So, yeah, going to be a daddy! We’re very excited. This is the week eight ultrasound. Only 32 more weeks to go!
(I know there really isn’t much to see. Sort of looks like a blurry set of pixels. Later ones ought to be more focused.)
Rosey found this great link for creating yourself as a SouthPark character. She’s proceeded to create a composite of both her and I.
Rosey and I picked up a new digital camera a few weeks back (a Canon Powershot A540.) It’s a great camera, but we needed somewhere to post our pictures so our friends could see them. We started using Flickr, which is very slick setup, but they limit the amount of data you can upload in a month unless you’re a subscriber.
Well, there’s no point in paying for hosting when I all ready have a domain. Therefore, I installed Gallery at http://www.wormbytes.ca/gallery
The best part is that I can rsync the files from my desktop to the server and then import those photos directly into the gallery. Nice and easy.
My grandfather (Henry Kaes) supplied me with a bunch of old photos of various members of my family. I’ve collected them here with as much documentation as possible so that my children (some day), will know their family story.
For many years I wanted to join the ACM, but I never had the money (first as a starving student, and then as a starving small-business owner.) Last December, however, I began work at ePublishing so I decided to take a bit of my salary and join both the ACM and the IEEE. Both organizations are a great idea for anyone working in the computing industry.
While I’ve gotten a lot out of my IEEE membership, I absolutely love the ACM Professional Development Centre —especially the free online books offered to all members.
The ACM offers access to both O’Reilly’s Safari® Enterprise Library and SkillSoft’s Books24x7. I still have a large collection of books I’ve purchased, and I will continue to purchase new books in the future, but for the price of one or two hardcover books, I can have access to a full library for a year. It’s a great way to discover whether a book is good enough to own.
If you are trying to stay current with what’s happening in this industry, I would highly recommend becoming a member of both the ACM and the IEEE.
A co-worker sent me the Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design. Put it this way: 60% of a web designer’s time is spent swearing at Internet Explorer or Bill Gates (or both!)
Enjoy!
For the past year or so I’ve used the JavaScript library Prototype to make coding in JavaScript more pleasant. Today, while reading A List Apart, I came across a reference to a new library, jQuery. Initial impressions are favourable.
Unfortunately, like Prototype, trying to read the source code for this library/extension is extremely complicated. I’m hoping this is just due to my lack of JavaScript guru-ness, since it seems like one needs to be a guru to understand what the code is doing. At least the documentation is clear for an end-user.
I came across an article in Nature today that discusses Stephen Hawking’s theory of how the universe began. Basically, he assumes that every possible history of the universe was present in the first few instances after the Big Bang. Within that period the histories that lead to our present universe began to dominate, while the other possibilities whithered away. Cool concept!
Customers of Sympatico’s high-speed Internet service receive instructions on how to set up their email; however, these settings are aimed at people using Outlook, Netscape, or Eudora. What I needed were instructions on how to configure my local SMTP server, Postfix, with Sympatico. Of course, that information is not available. This document details how I figured out the settings required to make smtphm.sympatico.ca happy.
You need a version of Postfix built with TLS and SASL support enabled. If your distribution doesn’t come with it pre-built follow the instructions at:
On my Debian unstable system I simply did:
apt-get install postfix libsasl2-modulesI’m assuming that your Postfix configuration directory it /etc/postfix. Adjust appropriately to accommodate your system.
To use SASL we need a password file containing our user name and password for the server we are connecting to. Per Sympatico’s instructions the server is smtphm.sympatico.ca.
cd /etc/postfix
mkdir sasl && cd sasl
echo "[smtphm.sympatico.ca] USERNAME@symaptico.ca:PASSWORD" > passwd
postmap hash:passwdThe above creates the password file and the hash-based database file that Postfix uses. Of course replace USERNAME with your [% symaptico %] user name, and PASSWORD with your password (the email password, not the b1 password to access the Internet.)
Make sure in your main.cf you have configured your relayhost as: relayhost = [smtphm.sympatico.ca]
Finally, add the following lines to your main.cf file:
# Enable TLS/SASL for the smtphm.sympatico.ca server
smtp_use_tls = yes
smtp_tls_note_starttls_offer = yes
tls_random_source = dev:/dev/urandom
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl/passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options = Restart Postfix and send a test message. If all went well you should see the successful sending of the message in the Postfix log file.
Good luck!
While reading various blogs online I came across a post mentioning a great Firefox add-on called FireBug. According to the author’s write-up:
FireBug is a new tool that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter.
I would highly recommend this add-on for anyone doing “Web 2.0” development.