Donkey Talk

This isn’t as bad as Earworms, but it’s really starting to bug me.

I got an email from Google telling me that someone was trying to retrieve my password and to ignore it if it wasn’t me. I get these all the time.

This time, though, it had the 7 other email accounts “associated with my account”. No, it wasn’t as simple as a period separating the names like everyone in the forums on the web is claiming. If I’m assholeme@gmail.com, I’m not just getting asshole.me@gmail.com and ass.holeme@gmail.com and ass.hole.me@gmail.com’s mail.

That’s at least understandable. No. I’m getting mail meant for asskicker@gmail.com, 002345ass@gmail.com, holeshit123@email.com, etc., totaling seven.

The worst part of it is, I’m not getting any good porn or pics or anything. Just boring personal messages and a ton of crap from verizon, car dealers, etc.

I filter everything that comes in. But more keeps coming.

Unfortunately, I would just kill my account and open one with a ridiculously long name, but my account is actually being used for some critical companies that I need and would be hard to change.

So for right now I’m just burning and saying to myself, “at least is wasn’t an earworm”.

Dead Donkey in the middle of the web?

“Uh…..”
“yeh, yeh, dead donkey dick”
“Shut up Beavis”
“Fartknocker”
“Go stick it in your bunghole..”
“Oh, yeah okay.”
“Uh, I guess we’re back now…uh…”

Seeing the extreme right wing governor of Wisconsin and his Republican cronies trying to crush cops, firemen, teachers and other public workers, I recall Tom Joad’s farewell speech in “The Grapes of Wrath” :

“Maybe it’s like Casey says. A fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but only a piece of a big soul, the one big soul out there that belongs to everybody. And then it don’t matter. Then I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere…Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a company thug beating up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad, and I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready…And when our people eat the stuff they raise, and the houses they build, I’ll be there too.”

(to those historically challenged, “The Grapes of Wrath” was made back during the Thirties, before we had anything like company provided health care, 40 hour work weeks or child labor laws, all of which you can thank the American Union Movement for and none of which would exist if people like Gov. Walker ran the country)

Okay, I’ll admit it; I have “just a little” problem with boredom from time to time. My most recent boredom “project” is “Textpattern”:http://www.textpattern.com on a vps account with “Fivebean”:http://fivebean.com/account/aff.php?aff=120, hence the title, but I’ll get to that later.

A couple of months ago I was reading up on Windows Home Server. It’s actually pretty neat. Among other things, you can basically take an old outmoded computer, load it up with various hard drives you have sitting around and install Windows Home Server on it. Once installed, you can unhitch the monitor and run all the configurations you need in your browser from any other networked computer. What I like about it is the media server for streaming music and videos throughout your LAN (and over the internet), and the ability to install client software on your Windows computers on the LAN and have them auto-backup to the hard drives on the Windows Home Server.

But two things kept me from jumping on it: (1) it runs a little over $100 for the operating system and (2 – and more importantly) it would probably only consume around 2-3 hours of boredom time because it’s all too easy.

So instead we try to use linux to accomplish the same thing.

Since I’m most familiar with the ubuntu 9.10 desktop, I used the ubuntu 9.10 server for my home media server. I’m using “DYN-DNS”:http://www.dyndns.com/ to point one of their domains at my home ip address, so I was able to set up the new media server with a domain, basic postfix package, etc. Then I found some neat streaming content software called “MediaTomb”:http://mediatomb.cc/ which was extremely easy to set up. I ripped a bunch of my cds and copied them to the new server, made up playlists for them with Windows Media Player on the various windows machines on my soho LAN, and bingo, easy music everywhere. I’m still working on getting dvd playback, and I’m not able to backup up all the windows machines to the new server, but I’m auto-backing up the important one to “Backblaze”:http://www.backblaze.com/ . Etc., etc., etc.

Which brings me to “Fivebean VPS Hosting”:http://fivebean.com/account/aff.php?aff=120 . I stumbled across the link in one of my forums and decided to check it out. For those who *don’t* have too much time on their hands, VPS, virtual private server is just another way to host a website, if that’s what you want it for. One difference of virtual over shared hosting is that you’re on a machine with 3 or 4 other accounts in your own private virtual environment. It’s similar to installing something like Virtualbox on your home or work computer so that you can install a different operating system on it and access that OS anytime without rebooting. On Fivebean and other vps hosts, there are a small number of virtual accounts, each running their own operating system and directly connecting to the internet.

With virtual hosting, you pay for exactly how much RAM and disk space you’re getting and you don’t get any more. So (if I understand this right), if 4 people have virtual accounts on one server, and one of the people starts a runaway process that would normally slow down or crash an entire computer, it actually only slows down/crashes his virtual account. If he signed up for 256 megs of RAM, that’s all he can abuse with a runaway process. On a shared server with 8 or 10 (or more) hosting accounts, activity on any of the accounts can slow the whole machine down, thus slowing down everybody on the machine.

Shared hosting might be antiquated, but I have several business domains in that environment and it’s working fine; I’m on a quality, pricier host with an excellent network setup. I really only opened an account with “Fivebean”:http://fivebean.com/account/aff.php?aff=120 to check it out and because of the aforementioned boredom factor. (So far I’ve been pleasantly surprised)

That said, with a vps, you’re root, not just a login. Hell, I’m root on my home and work computers, so that’s not a huge thrill to me, but it does allow me to choose my operating system and install exactly what I want.

Soooo, I chose Ubuntu 9.10 server because that’s what I’m used to. You select it as one of the choices from the Fivebean web interface and it loads up already installed. I should mention, my initial Fivebean account was “bean” level with 128 megs of RAM at $6/mo. In reality, that’s fine for a file server or a mail server, but I really wanted to run Apache2 with PHP and MySQL. I soon found out that I needed more RAM. So I upgraded to a “Starter” account with 512 megs of RAM and 50 gigs of disk space for $15.20/mo.

I installed my web-server software following this “excellent tutorial”:http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu-9.10-karmic-koala-ispconfig-2-p3 . Actually page 1 has really good advice for setting up the basic server. But beyond that, I installed only what I needed for the web. I pointed one of my unused domains toward my new experimental server and adjusted the basic configuration in the Fivebean web interface called “Moxie”. Moxie is very easy and allows you to do all the basic stuff you need. If you want something more complicated and easy to configure like cpanel, you can add that, but for me, Moxie was enough.

I needed a mail server for sending messages from the site I was going to build, and I chose postfix, which I’ve set up a bunch of times at home. However, since this mail server was not going to be behind a firewall, I set up sasl authentication, for safety’s sake and that was a touch more complicated. I ran into a few glitches, because of the complexity, most of them because of typos, but I eventually got it running. The easiest basic tutorial I recommend is “here”:https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix . If you don’t want to waste time setting up your own mail server, go with shared hosting or something similar. But as I said, the original goal here was to consume boredom time, and postfix worked very well toward that end.

Next, and finally, I needed something to put on my shiny new web server. I decided to go with “Textpattern”:http://textpattern.com/ because I was a little familiar with it. “A little familiar” is no stretch. I have no problem installing it, but I never really got used the the txp markup that you need to master if you’re going to do anything beyond the very basic. Actually, the very basic works pretty well, as this site can attest.

But as far as the boredom project goes, Textpattern is a good starter. Particularly when you want to turn it from a blog into a commerce site with a shopping cart and products. As it turns out, there is an excellent shopping cart “plugin”:http://textpattern.org/plugins/953/yab_shop for Textpattern which actually works.

So I set up the basic server on Fivebean with Apache2/MySQL/PHP and Postfix. Then I created a single empty table database in MySQL using basic code (just google it; it’s easy). Since I’m root on the machine, I called the database textpattern and it’s location was ‘localhost’. I loaded up the unzipped textpattern download to my web server and ran the setup script from a web browser. As usual, it found the empty database and populated it, and set up perfectly ready for me to customize it. I downloaded the Yab_shop plugins and stuck them in the plugins area and hit the install button. Bingo, the installation of the plugins were trivial, and there were no errors.

I had to use the Yab_shop forum “thread”:http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=26300 to get it up and running because I’m not really familiar with customizing textpattern, so that consumed some time (yes!) but I eventually got it working.

It interfaces easily with Paypal, and I added merchant services to my account there, so I went about making that happen. It involved an easy tutorial from Paypal on how to create an ssl certificate if you’re root on your own machine (yes! again – thanks Fivebean). And the rest is history as they say.

So far I’ve added one product. It worked fine originally, but I wasn’t getting the test orders mailed to me, which goes back to the trouble I had initially getting postfix to work, but it all works now. Because I actually work, which consumes quite a few hours in itself, this boredom project lasted about 2 weeks. But I’m not done yet! I have to add a bunch of products to my new ecommerce site, promote it, etc. and start making money!

Back in 2nd grade my favorite time of day was “Show ‘n’ Tell”. I’d get to expound on the boring little details of my life that nobody cared about. In Show ‘n’ Tell I had a captive audience.

“My dog got in a fight with a woodchuck this mornin’. There was blood everywhere! I never seen so much blood!”
“Eeeeouuuuu.”
or
“Yesterday my dog found a dead skunk covered with maggots. After he rolled in it awhile, boy did he stink!”
“Eeeeeeoouuuuu..”
or
“Last week my dog started humping the milk man’s leg. Does that mean he’s a homo?”
“That’s just about enough, Mister!!”

Nowadays, we don’t have Show ‘n’ Tell, but we have blogs. Of course the “captive” audience that follows a blog kind of relates to how good the blog is. In other words, the old “if a tree falls in the arctic and there was nobody to hear it, did it really make a noise” maxim can certainly apply to blogs.

But this is about a Tivo, not about dead blogs. As I pass through life I’ve noticed that there are certain pleasures that I care about. Some are “reel nice ta have”; others are “uh, get yer goddam paws off that”. I’ve noticed that if necessary, I can live without beer and women, but when it comes to coffee or Tivo, you’d better keep your paws off!

Sooooo, to my endless consternation, for the past few months my Tivo has been actin’ up. Ever so gradually, it started getting slower and slower. First the little beep that you hear when you click the remote was late in arriving, then voices on recorded shows were out of sync. Then it would take awhile to refresh a screen. And finally, the damned thing would freeze up and I’d have to unplug it to reboot.

“Just buy a new one”, said my partner. “They’re cheap.”

Yeah, true; the last one I got her, a TivoHD, was free if you prepaid the $12.95/month subscription for a year in advance. But we don’t like to throw out perfectly good machines when they can be fixed. So I check around the Tivo site and find that I can send it in for repair, and I think they charge around $250. Hmmmmm….. Then I went to “Weaknees”:http://www.weaknees.com/ and found a whole bunch of information.

Weaknees sells drives for your particular model of Tivo that come complete with the operating system pre-installed, step-by-step instructions and even the Torx T-10 screwdriver that you need to accomplish opening your Tivo and putting the new drive in. But of course, we didn’t know that we necessarily needed a new hard drive. But they have a whole section of the site that lists symptoms and probable causes. In my case, they said 99% of the time those symptoms mean a failing hard drive.

Okay. Sometimes I have weak knees, but other times I like to hack around and enjoy hours of free entertainment. So I went to “msflive.org”:http://www.mfslive.org/ “Must have tools for Tivoholics”. That sounded like me. They have developed Tivo software tools for linux and windows and have step-by-step instructions so that you can take your original Tivo hard drive and transfer everything to a new drive to replace it. They even have tested the available drives so you know which ones you can use in your particular model of Tivo.

I won’t do any step-by-step stuff here, because they do it so much better. Suffice it to say, any Tivo information you need is at Mfslive and Weaknees.

But we promised a Show ‘n’ Tell segment. Basically, I bought a Torx screwdriver at Home Depot, a Western Digital Terabyte hard drive from “Newegg”:http://www.newegg.com/ and proceeded to open the Tivo. (Okay, it was a little scary.) But not to worry, because it is so well manufactured that everything just comes apart and goes back together like butter. Not like some computers I’ve built from parts.

The Windows version of mfslive seemed a little complicated to me (meaning there was more I had to read) and the linux version seemed simpler, so we went with that. I downloaded the linux boot disk they have available, burned it to cd and took my newly removed Tivo hard drive plus the new Western Digital Terabyte drive I bought downstairs to my computer that has SATA drives in it (my Tivo Series 3 needed SATA connections).

My Dell server downstairs is super ez to open and had my two existing SATA drives right in front for ez removal. All I did was take the connectors off those drives and hook them to the Tivo and the new drive. Then I booted from the linux boot disk I got from Mfslive.

It was basically very easy. Once you boot and use the simple commands to tell which drive is which, there is another simple command to copy everything from your old Tivo drive to the new one. But honesty compels me to relate that I ran into a couple of glitsches.

The first time, I hate to admit it, but I rushed and committed a typo in the command. I left out a ‘ – ‘. That’s a space, a dash and another space.
and there was some kind of error message. But I thought maybe it worked anyway, so I put the new drive into the Tivo and fired it up. I got a blank screen from the empty drive. Oh well.

Went back downstairs, re-hooked it all up, fired up the boot disk and proceeded to type in the *correct* code. That worked fine and it told me that I had 37 minutes to wait. A half hour later I went back and the monitor was blank. Huh? It turned out, the Dell blanks out the screen after a few minutes as a “screensaver” when you’re in the command line. I could hear the two hard drives still working, so I figured it was indeed a screen saver that was enabled in the BIOS. I should have waited a good hour for it to finish, but Nooooo, I’m in a hurry and I tapped a key to turn off the screen-blanking after 40 minutes and screwed up the copying right before the end. Oh well, maybe it missed copying some program that I don’t care about. Nope. Got it up in the Tivo and it only boots half-way.

Okay. Downstairs the third time. This time I realize that I could care less about all the shows recorded on the old hard drive. I saved the ones I cared about to the computer long ago. So this time when it boots up to Mfslive, I type in the command that just copies the essential operating system and skips the recorded programs. That takes only a couple minutes.

Lo and behold, the new terabyte drive goes easily into the Tivo and boots up successfully. But is the speed issue solved? Or will the Tivo keep freezing up even after all my work? Click, click, beep beep. Yep, resolved. New fast Tivo, new terabyte hard drive ready for 1400 hours of shows that I’ll never watch. But I’ll happily get my Mad Men and Breaking Bad fixes speedily and unencumbered by freezes.

The whole process was really much easier than my incompetence suggests, but I’ve always felt that Show-n-Tell should follow the truth to some extent, and not leave out the blood and maggots. (but if one wants to *add* a little blood and maggots and humped milkmen for artistic license, well….).

If I wasn’t in such a rush, the linux version of Mfslive would have worked the first time, and if I wasn’t too lazy to read the Windows information, that might have been easier too. But for most Tivoholics, I realize that Weaknees is your savior. They put out a fine product, extremely documented, and they even send you the Torx screwdriver. If you’re still scared, you can send the unit to them and they’ll even put the thing in for around $50. The Tivo hard drive really couldn’t be any easier to replace.

Or, if Vista is the new Windows ME, does that make Windows 7 the new XP?

Well, “Vista ha been very very good to me.” I ain’t complainin’, plus it was free. But I had the 32 bit version on my pc and decided I needed to try something in 64 bit that was maybe a little newer. After all, Vista 32 could only see 3 of my 4 gigs of RAM, and my dual core processor could easily handle a 64 bit os.

So I tried the “release candidate”:http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/get/download.aspx on an older machine first. That went all right, but I guess the machine was really old because I had trouble finding a lot of the drivers (32 bit version of Win7). Then I mistakenly put a “theme” on it, not realizing how sluggish that would make it, finally gave up and put XP back on the machine. The peanut gallery which actually uses that computer was getting very restless and I thought I heard a couple of threats. Put that mess back in the closet.

Fast forward to my Dell Poweredge with a 3.0 ghz cpu and 4 gigs of RAM. Let’s see if the results are any better on a newer machine. I should mention that changing a Windows OS has become increasingly easier. It’s gotten almost as easy as my ubuntu machine, where I just copy my home directory to a networked drive, wipe the hard drive and slap on the new os. In this case, I’ve been using “Acronis”:http://www.acronis.com/ to back up my documents folders. And since I moved my domain email over to “Google Apps”:http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html, there’s no fussing around with trying to recover all my Outlook Express contacts and past emails. Everything is stored on a free gmail account. And the way I’m filling it up, I imagine I will be dead about 30 years before I run out of space. So for the new install you just stick your backed up folders on a network drive, stick the new Windows on, and copy it all back. Of course, reinstalling certain applications which assume from the get-go that we’re all pirates, can always be a little chancy, but I was willing to take the risk. Besides, occasionally getting to scream over the phone at someone from Adobe can be somewhat entertaining, if you happen to be a little weird.

Anyway, the Release Candidate of Windows 7 lasts until next Spring/Summer, plenty of time for me to evaluate it. The install went very well. This time, with this version, you can actually leave it to do its own thing. When it installed itself and rebooted for the last time, I found that it was asking me if I wanted to join a Homegroup or Workgroup. Since I have all kinds of different operating systems running on my LAN, Workgroup is the correct choice. (Homegroup is easy, but the only computers that it recognizes are Windows 7 machines). Anyway, I normally configure my network settings manually, but this time I didn’t have to do anything. It quickly found all my machines, including the one running Linux and all its shares. Amazingly, Windows7 found 64 bit drivers for every piece of hardware on the machine except for my old Canon scanner. I clicked around the Canon site and couldn’t find 64 bit drivers for that particular machine, but within 20 minutes I received notice that Windows had finally found them. All my hardware set itself up, even the print servers on the LAN.

Anyway, the bestest thing I like about Windows 7 so far? Its networking, by far. No configurin’, no losing shares and having to reconnect, everything is just there, all the time. And it’s quicker. I have a gigabit LAN, but I’m guessing the 64 bit drivers made a difference on the network adapter. The whole machine is running pretty fast, or maybe it’s getting to see all 4 gigs of RAM, or maybe it’s just that I don’t have a lotta crap loaded on it. Another bonus, it’s finally got Windows Explorer set up logically where I can find things. It’s hard to explain, but everything is very intuitive. Trying to help other people in the office find things in folders on XP has always been frustrating. I’m thinking if I give them all Windows 7 (we never did migrate to Vista), it will be a lot easier.

It’s pretty bad when I have to look up my login and password here. What’s it been, six months? More?

Anyway, Comcast came by today to swap out my modem because my area had been upgraded to Docsis 3.0, meaning I could enjoy 50/10 mbps internet (at $139/mo? No thanks) or 22/5 mbps internet at $10 more than I’m paying now (yeah, ok). Which is pretty hard to figure out anyway, since with their digital voice phone and HDTV, I get so many discounts that figuring out the monthly bill is pretty much impossible.

So, that would make it time for the obligatory “Yawn, ho hum” post about a speed upgrade. I guess, since it wasn’t all that long ago that my connection crawled along at 9600 baud and the upgrade to 56 kb was so exciting, that “Yawn, ho hum” for the various megabit variations had some possible meaning.

!http://www.elburro.net/images/ComcastUltra.jpg!

Not that long ago? I guess I’m not counting the 8 years of George Bush that I’d like to pretend never happened, so in that sense, yeah, I was grinning from head to toe over 56kb not all that long ago.

But someone must have moved me to the Old Fart side of town when I wasn’t looking, because this time, it truly is “Yawn, ho hum”.

I’ve finally gotten to the point of having way more bandwidth than I have any possible use for. I didn’t think that would ever happen.

Checklist:
*VOIP?* it worked fine at 8/2
*Videos?* Once a month from Amazon? I’d usually rather read a book. Tv? Premium channels? In reality I’m starting to feel like Tony Soprano because all I seem to watch is World War II and Civil War docs on the History Channel.

*Music?* ditto
*Software downloads?* Aha!! Every geek’s dream, But what is the reality? Uh, every six months I download the new Ubuntu. And if it took all day rather than 10 minutes it makes no difference to me.

*Website uploads?* 5 megs up is great, but 2 megs is pretty good also.

*Web server?* Yeah, 5 megs up would be nice, but it’s against my TOS. Besides the point, having to pore over the access attempt logs whenever I’ve opened up a server is more stress than normal people like to handle who live on the Old Fart Side of Town.

*Plenty of bandwidth for 5 computers and 2 Tivos?* Yeah, but 8 megs had plenty too.

So I hate to say it, but I’m asking myself, “how the hell did I get here?”. All I can remember is seeing all this excitement over the web these past few months about Docsis 3.0 coming to a Comcast near you. And thinking, “hell, I prob’ly need that.”.
And when I went to their site to pay a bill the other day and decided to check on any specials in my area I see the Ultra (22 megs) and whatever the 50 meg plan is. “Hmmmm, mebbe I should give-em a call?” And next thing you know they have an installer coming over to bring my bright shiny Docsis 3.0 modem.

And I looked at it. And it is indeed bright and shiny. And I downloaded 3.5 gigs of Windows 7 to try it out and it took a few minutes…..

And I made lunch, and worked on some crap, and…..

Suddenly it’s night and I think there’s some kind of WWI thing on the History Channel.

I hate to admit it, but I’m thinking I need a new hobby.

At least for my business email. And it’s sad in a way; like an era has passed. Yeah, I know, everybody’s got problems, quit bitchin’. But when eras change, sometimes, somebody makes note of it; other times they just fade away. Yeah, take it Buddy:

“I’m gonna tell you how it’s a gonna be…,..
You’re gonna give your love to me……
Love can last more than one day……
Love a-real not fade away…….
Love a-real not fade away……”

It was 1994 when I procured my first 3-letter domain. I say “procured”, because back then domains were free. Email was text, email was crude, but email didn’t get spammed. At least back in the mid-nineties. And when it first started happening, or when there was just somebody whose email you didn’t want to read, there was a nifty application called procmail, a mail transport agent, an mta that was there to help. Enter a recipe in your .procmailrc and bingo, no more emails from idiots. Oh, the power of the Dark Side.

Everybody knows what happened next, so fast forward to the turn of the century. Hell, fast forward to current times, where entire multi-million dollar ISPs exist that do nothing but churn out spam. Millions of “messages” per hour. And the sad part is, (and I never really understood this part), but if a lot of people weren’t buying fake viagra and penis extenders, the multi-million dollar spam-ISPs wouldn’t exist.

But, knowing all that, we’ll linger around the turn-o-the-century for just a couple of lines or so.

Sometime after the year 2000 I became acquainted with Spamassassin, an open source application. Without getting into a whole long thing, calling the spamassassin app from your .procmailrc caused all incoming emails to be scanned and rated as to “spamminess”. Then a .procmailrc recipe could take certain very spammy emails and delete them, and store slightly spammy emails in a bin where you could check them out for the occasional false positive and pass good mail on to your basic legitimate user. By keeping good mail in one file and spammy mail in another, and running spamassassin’s learning feature on both files, spamassassin would get “smarter” and “smarter” in finding spam.

Hell, for smart people who could use the Dark Side and run procmail and spamassassin, spam was pretty much doomed, right?

Uh, yeah right. Long story short again, but either spammers were figuring out spamassassin, or I just wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, or a combination of the two.

As recently as a year ago, out of the thousands of spams per day which were hurled at my domain, barely one or two ever got past all my “stuff” and ended up in my box or one of my users. But over the past few months, no matter what I do, each user has been getting 20-30 spams per day. Still not bad considering the thousands headed our way, but a major consumer of time, nonetheless. Spamassassin didn’t seem to be working as well, so I was going back to filters involving IP blocks. Lately, in my slightly spammy file, two thirds of them were being “okayed” by spamassassin and were only stopped by manual IP blocks. And since spammers have so many blocks to use, I end up spending an hour or so a day just adding them to my filters. (But lest anyone think I no longer recommend spamassassin, hold your horses. I put the blame on my lack of keeping up.)

This started me thinking. For the last couple of years, I have sporadically had to maintain a webhosting setup for the mother of an acquintance after he unexpectedly died. He had email and scripting setups that were reasonably secure during the mid-nineties, but which lent themselves to being compromised in recent months. When I first went into his site to plug holes, it was a mess. So I started thinking, what if something “unexpected” happens to me? What happens to my business websites and email? Who’s gonna learn all this crap?

Sooooo, I took a little-used domain and tried an experiment. I signed up for “Google Apps Standard”:http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/editions.html . You basically point the MX records of your domain to the gmail filtering and storage system and see what happens.

What happens is no more spam. And it’s pretty easy to set up.

After double checking everything, I decided to move my 3-letter business domain over and give it a try. I tried the free, standard version first (and that’s where I am now) to see how it went. There is another beefier version that you pay $50/year for, so I figured if I still get a lot of spam with Standard, I could upgrade. There’s even a 30 day trial to kick the tires before you make the leap. What makes the $50 Premier edition “beefier” is the ability to turn on Postini industrial strength filtering. You also get a bunch of apps, ability to watch videos on a company intranet, but I won’t get into that stuff. I’m doing this to kill spam. You can also leave your email storage wherever it’s stored now, at your ISP, webhost, etc., and pay $3/year per email address for just the Postini filtering. If for some reason my Standard version test doesn’t pan out, I’ll check out the others. I had looked at Postini before, and I found the interface a little confusing, but basically, it’s giving you similar power to procmail recipes in creating filters, so yeah, it takes a while to learn, even in a GUI.

Anyway, tonight is the end of Day 1 using the free Google mail system for my very spam-infested domain and the results have been pretty startling. Out of several users, exactly one spam got through early on. There are hundreds of others in the various gmail spam bins for my users. Pre-e-e-tty impressive. But we’ll give it a few weeks and see how it goes.

Basically, after signing up, I followed the steps to prove I owned the domain and then put Google’s MX records in my domain. The verification process and the time it took to where the mail was running through Google took about an hour total. Once my mail was running through Google, I turned off the catch-all (actually I think that’s the default) so that all the madeupnames@mydomain.com spam would bounce into nowhere. Then I created a CNAME at my domain so that I could have http://webmail.mydomain.com/ point to the new gmail interfaces for myself and my 3 users.

After that, for the users who use Outlook Express, I downloaded the Google Email Uploader and sent all their messages, contacts and storage up to their gmail interface with its hefty 7 gigs of empty space. A word of caution to anyone who found this post from a search: You have to enable POP mail in the gmail interface before uploading, but *after* you upload it, go into Settings and set it to “Enable POP for anymail received after Now”. Otherwise, when they fire up their Outlook Express, it tries to download a couple hundred megs of their old messages and you have a lotta deletin’ to do. I know, I learned the hard way. Also, depending on how many years of email they want to upload, start it at night and let it run until the next morning. It is slow.

That’s about it. I’ll be checking out some of the other Google Apps. They looked kind of “enterprisy” at first glance, but you never know.

And as far as the Dark Side goes, yeah, I still use it for work, just not as much as when I had to try and outwit the spammers. Most likely I’ll go crazy and start exclusively using mutt & vi from my home computer, but that’s just my crap to sort out.

I think I’m nominating “this one”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24764828/ to the Assholes…..

For several years now, I have used XP Pro for my work computers and Ubuntu linux for my play computers. The work computers run everything I need to run with nary a hiccup and my play computers provide the cutting edge entertainment that I seem to need. I break them; I fix them; I learn; I turn stupid. It goes on and on. Not that I don’t use my main linux machine for work; it’s on the LAN and it’s running a LAMP testing server for my Dreamweaver experimenting.

So what the hell is the point here? Am I stalling about admitting something? Did something really embarrassing just happen?

Oh jesus….

“!vista_t.jpg!”:http://www.elburro.net/vista.jpg

Wait! Wait! There’s mitigation. Seriously. No, I didn’t go out and fork over $300+ for Windows ME with a new name. It was FREE, dammit. Directly from Microsoft. Yes, legal. I had to uh, do a couple a small things in return…..but we don’t need to go there right now.

Last week I opened up the mailer from Microsoft and discovered that I had two dvds in there, one was Vista Ultimate 32 bit, the other was 64 bit. The “Not To Be Sold!!!” imprinted onto each dvd kinda dissipated any eBay fantasies I might have had. So I figured, hell, they make nice coasters, no?

No, you want long embarrassing story cut short? Okay, I installed the bastard.

After a little research, I found that my “next to, but not quite” current copies of Photoshop and Dreamweaver could possibly have some problems with a 64 bit os, so I went for the 32 bit.

I backed up the stuff in my $HOME as usual and was about to backup all my emails and settings, but I noticed a huge link at the beginning of the Vista install that said Easy Transfer. Hmmmm, I thought, not like the last time I tried this in XP and had to search for the fabled Transfer Wizard. Oh well, let’s do Easy Transfer. The “Easy Transfer” took several hours for some reason, so I went to bed and tackled the bastard the next day.

Well, the next day, sure enough, my stuff was on my external hard drive in a single file. Hmmmmm…. Anyway, let’s install Vista, yup. I installed vista from within XP Pro and it was uneventful, a quicker install than XP, but slower than ubuntu. Install my main apps, uneventful, Photoshop CS, DW8, Microsoft Office Pro 2007, Peachtree Accounting 2008. Then it’s time for Easy Transfer my email and Stuff. It should be called Slow Transfer. I call it a day and tackle the bastard again the next day.

This section should be called The Bad:

The next day, I open up the new Windows Mail to find my several years worth of email that’s important enough to save. Uh, nothing there. Hmmm. Okay, import the messages. Click, browse….., browse….there’s the folder, click, Import. Nope. Vista says there’s nothing there. (But I know there is, dammit). Several hours later, researching vista forums, google, etc., and I’m finding I need to change the file permissions of the email, among a bunch of other suggestions…Hours go by, and some of those emails are important, dammit, why didn’t I back it up the old way! Dang, Dang! Long story short, in one of the forums, someone had a solution. Now normally, in a Windows computer, when you want to say, import your saved bookmarks, you click on Browse, you find the bookmarks.html on your hard drive, click Select, and Import and it’s there. Unfortunately, not on Windows Vista, at least with email imports. After you find the folder containing them and click Select, in the little box it shows up in you have to type:
C:\path\to\yer\messages before the folder name. We all congratulate ourselves for finding yet another Vista bug, and I have my email back. So much for Easy Transfer.

That was the only major trauma. The rest of it should really fall under Vista Annoyances. There is a much easier backup program than in XP, but it wants to back up everything, and I don’t friggin’ *want* everything. Just my crap. Still working on that one. Windows Explorer. Needs a little getting used to but not all that different. If I think of any more annoyances, I’ll stick them in, but for now we’ll go down to….

The Good:

Stable & snappy. 3 gigs of RAM, 3.2 GZ dual core processor, no problem. Seems quicker than XP, but I don’t have much crap on there yet. Update. I installed some more crap, mainly the Service Pack 1 for Vista, which was supposed to break my Creative Audigy SE sound card. Well, the sound card still works, and shockingly, on my 32bit version of Vista, it’s showing all 4 gigs of installed RAM. That’s supposed to be impossible on a 32bit system, but SP1 just did it. P’shop will be happy to hear that. (Oops! According to the googles, it shows the full 4 gigs, but only uses 3325 megs.)

The Windows Firewall. Basically, I’ve got a *hardware firewall*, securely setup machines, and we don’t need no stinkin’ Windows Firewalls. They’re LAN killers and all our machines have it turned off. Except, when I installed Peachtree Complete Accounting 2008, it specifically wants you to turn on any windows firewalls. It’s fairly important not to screw up, because like all my business apps, P’tree Accounting runs off a central server and all the workstations keep the data on the server. Anyway, I follow instructions and install it leaving the firewall *on*. I enable the firewall on the server too, just to make sure no glitsches. Amazingly, there were no glitsches. Peachtree works fine through the firewall, so does Access, Word and Publisher. In fact I left the firewall on just to see how long before it broke my LAN. A week later, it still hasn’t broken it.

Networking. On this aspect, I have to give mini-thumbs up to Vista. It’s internal networking seems a much more solid architecture than in XP. For one, all the workgroup shares show up immediately, without all of the “discovering” you have to do sometimes in XP. And in XP, some of my larger apps that run off the server (like P’tree Accounting and Access), when left on all day (or even for an hour or two) tend to lose the network connection. So when a customer calls and wants you to look up something on their invoice from six months ago, you click on Peachtree and the program crashes because the LAN disconnected. “Uh, sorry, let me run over to another computer and see if it crashed there too, heh heh.” In Vista, I can leave the accounting and database apps open all day on this workstation, because somehow the networking keeps it connected. Maybe when the lease times out, it reconnects behind the scenes. I dunno, but it makes me happy. I also have all my Photoshop and Dreamweaver files stored on the server, and even after I converted to gigabit LAN, it’s still a little show to pull up, especially my huge company website. In Vista, for whatever reason, it’s quicker and snappier hauling stuff up over the LAN.

Windows Search. For the first week or so after the vista install, your hard drive runs a lot, indexing everything causing consternation. Then it stops. After all that, searches are so instant that you don’t really need to go looking for anything. No more “where in the hell did I store that show application?” Just type a little search string and it’s there.

Defrag. It’s automatically set to run by itself once a week, unless you change the schedule. And it takes hours longer than the defrag in XP, and supposedly, it’s better and more thorough. We’ll see. So far I like it.

Anyway, I hate to admit it, but it seems a little better than XP, at least for my business apps. More later, the Good, the Bad, the Ugly. I’m a little nervous about my email, should I have to go back to XP, but heh heh.