Archive for February, 2010
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
When you start up Cygwin’s X.Org X11 server via startxwin.exe, it likes to leave an xterm window open on your desktop.
I suppose this is kind of handy if you were manually starting Cygwin/X, it’s pretty annoying if you have it set to start up when you log in to Windows. To keep this from happening, you just need to add an empty .startxwinrc file to your Cygwin home directory. That is, start the Cygwin bash shell, and use this command:
touch .startxwinrc
That’s it! No more xterm windows popping up.
Oh, if you’d rather have something besides xterm start up when you start Cygwin/X, you can just add a list of commands to .startxwinrc and it will execute them after starting the X.Org server.
Tags: Cygwin
Posted in Software | 1 Comment »
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
So, to combat spam, I recently deployed Postini at my workplace. We qualified for the K-12 promotion to it is awesome to have good spam handling for free. We currently use FirstClass as our mail server, and I’d rate it’s built in spam-handling mechanisms as “poor-to-none.” (We are eying Google Apps mail as a replacement in the next year or so.)
So, after finally getting Postini deployed and enabled for all accounts, the Postini stats report that just over 50% of incoming mail is being tossed out as “blatant spam,” with over 25% of the remaining mail being quarantined as “potential spam.” This is with Postini on the default lowest aggressiveness setting. So, assuming the worst case (“all incoming mail is spam”, which is almost true), our users are already receiving less than 37.5% as much spam as they used to. Once we’re satisfied that things are working fine, I’ll bump up the aggressiveness.
Anyways, I noticed that my FirstClass inbox was still being bombarded by spam messages (a few per hour), most of them obviously spam. Why weren’t these being blocked by Postini?
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Tags: E-mail, E-mail Security, Postini
Posted in Software | No Comments »
Thursday, February 18th, 2010
I ran into this problem with WordPress running on a Mac OS X server. I suppose that this may happen on other servers running Apache as well. Attempting to access the WordPress site threw this error at you:
Server error!
The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there was an error in a CGI script.
If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 500
Turned out that the .htaccess file in the root of the WordPress install had some gibberish in it. It looks like this gibberish replaced some of the actual contents of the file. I don’t know how it got there, but fixing the .htaccess file solved the problem. So, that’s something to check if you are having this problem as well!
Tags: Mac OS X Server, WordPress
Posted in Software | No Comments »
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
Yesterday, Facebook finally launched XMPP support for Facebook Chat. (More about XMPP here.) This is something that they announced that they were working on back in May, 2008 — almost two years ago. After a long time (of mostly silence), here we have it — you can now connect to Facebook using (almost) any XMPP client, including popular “universal” chat clients like Pidgin, Trillian, Adium, Digsby, Miranda, Empathy, etc., using the XMPP support that they already have. This also paves the way for Facebook Chat to become one of the most used IM protocols, up in the ranks with AOL Instant Messenger, Windows Live, and Google Talk.
I’m a bit disappointed, but not surprised, that this initial launch of XMPP support comes without support for XMPP federation (“S2S”). If we had S2S support for Facebook Chat, then Facebook users could talk with users on any XMPP/Jabber network, and vice versa. This would also enable a particularly cool bridge between Facebook Chat and Google Talk, which are both based on XMPP, and it might even push AIM and WLM more towards supporting XMPP, so that we could have a truly universal IM network on the Internet. (We have it for e-mail already… why not for IM?)
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Tags: Facebook, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, XMPP
Posted in The World Online | 3 Comments »
Monday, February 1st, 2010
…How’s that for good grammar?
Anyway, this error popped up for me in Windows 7 the other day. After the computer boots up, you click on your user icon, type in your password, and BAM! “The User Profile Service service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded.” And then you are logged off, and stuck back at the user select screen.
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Tags: Windows 7, Windows Vista
Posted in Software | 46 Comments »
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