Checking for mail and DNS problems

Dave’s recent arcicle about problems with Mail.app reminded me that sometimes mail (and DNS) problems occure on the sending end, and some time on the receiving.

So I’ld like to take this opportunity to plug DNS Report, which is a really handy tool for rooting out problems with DNS and mail configs (or at least checking if DNS and mail are configured properly).

Here are a couple of examples:

DNS and mail config for theconsultant.net
DNS and mail config for sherman.ca

I am not linking to my own domain, as it shows so much red, that I am embarrassed.

P.S. Dave, you might want to at least fix mail to postmaster. Thankfully stoopid folks from rfcignorant.org picked up their toys and left the sandbox. I hope so did the sheeple that used rfcignorant.org RBL.

Ok, rant time…

RBLs are a great idea in theory, folks. Sure, I know Dave, we have similar ideas about what e-mail is useless, so if he doesn’t like e-mail from Sonya Abacha, most likely I’d not want to read it either. However, what happened to every bloody RBL out there is that the moment it got sufficiently big, folks who created it (and they tend to be loudmouthed, obnoxious and highly opinionated folks, kind of like me) decide that they need to force their opinions on to others.

They tell the rest of the world that no, they are not forcing their opinion onto others, and that people are free not to use their RBL system. Vaild opinion. But how many e-mail systems come with RBLs enabled by default, and how many people heard that “Gee, RBLs are great, they stop spam cold!”, an d enabled it, only to start losing valid mail?

In particular I had an axe to grind with rfcignorant.org. I had a /27 sub-allocated and routed to me from achilles.net. At one point Achilles had a problem with spam to postmaster (that by RFC must exist and must be read by humans), that Andrew Hutton started replying to all postmaster mails with auto-reply with a phone number and e-mail address that was read.

Some dumbass reported achilles.net to rfcignorant because this was “against the internet rules”.

Another dumbass at RFCignorant promptly added entire Achilless netblock to their RBL.

And for the next 2 years chaos ensued – Andrew Hutton instead of giving out an e-mail addy that was actually read promptly started to /dev/null all spam coming to postmaster, generating illusion of postmaster being a valid e-mail address, I had problems with my own e-mail (that I hosted on DSL link from achilless, under a different domain name, and which was technically a totally separate organization just buying inet access from achilless) because entire Achilless IP space was blacklisted, attempts to get de-listed from the RBL proved to be futile, because dumbass at rfcignorant would add, but never remove entries, etc.

I learned about it when some of my e-mails replying to a mailing list question (“I am not subscribed, so please CC me on any replies”) got bounced with apropriate reply.

People that really got screwed on the deal were the rest of the interweb, I feel, as those who used rfcignorant RBL missed out on my insightful, witty e-mail commentary. Or something like that.

Oh well. That’s all water over the bridge now….

On the other hand, I have no moral qualms about bouncing all mail from Korea, or all mail from hotmail.com… Talk about double standards….

iLife 06 and G3 processor and rant about Pacifist.app

After cobbling together an iBook (long story, but iBook in question is 600Mhz G3 with 100Mhz bus (as opposed to 600Mhz with 66Mhz bus that would make it much closer to molasses) 40 gig HD and combo drive), and throwing a clean install of 10.4.5 onto it today, I proceeded to turn it into a master disk image.

Every once in a blue moon I create an up to date install of OS with all the apps, system configured how I like it, accounts set up as I like them, and then use asr to back them onto an external hard drive. Then, in event I need to quickly roll out a system or recover from disaster I’d just need to asr the image back.

Two words about asr. Personally, I love asr. It can act as a poor man’s backup tool to create an identical bootable disk on a different drive (especially useful if you have some sort of bootable CD/DVD from which you can boot, as then asr would use fast block copy to copy data from disk to disk). Coincidentially, vast majority of macs (Let’s not talk about x86 ones. I am not yet sure I like them) supports firewire disk target mode. asr is also useful in creating and restoring from disk images.

Sadly for things like recovery disk I tend to use junky drives, as it’s not really a priority, just convinience, and coincidentially there is no funding for it. A disk with my last image died, so I decided to take advantage of the opportunity, as I were setting up a new system from scratch, with no baggage of software archeologies.

When I put in iLife 06 DVD into iBook and attempted to install it, I were told that iLife 06 only works with G4 and up processors.

So not being deferred, I’ve used Pacifist (See rant about Pacifist at the bottom) to extract iMovie package into a folder, to see what it is that Apple is trying to do on me.

I’ve talked about Fat files and lipo earlier, in case you feel like a review.

So a quick check with lipo confirmed what Apple is saying…. the compiled the binary for G4 and x86 processors only, obsoleting G3s. *sigh* First the cut off was presence of Firewire, then with iWork 05 (which was like 650 megs, yet shipped on DVD) it was presence of DVD, but now it’s G4 and up. I got to give a credit to the marketing/built in obsolescence people at Apple – they are good!

stany@Ghostwheel:~/Desktop/Root/Applications/iMovie HD.app/Contents/MacOS[03:46 AM]$ lipo -detailed_info iMovie HD 
Fat header in: iMovie HD
fat_magic 0xcafebabe
nfat_arch 2
architecture i386
    cputype CPU_TYPE_I386
    cpusubtype CPU_SUBTYPE_I386_ALL
    offset 4096
    size 3217924
    align 2^12 (4096)
architecture ppc7400
    cputype CPU_TYPE_POWERPC
    cpusubtype CPU_SUBTYPE_POWERPC_7400
    offset 3223552
    size 3327624
    align 2^12 (4096)
stany@Ghostwheel:~/Desktop/Root/Applications/iMovie HD.app/Contents/MacOS[03:46 AM]$ 

7400 is, of course, G4.

Attempts to run it generate ldynamic linker errors:

stany@Ghostwheel:~/Desktop/Root/Applications/iMovie HD.app/Contents/MacOS[03:46 AM]$ ./iMovie HD 
dyld: incompatible cpu-subtype
Trace/BPT trap
stany@Ghostwheel:~/Desktop/Root/Applications/iMovie HD.app/Contents/MacOS[03:54 AM]$

Now a quick rant about Pacifist.

Dear Charles Srstka.

I like Pacifist. I’ve not registered it using a pirated serial, and see 15 second time out each time I start it. One of these days I’ll even send you some money to support your effort (which seem to have been stalled since 2004). But, can you give me an answer to one question: Why the heck does Pacifist ask for administrator password each time one attempts to extract a file out of a package? Shouldn’t it only do that if one doesn’t have write permissions to the folder one is extracting files into? If I have read/write rights to files in package and to Desktop onto which I want to extract package’s contents, why does Pacifist want my password? Isn’t that getting users used to Pavlovian response of typing in admin password every time there is a prompt on screen, regardless of the need?
Please, think of the users, esp in view of the recent series of Mac OS worms that also ask for admin passwords.

Damn, if you fix it to actually check (and tell user why) if it needs admin password, and e-mail me about it, I’ll buy a license for Pacifist.

Little Annoyances: Mail.app

1) Next unread message.

I prefer to use a plain list view for a mailbox, and have to open a message to view it.

Remember Eudora? I used to use Eudora, and sometimes think I still should. It has this nice feature where you hit the spacebar, causing the current message to page down web-page style. When you reach the end hit that spacebar again and you jump to the next unread message in that mailbox. Nice, eh?

That does not work in Mail.

So, how about a key command to do that? Nope, not available either.

2) Invalid Email addresses.

What is so hard about telling me you can not send the email because I was too stupid to enter in a proper email address? Mail will happily harass you about opening too many windows at once.. so why not invalid email addresses?

Yeah, I caught myself BCC’ing several people, and some of them were not actual email addresses, just the domain name. Took me way too long to figure out too!

Can you Help? Emailing pictures with iPhoto is broken!

I have iPhoto 5.0.4, latest version before iLife 2006. I’m still running 10.4.3 though.

The problem is simple: I choose a series of pictures, click the strangely-icon-less email button and select my options, and watch as the Mac does it’s thing. Once the progress bar is done… nothing happens.

Picture 3.png

When I go to the prefs I have a blank pop-up menu in which to choose an email program.

Picture 4.png

So far I have:

– repaired permissions
– moved the old iPhoto prefs out of the way
– cleared the ByHost cache

When I checked the result of ‘defaults read com.apple.iPhoto’ I got:

MailApp = Mail;

I checked on a friend’s machine and defaults gives the same results.

Which leads me to believe Mail.app is selected, so why does it not work?

Console has the following:

2006-02-08 18:46:24.773 iPhoto[2189] *** -[NSTextField setAllowsMultipleSelection:]: selector not recognized [self = 0x72d2560]
2006-02-08 18:47:27.047 iPhoto[2189] *** -[NSURL initFileURLWithPath:]: nil string parameter

Suggestions welcome! … or a copy of iLife 2006. 😉

Sharing Realities

It seems that Richard Ostrofsky published a book.

Subject seems sufficiently interesting that maybe I should stop by his bookstore on Sunnyside, look at the book, and maybe even buy it.

Of course right now my interest is more due to attempt to “understand” Gödel’s completeness (Everything that is ‘true’ can be logically ‘proven’, and everything that can be logically ‘proven’ is ‘true’.) and incompleteness (in any description of ‘reality’ it is possible to construct some statement that is ‘true’ in the context of reality, yet can’t be proven) theorems. Of course Kurt Gödel went insane. I, on the other hand, am doing this as part of MATH 4802 course at Carletonia.

Hidden Cambodia

I am generally not a big fan of LiveJournal – it is way too annoying to use if one is not a member of LJ, and vast majority of folks using LJ tend to be not the folks whose posts I want to read. There are folks who throw hissy fits over being “friended” or “defriended”, and some of the users seem to have nothing more productive to say then the fact that they drank alot and then threw up. Reading people’s comments on LJ is about as essential as reading comments on slashdot – vast majority is drivel.

Occasionally there are great exceptions to the above that sadly just underscore the general mediocrity of interweb in general and LJ specifically. I came upon travelogue of stickgirl who writes of her experiences in Cambodia, while touring it on a dirt bike for a week.

She signed up with Hidden Cambodia Adventure Tours in Siem Reap and went on a 6 day tour of Cambodia country side on dirt bike, accompanied with two local (English speaking) guides. In process, she took tons of great photos, and her background explanations are fascinating and captivating read.

So, without firther ado, some (direct) links:

  • Day 1 – Arrival in Siem Reap
  • Day 2 – Pol Pot and Pot Holes
  • Day 3– Monkeys and Mountains
  • Day 4 – The Eating Kind
  • Day 5 – I haven’t met anyone who woted for him
  • Day 6 – End of the Road
  • Day 7 – Temples, Monkeys and Monks
  • Day 8 – Big Lake, Big Birds, Big City
  • Days 9-10

  • What do you know about Cambodia? Were you to ask me this question yesterday, I’d say that not much: It was a colony, it was called Kampuchea at one point (I think the switchover happened around 1989 as I have stamps labeled Kampuchea from around then), there was a civil war between monarchists and Pop Pot lead Khmer Rouge, and that’s about it…

    What do I know now? Well, carrying pigs on motorcycles seems to be a Cambodian national sport, with bonus points for squeals being heard way in advance of a rider. Blunt weapons are a better option when one needs to kill off 20 – 25% of the population, as bullets are expensive. 7th century temples are sadly neglected, and big trees can grow right over them (Actually that is kind of creepy. There were some shots similar to this in “Baraka“). I’ve actually ate snake in the warmer climates many moons ago (This was not in a chinese or french restorant, and it probably want’s prepared “properly”, but with all the vertibrae it resembled chicken or goose neck), so I now wonder which snakes are not “the eating kind”.

    BTW, CMAC is Cambodian Mine Action Center (one of the photos on Day 3). “This minefield is funded by French Government”

    I were curious what kind of gear one takes with him/her on a tour like that. Turned out that she took five 1 gig CF cards and 4 sets of batteries.

    P.S. stickgirl did a 3 week trip to africa in 2004, and also posted tons of photos and apropriate descriptions. Finding them using LJ interface is left as an excercise for the gentle reader (not sure if reader will be gentle by the time s/he is done)

    An Applescript for playing DVD’s off of your local drive

    Joshua, now 2 and a half, loves to watch his Thomas the Tank Engine movies. I want to keep him away from the original media.. so the contents of the DVD is now on my drive.

    Being irritated at the number of clicks I had to go through to play it, I found a script that would make things simple.

    Thanks to the folks on the forums at applescript.net who also wanted to do this!.

    Anyhow, here’s the script:

    set prefix to “ExternalHD:”
    set suffix to “:VIDEO_TS:”
    set choice to “”
    tell application “Finder”
    set movies to the name of every item of alias prefix
    set choice to (choose from list movies with prompt “Pick a movie to watch”)
    set themovie to ((prefix & choice & suffix) as alias)
    end tell

    tell application “DVD Player”
    activate
    open dvd video folder themovie
    set viewer full screen to true
    play dvd
    end tell

    To use it you will need to edit the “ExternalHD:” to match wherever your movies are.