Shami's Blog

My brother, Ali, was on TV earlier today. MBC is one of the most popular TV channels in the Arab world.

Good luck man, keep up the good work.

Yesterday was one of my best friends’ wedding day. I wish you and Farah the best of luck and all the prosperity life can offer. Congratulations.

I saw the trailer for Dirt2 today

It reminded me of an old rally game I had on the SNES “Super Off Road Baja”




The resemblance is striking, isn’t it?

VMware remote console was working properly for me when I was using Ubuntu Hardy. After upgrading to Jaunty the arrow keys stopped working inside the remote console. Seems some people face this problem even under windows.

A search got me to this:

echo xkeymap.nokeycodeMap="TRUE" > ~/.vmware/config

Just close any open remote consoles and open up again and you’re in business.

So I’m working on a new web server but I don’t want to use Apache since it’s a virtual machine. Had some trouble with the rewirte rules but I think I got them

From this forum post

$HTTP["url"] !~ ".(gif|png|css|jpg|jpeg|js)$" {
   server.error-handler-404 = "/index.php"
}

But I thought of a different approach and it seems to work so far, and maybe causes less error messages in the logs:

url.rewrite-once = ("^/(.*.html)$" => "/index.php?page=$1", "^/(.*.html?.*)" => "/index.php?page=$1", "^/(.*/?.*)" => "/index.php?page=$1")

Have a good one

So I went to a community night hosted at the Microsoft Innovation Center here in Amman with my friend Bander which he told me was interesting. Even though I knew I was going to be the only non-Microsoft guy there I thought I should check it out.

The session was about using Silverlight with Sharepoint. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised with Silverlight’s capabilities. I only thought it was a Flash competitor, but it turned out to be more than that.

At the end of the session the host had a Sharepoint 2007 best practices book to give away. The organizers decided to ask a question and give the book to the person who answers it.

The funny thing was that I was the only person who knew the answer, and I was given the book. That’s when Bander jumped saying “Don’t give him the book! Don’t give him the book! He’s a Linux guy, 2 weeks ago he didn’t even know what Sharepoint is”

Anyways, fun night, and I’d like to play with Sharepoint and Silverlight and see what they’re capable of.

I’ve been busy setting up a PHPlist server for my employer. All tests went ok, but as soon as we sent our first newsletter Yahoo! blocked the server. After looking around for a solution people suggested we sign all outgoing emails with DomainKeys and not hammer Yahoo’s servers with consecutive connection.

Using DomainKeys was a simple setup with DKIMproxy, as for throttling, you all know Postfix is one high performance MTA, so that would be hard to do. PHPlist has a throttling feature but I didn’t want to use that because it would slow emails going to all domains and it took about half a day to send messages to about 6,000 users. That is unacceptable.

Update: Yahoo and other providers throttle inbound connections in an attempt to reduce spam. If you’re a big operator, talk to them about whitelisting. If not, just wait for the retry, your mail eventually goes through. For bulk mail issues this contact is helpful: <mail-abuse-bulk@cc.yahoo-inc.com>

After some more digging around I found that Postfix 2.5 introduced the perfect solution, here you go:

First, add the following lines to your master.cf

domain1      unix  -       -       n       -       -       smtp
        -o smtp_fallback_relay=
domain2      unix  -       -       n       -       -       smtp
        -o smtp_fallback_relay=
domain3      unix  -       -       n       -       -       smtp
        -o smtp_fallback_relay=

 

Now, to use those transports add these lines to your transport_maps file

domain1.tld    domain1:
domain2.tld    domain2:
domain3.tld    domain3:

 

Finally, set the destination_rate_delay for those transports in main.cf

domain1_destination_rate_delay = 10s
domain2_destination_rate_delay = 20s
domain3_destination_rate_delay = 30s

 

This will effectively send all outgoing messages at full speed, except for messages going to domain1.tld, domain2.tld, and domain3.tld; Postfix will wait 10/20/30 seconds after sending each message to domain1.tld/domain2.tld/domain3.tld.

I’m currently experimenting with PHPlist to use for our corporate newsletters. During the tests I got the following error

Database error 1064 while doing query You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ’1)’ at line 3

Tracking this problem down I found the following code segment in “admin/send_core.php”

if (is_array($_POST["criteria_values"])) {
$values = join(", ",$_POST["criteria_values"]);
} else {
$values = $_POST["criteria_values"];
}

$values in this segment will always start with a comma. We just need to add a substr statement to fix that. Just change it to

if (is_array($_POST["criteria_values"])) {
$values = join(", ",$_POST["criteria_values"]);
} else {
$values = $_POST["criteria_values"];
}
if (substr($values, 0, 1) == ",") {
$values = substr($values, 1);
}

That’s it. This will remove the starting comma (If it exists)

Jordanians are known for frowning. I hereby propose a cheap, yet efficient solution:

First, get a couple of paper clips and a couple of rubber bands

Attach as follows

Now install

Just make sure the rubber bands are stronger than your frown

For all of you out there, happy Valentine’s Day. Yeah right! I don’t celebrate it, there are more important things in this world, just look at the comic below, inspired by real Jordanian lives.

Translation: Abu-Mahjoob celebrating Valentine’s Day.