not be affected:

sudo newaliases

myorigin

This setting is important as internal emails from packages such as cron jobs do not supply full mail 'credentials' such as sender email. They use the 'myorigin' setting.

As such, it needs to be set to the main hostname of the Slice.

By default, the setting refers to the '/etc/mailname' file. Let's have a look at the contents:

cat /etc/mailname

The output on mine is:

mail.demoslice.com

Which is no real surprise as that is what we set when installing postfix.

However, there is another way of setting 'myorigin' and that is to use '$mydomain' in the main.cf file like this:

myorigin = $mydomain

We haven't specifically set the $mydomain variable at any point but postfix gets the information from the 'myhostname' setting - parsing the hostname to gain the main domain name.

The advantage of setting the myorigin this way is that it makes for easier administration at a later date as only one setting (myhostname) needs changing - all the others take the change from that.

mydestination

Although we have not set the Slice to receive mail (we will do that in the next article), this setting defines from which domain(s) it will accept mail.

The default looks like this:

mydestination = mail.demoslice.com, localhost.demoslice.com, , localhost

That is fine for our needs as we are, at this stage, setting up mail for a single domain but, like the 'myorigin' setting, we can reduce future administration by using the '$mydomain' variable like so:

mydestination = $mydomain, localhost.$mydomain, localhost

Again, using the variable saves a lot of possible administrative headaches at a later date.

relayhosts

For our setup we do not need this setting so you can leave that blank.

mynetworks

Defines the network to use. The default includes IPv6 settings which can be removed, leaving:

mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8

The rest

The remaining settings can also be left at this stage.

They will come into play later on when we look at some more complex configurations but, for the moment, they are not needed and can be left at the defaults.

Final settings

After the changes we have made, the last section in my main.cf looks like this:

myhostname = mail.demoslice.com

alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases
alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases

myorigin = $mydomain
mydestination = $mydomain, localhost.$mydomain, localhost

relayhost =
mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8
mailbox_size_limit = 0
recipient_delimiter = +
inet_interfaces = all

Restart

As with all packages, once you have made any changes to the configuration, you will need to restart it:

sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart

Once that is done, we can conduct a quick test.

Send mail

As with all administrative changes (not that we made many changes here), it is always a good idea to test them.

Send mail to a working email address:

mail user@example.com
Subject: test
test
.
Cc:

You should receive an email from the correct user and the correct domain - check the headers to see if they are correct.

Summary

Getting involved in the configuration of postfix can be a daunting task.

This introduction should help with the basics and shows that postfix is simple in its approach and design and how using variables instead of hard coding domain names can save time and effort in any future administration.

PickledOnion

Postfix - installation

2008-08-27T09:30:24+00:00

The base package for all the mail articles will be postfix. There are, of course, alternatives to postfix, each with advantages and disadvantages and, without going into the differences, I have chosen postfix due its relative ease of configuration.

As many of the future articles will concentrate on administrative issues and assume postfix is already installed, let's go ahead and install it.

Following from preparing the Slice for our email setup, we can move onto installing postfix.

Installation

Installation is very easy (remember we are using Ubuntu Hardy for these articles):

sudo aptitude install postfix telnet mailx

Note that we also install telnet and mailx as they contain several tools we'll use to test and configure postfix.

During the installation you will be asked the general type of mail configuration:

Choose the 'Internet Site' option.

You will then need to enter your main domain name (this should match the hostname we set in the previous article):

Done.

Defaults

At this stage, you can send emails from your application.

The preparation we did in the previous article and the settings shown above during the postfix installation mean that the very basics are already done.

Quick test

Although we will look in more detail at sending mail in the next article, let's conduct a quick test to see if postfix is actually sending mail.

You will need to send an email to a working email address using the 'mail' command:

mail address@example.com

Replace the email address with one of your choosing (remember this must be a working email address).

The output asks for the subject of the emai. Once done, press enter/return.

Next enter the subject of the email. Once done, press enter/return and then a single period (.) - the period lets mail know the body is finished.

Finally press enter/return again to send the email (you may need to do this twice so you skip the 'CC:' entry.

The output on my machine looks something like this:

mail address@example.com
Subject: test email from demoslice.com
test body of the email.
.
Cc:

No confirmation is given that the email has been sent (the logs will show the details) but...

You've got mail

Check the receiving email address and voila! a nice, fresh email with the subject 'test email from demoslice.com'.

For many people, that is all you need to send mail from your application - especially if the only emails are notifications to the site administrator.

However, the next article will look in more detail at the settings in postfix's main.cf file and what they mean. This can help in reducing the chances of your email being classed as spam or your Slice IP being blocklisted.

Summary

Installation of postfix is very simple using the aptitude package manager.

Once installed, email can be sent straight away.

PickledOnion

Email - preparing the Slice

2008-08-27T09:30:04+00:00

Beginning a series of articles on many aspects of email (sending, receiving, configuring, etc), we need to start with the very basics by preparing the Slice.

This article looks at the hostname and reverse DNS (RDNS) settings on the Slice.

Assumptions

The only assumptions made for these email articles are:

1: You are running Ubuntu Hardy (The instructions may work on other distros but it has not been tested and is not guaranteed)

2: You have followed the setup articles: page 1 and page 2

Beyond that, I hope to show everything that is needed from the very basics upwards.

Hostname

The first thing to look at is the Slice hostname.

This is simply the 'name' of the Slice and is used in the headers of the email (the headers can be thought of as the address and sender label on the email).

There are a couple of ways of setting the host name.

Slicemanager

When you build a new Slice or rebuild a Slice, you are given the opportunity to set the Slice name - this can be a FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name). This name is then used to set the hostname when the Slice is built.

This can be a quick and easy way of setting the hostname.

However, you do not have restrict your Slice name to match that of the hostname.

On the demo account I have a Slice named 'slice1'. As such, the hostname of the Slice was initially set as 'slice1'.

I don't want to rebuild the Slice and I am happy with the Slicemanager name of 'slice1'. As such, let's look at changing the hostname from the command line:

Command Line

Setting the hostname via the command line involves the very simple adjustment of a couple of files.

We can start by checking what the current hostname is:

hostname -f

On my Slice, the output is:

slice1

Well, that makes sense. When I built the Slice I named it 'slice1' in the Slicemanager. As such, the hostname was set to 'slice1'.

mail.demoslice.com

For these basic articles I am going to use the domain 'mail.demoslice.com' - I am setting up a mail server so that makes sense.

I need to change the hostname to match the domain:

sudo nano /etc/hostname

Replace the current hostname (slice1) with the one you need (in this case mail.demoslice.com).

The second file to edit is:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

The default looks like this on my Slice:

127.0.0.1       localhost localhost.localdomain
127.0.0.1       slice1

Following on from what we are doing, replace 'slice1' with 'mail.demoslice.com'.

Of course, replace mail.demoslice.com with your domain.

reboot

Conduct a quick reboot:

sudo reboot

and check the hostname:

hostname -f

The output is now:

mail.demoslice.com

Good start!

Reverse DNS

The second main aspect we need to look at when preparing the Slice is the Reverse DNS (RDNS).

One of the main reasons for email being marked as spam and causing IP addresses to be blocklisted is a mismatch between the sending domain and the RDNS of the Slice.

We can check the RDNS of the Slice from the Slicemanager.

Log into the Slicemanager

Once done, click the DNS tab and then the 'Reverse DNS' link.

On the demo account, one of the Slices has this record as the default:

All we need to do is change the default entry to match our main domain:

Done.

Check the RDNS

The RDNS may take a while to propagate and you really need to wait until it has done so before you can fully configure and test any mail setup.

To check the RDNS, you need to input the IP address if the Slice into the 'dig' command.

Note that 'dig' is not installed on a base Ubuntu Hardy Slice:

sudo aptitude install dnsutils

(Many thanks for the comments that noted dig is not installed by default - I use my workstation to conduct dig commands and didn't think that others may use the Slice for that!)

So, to check the RDNS:

dig -x 208.75.84.20

In this case, the output includes the correct answer:

dig -x 208.75.84.20
...
...
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;20.84.75.208.in-addr.arpa.     IN      PTR

;; ANSWER SECTION:
20.84.75.208.in-addr.arpa. 3477 IN      PTR     mail.demoslice.com.

Done.

Summary

Preparing the Slice is a vital step in any mail setup - even if 'only' sending mail from your application to an administrator, it is very important to get the basics right.

As the articles progress you will start to see where this preparation comes into play when sending and receiving emails.

PickledOnion

Milton Friedman’s “Freedom To Choose”

2008-08-27T06:17:12+00:00

In the last 6 months or so I’ve become a big Milton Friedman fan. Complex issues like inflation, money supply, economic growth, unemployment, government spending, deficits, etc always seemed like complex issues to me with many sides to the story. You could read or ask 20 different people about issues like that and you’d get 20 different answers.

Somehow, Milton Friedman seems to make them easy to understand, and I feel almost embarrassed that I didn’t understand them better before.

He has now passed away, but I just finished watching part of his 1980 documentary called “Freedom To Choose” and it’s outstanding. You can watch one part of it here, although I recommend you check out the whole thing.

I was shocked when reading Fortune Magazine recently (where Obama and McCain discuss the economy) to see a quote from McCain stating that his economic role model was Milton Friedman. That certainly caught my eye. Although I’m more liberal socially on some issues than McCain, this was a huge plus for me. I don’t think Obama’s plan for the economy makes any sense at all (he wants to raise business taxes, taxes on wealthy, and increase government spending… basically the exact opposite of what would help the economy).

It’s interesting to note that Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has decided to fund a study from the top 500 economists (at great personal expense) to see where they fall on the presidential election coming up. I feel pretty confident they will come down economically on the side of McCain (it’s just such a shame he hasn’t come around on some other issues, I’m not totally sold on him :).

Apparently, even Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Milton Friedman fanboy! (Which actually really helps explain his politics.)

Free to Choose - Schwarzenegger Intro
Uploaded by Berserk0486

What do you think about Milton Friedman? Had you heard of him before this post? Leave a comment below.

First anniversary!

2008-08-27T05:41:16+00:00

Our website is a year old now. Without navel-gazing too much, I’d like to offer some quick visuals to suggest just how dramatically our crappiness quotient has dropped. These are our first six months worth of headers…

I swore to myself after making the first few headers that someday we would be able to look back at them and laugh, and I think we’ve reached that point!

Also, over the past six months, we managed to convince more readers to spend more time here.

Winklers of the Carribean

2008-08-27T04:11:20+00:00

On August 13, Berta, the kids, and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean. We made arrangements for this couple months ago via Carnival's website as our family vacation for this year. Our destination: San Juan in Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and Grand Turk.

So on that Wednesday, we loaded our luggage into the car and drove to the port in New York City. We were running a little bit late because we had to drop off the house key with our cat sitter, and I was afraid we weren't going to make it, but we did manage to not "miss the boat". Nonetheless, that short delay did manage to affect our whole trip.

After dealing with the registration folks and boarding the boat, we were told that our state room was ready to occupy. So we went directly to our state room. What we should have done, is gone to the Phantom auditorium to watch the embarkation show. The embarkation show was a short show put on by the cruise director giving everyone the information they would need to know what was going on on the ship during the trip. Obviously, this was an essential bit of information that we somehow missed, and is really the only explanation I can see for why we hardly ever ran into any of the thousands of people who were on the ship with us.

Anyway, we did find out that the ship was operating a "kid camp" for kids so that they could get away from their parents for a little while. Abby was very enthusiastic about attending kid camp. They held a short meeting for parents that evening to learn more about kid camp, which we attended. Apart from that, we wandered around the ship a little bit and got acquainted with it. We walked through the Lido deck, deck nine, and as we did both Berta and I accepted drinks from one of the waiters.

One weird thing about the cruise is the "sail & sign" card. They issue you these cards at the start of the cruise, and each person gets one, even the kids. The card is used not just for opening your state room door, but also to pay for things while on the ship. So whenever you get a drink, which includes both alcohol and soda, you need to present this card so they can charge you for it. It's a handy way to simplify purchases on board the ship, but it sure does rack up by the end of the trip.

Over the next two days we did nothing but sail through the ocean to our destination. This is the part that makes me think I will not cruise again. While we spent maybe 6 to 7 hours at each of the three ports, optimistically 21 hours total, we spent four solid days getting from New York to the Caribbean, which doesn't count the time it took to get from port to port. Don't get me wrong, when we finally figured out where things were going on on board, there was enough to do, but really, there's only so much gambling, drinking, and off-Broadway show watching you can do without land in site.

During this time, Berta and I made spa appointments. I'm not really sure what she did, but I got a shave and a haircut. The haircut was ok, but the shave was way too close. I ended up with itchy ingrown hairs on my neck for the next couple days. I had even got a "mini facial" (whatever the heck that is) along with the shave, so I don't know what the problem was. I was supposed to do a follow-up, but I decided to pass since I had such a poor experience.

After two days of not much else but being surrounded by water, we were very happy to see San Juan when we finally pulled into view. Outside the bay in which the ship docked, there was a large fort. It was very castle like. While passing by, we thought that it might be nice to look at it while we were on shore.

When the ship was finally docked, we made our way down to the gangplank and exited the ship. It was a couple hours before our excursion was scheduled to begin, so we decided to wander around near the dock on our own. There were a lot of tour buses near the dock, complete with drivers looking for people to take tours. Every few feet one of them stopped us to ask if we wanted to see the town. Knowing that we had an excursion planned, we didn't accept their offers. Instead we walked a bit down the waterfront, and looked at a few local people selling things from kiosks on the road. There wasn't anything there particularly noteworthy, but it was interesting to see local folks selling locally made items.

It wasn't long walking when we had to turn around and go back to the pier to wait in line for our excursion. While in line with tour guide collected our tickets and then we made our way back out to the road and boarded one of the tour buses. Our scheduled tour was to be a tour of San Juan night life, since we were there in the afternoon and into the evening. Our driver decided to take us into new San Juan on a short drive around town.

This was perhaps one of the more disappointing aspects of our trip. The driver didn't really take us to any interesting places to see, and seemed more interested in telling us the prices of condos in the buildings that we passed, and pointing out where the back doors of some casinos were. We did stop at Puerto Rican Senate building, which was not remarkable but was near a good view of one of the castles. Abby and I took a couple of pictures there, while Riley napped on Berta in the bus.

The bus left from there and continued to a small park in the old section of San Juan. Around this park were a few designated stores that were chosen by the cruise line to remain open and give us good bargains. I found it ironic that most of the items in the stores were made in Mexico and not in Puerto Rico. The shopping wasn't so interesting, but the outside architecture was. You could tell that you were in old San Juan because all of the buildings exteriors were painted different pastel colors and had a specific kind of architecture. Combined with some cobblestone streets it was a pretty nice view, and more what I like to go on vacation for than shopping in some pre-designated stores.

It was Berta's idea that we could try to eat dinner in San Juan, but it seems that the cruise line doesn't really consider this when they create their excursions. It seems like they figure you already paid for dinner on the ship so why would you want to eat and pay for a meal at one of your ports of call. As a result, the excursions don't seem to leave time for meals on shore. Nonetheless, we weren't that far from the ship and decided that if we stayed to eat we would simply missed the bus and catch up with the ship before it left. Unfortunately, there were only two places to eat in the small square where we had stopped. One was a small café that did not seem to serve dinner, and the other was a restaurant that was highly recommended by a guide that I picked up early on, but seemed quite busy considering the number of patrons sitting at tables in the sidewalk outside.

A little frustrated with the situation, we decided to head up the hill toward one of the castles. Since we were in San Juan so late, and so much of the day had already gone by, we were not in time to catch one of the walking towards of the Fort. Still, the outside grounds were open to wander in, and offered plenty to look at even if we couldn't go inside.

Visiting the Fort and going off tour was probably the best thing we did that day in Puerto Rico. I'm glad we left the tour bus behind and skipped dinner to catch the castle in the last of the sunlight. It was definitely something to see and I wish I had more time or could come back during the day to take a tour of the inside. Maybe next time.

We had to make our way through the square to get back to the ship, and although we arrived 15 minutes late the tour bus was still there waiting for other people who apparently enjoy the kind of junk shopping that the cruise line would like you to do. Instead of walking the whole way back to the ship, where it would inevitably be dark and in a strange place, we decided to catch the tour bus back to the ship, and eat dinner in the ship's dining room. Sure, it's kind of a bummer that we didn't get to eat authentic food in San Juan, but who knows if you can even drink the water there.

I should take a moment to describe dinners aboard the ship. Of course all the dinners were prepaid with the cost of the cruise. You get a predesignated mealtime, either early seating or late seating. Most of the events on board seem to jive with the early dinner seating, and so of course we had selected the late seating. Being that we usually eat late in the evening when we are at home, this didn't seem like a problem, and really, on board the ship, it wasn't a problem either, just everything was a little bit later than what you might expect.

For example, the usual show that corresponds with the evening entertainment takes place during the late dinner seating. There is a second show for the people who go to the late dinner seating, after the late dinner much later at night. Our kids are used to staying up pretty late, so that wasn't much of a problem, but it did stretch out the day very long.

Regarding the dinners themselves, Carnival prides itself on its casual atmosphere, yet still has two formal dinners aboard during the weeklong cruise. One on the way to the Caribbean, and one on the way back. That's fine, we had planned for that. There are a couple of other places to eat on board, including a 24 hour pizza place, which doesn't have half bad pizza. Still, the non-dining room fare is definitely not as good as what you can get in the dining room. Also in the dining room, there are people to wait on you, which is really what you want when you're on vacation.

Our waiter, the head waiter for our section,Pongsac , was quite good and kept the kids entertained. There were even little performances by the waitstaff on some nights, including the YMCA dance, and a very long conga line. Pongsac also did a very interesting rendition of the birthday song, first in English, then in Chinese, where everyone got to shop along. It was pretty fun.

As far as the food itself goes, all I have to say is "warm chocolate melting cake."

Our next stop was in St. Thomas. St. Thomas is one of the US Virgin Islands, but it used to be one of the British Virgin Islands, and so everyone there still drives on the left side of the road. None of this makes any sense however, because they still use cars with the steering wheel oriented for right side road driving. This is just something that I found curious.

Our excursion that was scheduled for St. Thomas included a bit of sightseeing via another tour, and then a stop at Megen's Bay, one of the highest rated beaches in the world.

We got off the ship in the morning and lined up outside ready for our excursion. Our driver, named Tuffie, was a seasoned veteran driving his own vehicle. In stark contrast to our driver in San Juan, Tuffie knew what the heck he was talking about and was very entertaining during our drive around St. Thomas. We stopped in a couple of places during our drive.

After taking an unusual detour through a Home Depot parking lot, which actually became a part of the tour description, as Tuffie described the need to have their own Home Depot for when hurricanes hit and they needed to rebuild, we stopped at a lookout platform seemingly designed specifically for tour buses to park. The platform was situated very near the top of one of St. Thomas' tall mountains. From there we had a spectacular view of the port and the ocean beyond. This is where I obtained one of the best photos I took on the trip. I have taken many chots from this platform and combined into a large panorama, which is now my computer's desktop wallpaper.

This is unfortunately one of those places where the pictures don't do justice to the actual place, since you see this kind of thing in pictures all the time and you become a bit desensitized to it. Seeing someone else's pictures, sure, it's nice to know that someone once there, but unless you saw it yourself, it doesn't really mean as much to you. Still, I think the picture is pretty cool.

From there, we went on to Blackbeard's Tower. Blackbeard's Tower is a three-story tower sitting in the upper regions of the mountains on St. Thomas. It was erected as a lookout for pirate ships in the area of the Caribbean around St. Thomas. It has since served as a stronghold against the sometimes violent Caribbean weather, and has withstood all hurricanes since it was built.

The tower itself is surrounded by a small museum and a hotel. It was strange that the hotel pools are intermixed with the museum exhibits, but it makes it look nice. The one aspect of the museum that we enjoyed most were the large pirate statues placed around the grounds of the museum. Each statue depicted a single pirate, and have a plaque at the bottom with a bio of the pirate. An oversized statue of Blackbeard himself stood outside the tower.

We also got to see the inside of some of the houses that originally adorned St. Thomas. Most houses on St. Thomas don't have air conditioning, instead they have east-west facing windows that allow the wind to blow through and cool the house naturally. Most rooms on St. Thomas have high ceilings which allows the hot air to collect above the cool space where people stay. Also since there aren't many natural springs on St. Thomas, most houses have some kind of water collection device on the roof. There is a desalinization plant on St. Thomas but most houses don't make use of it unless their water collection runs dry.

I'm not sure what the big deal was about the 99 steps, but we did go down them. It was a long trip, and the steps were deep. I'm pretty sure I took some video of that too. Riveting!

At the bottom of the steps was the old town, which was all shops. There was also a post office and the St. Thomas Liberty Bell, which I didn't see close up personally, but Berta reports that it looks fairly identical to our own Liberty Bell, screws and all. I was busy in one of the shops learning about watches. They had air conditioning, and the cheapest watch the guy showed me was $800 (and kind of sucked).

We didn't spend much time there when our tour guide rounded us up to take us to Megen's bay.

As I said, Megen's Bay is apparently one of the top 10 rated beaches in the world, and from what I've seen it has earned its reputation. The beach itself has clean, fine, white sand, then to the facilities are good for a beach that size. The water was very clear, so clear that you could see fish in the water swimming around you when the water was several feet deep.

While we were waiting for our lunch at the snack stand, I went into the bead shop and bought a pair of goggles so that I could look around underwater while I was swimming. We ate our pizza, salads, hamburger, whatever, and headed out to claim a spot on the beach. The kids took pleasure in observing the wildlife, collecting very small shells, noticing the actual coconuts on the actual coconuts trees, and trying to drown me in the ocean.

Abby spotted a large lizard in among one of the grooves of trees. While watching it, another huge lizard came out of the trees. These things must've been 3 feet long, and sat there for a long time looking at us like we were food. They were pretty cool.

I swam out in the ocean to the extent of the swimming area, where I could definitely not touch bottom, but I could see it. From there I could also see the entire beach, and it was all very cool. Megen's Bay was certainly not a disappointment.

After a short two hours at the beach, we packed up our stuff and loaded back into the tour bus to go back to the ship.

Oh, I completely forgot to mention the Riley pox. Earlier in the morning, before we arrived at St. Thomas, Riley started to develop its malt Reds box that looks almost like insect bites all over his body. They were a little itchy, but didn't bother him too much. But he did look like he had come down with some kind of terrible, terrible disease. Berta took him to the infirmary on the ship where they prescribed some antibiotics for the inflammation noticed in his throat and some Benadryl for the spots.

Riley was fine after a couple days, and the spots completely cleared up in that time, but it was still a bit worrisome being so far from home with what could have been a much more serious problem.

Our next port of call was grand Turk. If you've been following my twitter account, this is the part that you've been looking for where I talk about being dead.

Our original excursion on grand Turk to do snorkeling was canceled due to some kind of equipment problem, and so while Berta planned to do some kind of ocean activity with the kids on her own, we scheduled some time for me to go on a scuba diving excursion alone.

I gathered up my stuff and headed out just after noon to meet with the other "Discover SCUBA" excursion members. In the small shopping village that apparently constitutes the entirety of grand Turk I met our small group of 12 and one instructor. After reading through a medical form to make sure that we were all fit enough to do diving, he led us to the diving boat and his partner instructor.

We did a bit of textbook instruction on board the boat without any equipment. We learned the most important rules about scuba diving, including the number one rule, "breathe". We learned hand signs to communicate underwater. We learned about the equipment and house to use it. And then we all got equipment and jumped in the water.

There in the shallow water, we did some skills training. Basic things like learning to breathe through our mouths with the gear on, and how to find our mouthpiece if it somehow came loose and put it back in. The hardest skill we learned, at least for me, was breathing in through your mouth and out of your nose without wearing goggles. It sounds pretty easy but with the water all around you, you just want to hold your breath in the first place.

There were two people in our group that could not hack the skills, and so we took them back to the beach before we went out on our dive. For the dive, we went to a small coral bed a bit off the shore, and about 35 to 40 feet below the surface. I was still a bit nervous having just learned how to use the scuba equipment, so I probably missed a lot that I wouldn't have missed if I'd had more training first, but I still did see a lot of really neat things. The coral is a lot more than what you see on TV. It has these treelike things that grow up into the shallower water, and of course all sorts of living things swim around the coral,

You know those blue fish you see at the pet store? The tropical ones? This is apparently where they come from, and they're huge! I saw those fish. I saw large schools of little orange fish. I saw small schools of long silver fish. I didn't see the turtle, but there apparently was one.

I had a little trouble near the end of the dive staying deep enough in the water. I could not get used to the idea of appointing my head downward to go downward, which seems to be the key to the skill. I will remember this next time.

Apart from that the dive went smoothly. When we were done, I boarded the boat and my instructor gave me credit toward certification. From there, we drove back to shore, where everything had gone crazy.

See, my excursion left at 12:45 and was scheduled to be only 2 1/2 hours long. I didn't get back to shore until 5:20, which is obviously much longer than they had scheduled to have us out, but I don't see how they could have done what they had planned to do in such a short amount of time. Of course, Berta and the kids were wondering where I'd gotten to. And so when I didn't show up at the designated time and place, they went back and asked at the excursion desk whether my tour had returned. It was at the point when the excursion people said that my tour had returned at 3:30 that Berta began to think I was dead.

So I wandered around sure for about a half an hour looking for them, and at some point in their decided to get dressed in dry clothes. Since the ship was scheduled to depart at 6:30, I hope that they had made it off the shore and were already on board when I decided to head back to the ship and brave the long line of people who also decided to return at that time. As I made my way to the security checkpoint, I saw Berta and the kids standing there quite distraught. And of course at this time, I had no idea what was going on. I was promptly beaten upon after passing through the metal detector, even though none of this was my fault.

So that evening was pretty much shot, ending a good day with not so great being dead.

That was our last port. It was probably for the best. We spent the next two days trying to acclimate ourselves to whatever process it was everyone else on the ship had learned on the first day. I spent some time playing bingo, and we watched a few shows. The shows were pretty good for being on a boat, but there's only so much Frank Sinatra and Gloria Estefan that I can take. The Beatles show was actually decent, and the final days show where people on the cruise impersonated different celebrities was pretty novel. We also enjoyed some karaoke, just watching other people singing, none of the four of us doing any singing. I won $150 playing craps for a couple hours.

The disembarkation procedure had a presentation also, and this time I didn't miss it. We were pretty clear about what we needed to do to get off the boat. Disembarking pretty much thrust you directly into not being on vacation anymore, having to deal with manipulating your luggage when off of the ship, communicating with customs, finding the car, and then navigating your way out of New York. It was certainly not a pleasant way to end what was otherwise a reasonably relaxing vacation.

Overall, it was a good trip. I'm not really a big fan of the beach, specifically sitting out in the sun, but this trip was fairly entertaining even in those parts. Still, I think it will be a while if I ever go on another cruise, if only because there were many things that the kids would not be interested in onboard the ship unless they were older, and that way Berta and I could spend more time enjoying our own vacation instead of avoiding things the kids don't find fun.

Dish Replacement

2008-08-26T21:06:36+00:00

I know that many people are looking forward to my telling of my vacation, especially about the part where I was dead, but as I was writing it last night (actually, dictating it to the computer, just like this entry) I had gotten 45 paragraphs in thought, "Gee, I ought to save this at some point," and at that very moment, my text editor decided to completely crash on me. So the end result is that you won't be hearing about my trip for a little while longer yet. Suffice to say that I have enough to say about it that I will definitely need to write about it.

In the meantime, allow me to complain about my satellite dish receiver. I've been a longtime Dish Network customer, and when we moved to the new house we renewed our subscription to the service and got all brand-new equipment. One of the weird things about the new equipment is that it's all rental. We previously owned our equipment, now we rent it for a small fee every month just like other people do from their cable companies. It's not a big deal, but if I think about it too much it really gets on my nerves. Fortunately, there is an upside.

Once about every two years, the satellite receiver dies. There's really no explanation for it, although they frequently blame it on electrical surges, which is nigh impossible considering how much surge suppression I put between the power line and the receiver. Whatever the cause, the receiver just starts behaving strangely and eventually won't let you watch TV anymore.

Our receiver was acting up a bit even before we left for vacation, I just didn't have the time to mess with it. Basically, it would turn on, run through a little diagnostic routine, and then turn off inexplicably. If you pushed the right combination of buttons at the right time, you could convince it to turn on and watch Spike TV, but that's all it would let you watch, and only for about three minutes before it would turn off again.

I called Dish Network support, and they put me through the usual reset procedure, unplug procedure, plug it into a different place procedure, unplug the satellite line from the receiver procedure, and a few other stupid little things before they agreed to send me a new receiver. Hence the benefit of renting the receiver: when something goes wrong with the one you have, they just send you a brand-new one.

Fortunately, in comparison to the last time this happened, we were smack in the middle of September, when all the new shows start coming on TV, and we were left without a TV receiver with which to watch any season premieres. This time, we get at least a week or two leeway before things get dicey.

The new satellite receiver arrived today, complete with a return authorization sticker and prepaid shipping. All I need to do now is replace the existing receiver with the new receiver, and ship the old one back to them. Assuming that I didn't abuse the old receiver, which I didn't, there should be no additional charge for the receiver and I should be able to watch TV as the new season soon starts.

Webcomic 16: The Prestigigator

2008-08-26T00:21:53+00:00

WEBCOMIC INDEX — FIRST COMIC — PREVIOUS COMIC — NEXT COMIC

She’s so excited

2008-08-25T23:05:18+00:00

I can’t remember why Ava was so excited.

How is it like to Pair Program?

2008-08-25T19:04:01+00:00

"Pair all the effin' time."

In the last seven months, I've been lucky enough to pair program with at least three people from Hashrocket (Sandro Turriate, Jon Larkowski, Wes Gibbs). I come and go to Florida when they need more resources to fill in the required pair or task fullfiller -- be it ui designer or front-end integrator or as a ruby/rails programmer. I am not yet a full time Hashrocket crew but I am part of the Hashrocket family. When I'm back in Chicago, I always miss my pair and I wish I was pairing rather than working remotely from home.

I've been getting emails recently regarding Obie's post on pair programming since I'm in one of the photos. Questions like: How is it like to pair? How is pair programming all the day like? How is it possible to find time if you want to send an email to your boyfriend? These questions are all interesting. I guess since pairing seems to feel more natural to me now, I tend to overlook those details. Someone who has not experienced true pairing will be really curious as to how it's like.

Communication is the key to pairing. I'm an ex-World of Warcraft arena player so I'm going to do this short babble. My team would be me as a warlock plus a healer class (shaman, druid or priest). That's a twos team. When our team enters an arena match for a 2v2, I have to constantly tell my partner exactly who I am attacking, what I'm doing or will do and what's happening to me all the time during the match via Ventrilo. I relay everything happening from my end. My partner does the same thing. He will tell me if he's out of mana in case he needs to heal me and I'll tell him: "Alright, I can take care of myself for 12 secs. Go hide, drink water to regain mana". If I need an immediate heal during that 12 sec window when he's out of my range, I will say it in Ventrilo that I'm running to where he is and that he can meet me halfway to support me with a heal. Alright, well enough of the WoW.

How does that babble relate to pairing? Well in pairing you constantly have to think out loud in front of your pair -- saying out loud everything and that's your thought process being communicated to your pair. The pairs charter their thought process meeting haflway to sync. Every idea or alternative is discussed and weighed mostly with simplicity (and scaling) in mind. When pairs are in sync, the code becomes more apparent and comprehensible to both.

It is true. We do a ping-pong pairing. Either one drives the test and the other drives the actual coding from what was tested. Then we also do ping-pong stories where one will drive a story, alternatively then the other pair drives the next story. Stories are small task that makes pairing more effective. A pair can Teleport into the laptop being used during the pairing session. The pairs will bounce logic, ideas and problems to solve what's at hand together. Then code.

We have time in between stories to take a short break to do whatever it is we need to do outside of pairing. I don't find pairing limiting at all but it keeps me disciplined with my time as it enforces me to be more efficient. In fact, it keeps me awake after lunch too!

I've learned so many techniques from pairing. One good example that I've learned was from my most recent pair: Wes Gibbs. So while we were pairing, he took note once about a Git command. He opened a text file and typed in some notes; and out of curiosity, I asked him what the file was for. He explained to me that with all the technology that we keep up with, it was ideal for him to keep notes via a text file as a reminder. Exactly! What a great idea. I copied his technique since I seem to have issues with short term memory. So in pairing, you not only learn in parallel with your pair but you tend to pick up each other's techniques may they be outside of programming.

Matt Remsik of Hashrocket also wrote a blog post on "Pairing as a way of life" so check out his blog too.

I can talk all day about how pairing is like but that will make this article a novel :P Thanks to those who emailed me about this topic because it prompted me to write this new blog entry. Just shoot me an email if you have more questions.

/peace out :)