Category Archives: General

Installing an email server on Ubuntu

General

I need to set up a TLS-capable email server (which I will access via IMAP), so that the messages are encrypted between my email server and the recipient/sender’s email server.

Initial investigations show that my pessimism was appropriate – I can’t find much clear information about how to do this. Ubuntu do a server release now, so I’d like to just use the stuff they recommend. how they recommend it, but there’s not much documentation about what they package, and I still have to deal with various things, and decide between them, including sendmail, postfix, dovecot, exim, etc, which translate for me to “yadda, yadda, yadda”. As far as I can tell, dovecot does IMAP, and postfix does SMTP, and they have to be set up separately and somehow told to use the same mailboxes and the same security settings.

I don’t do this stuff generally. Installing Apache is obscure enough for me, thanks. If there’s an nice explanation for the uninitated somewhere, and a detailed how-to, that would be nice.

Am I wrong to think that most email servers should have very similar setups, so some kind of wizard/installer could just give me what I probably want?

More Glom reviews

General,

While I was on holiday, a couple of Glom reviews appeared:

Both reviews are generous and kind. They understand what I’m trying to offer with Glom while forgiving it for not yet being perfect. I agree with Xaprb’s review that there are still a few too many bugs in the 1.0 version so I think it’s still not the right time to work on big new features.

I’ve listed the Glom reviews on the glom.org site.

Romania? Ba da!

General

This evening we are off to Romania for three weeks, driving [1] from Munich through Hungary to TimiÅŸoara and staying there for a week or so. Apparently I’m doing a general GNOME talk at the local TimiÅŸoara LUG on Thursday, but I’ll need to borrow someone’s PC to actually make some slides, because I’ve been rushing to finish more important things before leaving.

Then we’ll spend a few days in Bucharest being Urban. Then a week or so in the country, hopefully in the Carpathian mountains, looking for bears, pristine wilderness, and ethnic types with hats.

I’ve learn a little Romanian over the last few weeks. Pimsleurs Romanian course only has 10 half-hour lessons, but it really helped to get the basics in to my head. Plus the Teach Yourself Romanian book and CDs, and Zsolt Czimbalmos’ Romanian audio (Creative Commons licensed). The Pimsleurs method is so effective that I am getting the Pimsleurs language-learning religion.

I’ll check email occasionally. If it’s urgent then you’ll find a way to contact me.

[1] Not my idea. Cars are a stupid waste of time and space. At least we’ll swap it for an authentic Dacia when we are there, built for Romanian roads.

Web 2.0 yadda yadda

General

What is it about Web 2.0 that means everyone’s got to have an opinion and most of those opinions are expressed at great waffly length with little obvious difference between them? And everyone’s got to let the caffeine convince them that they’ve just had a revolutionary get-on-the-speeding-train notion, while everyone else is thinking “Yeah, so, what’s new?”, or “Erm, it’s not that simple”. I can’t take it any more. No more Web 2.0 blog entries over a hundred words. Keep giving me the executive summaries, Luis. I’ll try not to follow the links.

Parsing .deb packages with Python?

General

Another ungoogleable question means it’s time to ask the Lazy Web again. Sometimes I wish that I could tell google what is the object and what is the subject.

Before I reinvent the wheel, does anybody know of a python module to unpack and parse debian packages, putting the information (such as the stuff in the control file) into a python object?

Openismus GmbH on the way

General, ,

I finally instructed my accountant to set up Openismus GmbH which will probably take a few weeks. It feels slightly scary, but I want to give it a try. Got to build to grow.

I already have a first part-time employee – Johannes Schmid of Anjuta fame. I was very sad to reply to all the other people who answered my call for a mini-job, but maybe I can use some of them if I get enough work.

A GmbH is a German form of limited company, and is one of the few forms of company that is taken seriously. It’s not actually necessary in Germany, unlike the U.K. which demands that freelancers create one-man Ltd companies that employ them(selves). It’s also much more difficult and expensive than in the U.K. There’s an extra tax that you have to pay, plus additional administration. But it’s generally simpler when dealing with international companies, so I can consider it as marketing, and it will be better for employing people.

I should probably improve the web site too. Sooner or later I’ll have to accept that there’s no sane way to make attractive web sites without hacks. Yes, I mean round corners.

Munich’s big square computer

General

I noticed this post about Munich’s new LRZ supercomputer in Garching on Moritz Angermann’s blog. Looking at this photo (webcam apparently, so maybe you can only see it in the daylight), there’s something faintly absurd about it. Apparently this big cube building (at the right) is the computer, or can be perceived as the computer because it’s dealt with remotely. This might be a picture of the inside, but I’d still rather think of the building as the computer. It’s just a very big computer, you see.

I’ve never been to Garching, but I keep meeting clever people who work there.

German mini job

General

If there are any German GTK+/gtkmm/GNOME developers out there who’d like a few hours of part-time employment per week. maybe alongside their studies, please email me. I can’t offer much, and it might not last forever, but it’s probably better than the crap you’d have to do otherwise.

Debian soname/suffix/0c2a/thingy overview?

General

This is a slightly modified version of my email to the maemo-developers list, in case a Debian person can clear this up for me:

When creating maemo packages, we will tend to take the debian or Ubuntu package and modify it for maemo. However, for C++ libraries, and maybe C libraries, the latest Debian or Ubuntu soname might not be appropriate.

In this context, the soname is the package suffix, such as 0c2a seen in the http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libs/libsigc++-2.0-0c2a>libsigc++ package.

I believe that these suffixes are changed whenever either

  • A new version of g++, with a new C++ ABI, is used.
  • A new version of libstdc++, with a new ABI, is used.
  • A new version of glibc, with a new ABI, is used.

I don’t know what the 0, c, 2, or a parts of the suffix mean, or if suffix is just changed arbitrarily. I can’t find an overview of these in the debian documentation, so I don’t know what might be an appropriate soname for maemo’s own mix of ABI.