Quarter Life Crisis
The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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392 words
- The Guardian has a funny but on nasty immigrants.
- Mark Pilgrim on, err, something.
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John Gruber on
spray-on usability and the flawed perception of Linux advocates. While John nails it as far as the Linux guys are concerned – I'd still say that Apple's managing of printers isn't particularly intuitive these days. I mean, what do I know about ways to connect a printer? (More than I'd like to.) And how much do I care about them? And what are all those options for connection types/protocols? I want to see printers!
- Another joke: Our student mail server was offline for two days because of a hardware fault. Sounds like a joke – sadly it isn't. Can hardware faults still count as an excuse for services as vital as e-mail these days? Luckily e-mail was designed fault tolerant enough to make sure messages still arrived after this. But it was sending messages which required a bit of trickery.
- My approach to e-mail is a simple one: Send and retrieve all messages from one server. This seems to be the least painful method when wanting to be able to use e-mail from everywhere. I'll always have to ssh-tunnel my way to that server – giving the additional advantage that communication is encrypted. But it's always the same procedure and it tends to work even from the most 'secured'/inconvenient networks. By now I even have a script for it, thanks to a generous reader. Of course this means I totally have to rely on that e-mail server.
- Another option I thought about was using encrypted POP/SMTP with authentification. But I don't have a server that's capable of those techniques and it seems to be more prone to failure as some overzealous firewalls might forbid those types of connections (cf. our department).
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Another extremely bad joke: Apparently I can't send e-mail to an address in my department using my address from my department via another server because of
451 Temporary local problem - please try lateras I am told more than a day later. All other combinations of servers and sending/receiving addresses work. (Needless to say that the 'temporary' problem is persistent. - Is it possible that our Windows 'friends' have a new virus going? I have unprecendented levels not only of spam but also of messages with dodgy attachments in my inbox.
