i summon one kim

The first revision of my Postfix configuration files was committed in RCS on February 19, 2001. By March 25th I had implemented a patch to allow me to use Postfix even on the central mail server. The patch allowed disabling canonical rewriting for the SMTP envelope recipient.

Traditionally the GW systems have supported the use of external mail redirection services (e.g. IKI ry and Pobox), and I did not want to discontinue this just because I switched the MTA. I think it is great that we can have mail headers correctly reflect the preferred mail address for all of our users, regardless how the mail enters our system. This is really just a “per-user configurable masquerading” of addresses. Doing it in the MTA avoids the need to modify all software to support configurable mail addresses (and the need to separately configure the address all over the place).

However, maintaining a private patch can take quite a bit of time, so I submitted my patch for inclusion in the official Postfix distribution. Unfortunately Wietse rejected it, but he encouraged me to model it after the masquerading classes. I’m hoping he will accept the new patch. I must admit, this approach is much nicer, allowing canonical maps to be enabled or disabled for any of envelope sender, envelope recipient, sender headers or recipient headers individually.

But I need to wait a couple of weeks to make sure the new implementation works without problems in production first. Brave souls out there can download the patch and try it out. Please let me know if you are using this feature, and how it works for you.

Provided that no problems surface, this feature should be part of the Postfix package in pkgsrc as well as in the NetBSD base system as they are upgraded to Postfix 2.1.1 or later.

I think WordPress needs dedicated filters to be applied on content and excerpt immediately when they are retrieved from the database, to be used by formatting filters such as Markdown.

I like Markdown, but I was having problems with how WordPress does not pass the complete article to it when the “more tag” is used, and when forming RSS descriptions. Markdown uses shorthand link tags that would normally be resolved with references placed at the end of the document. With the truncation, links were not being resolved, and what’s worse, Markdown notation was left in the resulting display.

I created a patch that fixes the problem for my current articles. However, I think multipage entries would still have this problem, so this patch is not sufficient. Also, I’m not sure if I’m causing undesirable side-effects by moving the the_excerpt filter further up in the code.

Before I start working on the filters to be applied on database retrieval, I’m waiting to hear back from WordPress developers about the approach, to avoid wasted work.

I took some time today to release tcsh 6.13, allowing Christos to spend his time on code enhancements rather than the release procedure. The latest beta had already been out for a couple of months, and I had been using it every day for over a month without problems. This combined with no complaints on the beta testers list would seem to indicate it was an excellent release candidate. The previous release was from July of 2002, so it was about time to get a new release out.

Christos has promptly committed new patches into the code repository, so I’m thinking I’ll try to pick another beta 6 months from now and see if I could push the next release out soon after.

It seems unbelievable that I have not written anything for almost eight months. Maybe it is not unbelievable to people who know me (or are waiting for an email from me), but I’ve certainly surprised myself. I must be good at self-deception.

I just got WordPress embedded to my site today. WordPress is quite flexible — I was expecting to have to modify the code, but as it stands today, there are no local modifications. The only “change” is that I’m calling the code from my custom index.php file, but that’s actually how the authors intended it to be used anyway. Once I get familiar with the new tools (such as sending in entries via email and blogrolling links) I hope to get back to more frequent updates.

I hadn’t kept an eye on new developments in my favorite PostScript converter, mp for a while. Last I remember, I tracked down its home when I added it to pkgsrc as print/mp. It does a great job at printing mail, news and other documents. It also comes with templates to use with various day-runner formats.

A couple of days ago Hubert relayed a message from Rich Burridge, the author of mpdist, that the version in pkgsrc is really old. He had included the URL to its new home, so I spent some time bringing us up to the latest and greatest.

One upgrade down, a gazillion to go…

Naturally as I am done with an upgrade, a security issue is announced regarding Apache::Gallery‘s use of the Inline module. A new version of Apache::Gallery was released, with new beta state modules as dependencies: Image::Imlib2 directly and Module::Build indirectly. (What’s wrong with good old Make::Maker, I ask!)

After figuring out Module::Build and then staring at strange shared library resolution problems with Image::Imlib2, I simply put in an ugly kludge. I just have a feeling that this will come back to bite me one day.

The new Apache::Gallery comes with two sets of templates: default and new. I’m yet to try them out — I just made the minimal adjustment for now to keep the existing albums working. The folder.png image was renamed to agfolder.png, and it is used in dir.tpl.

I’ve been running a new version of Apache::Gallery for a while (a couple of months, actually) on my on-line photos. It has all been working well, and is easier to maintain than the old one, so I committed the changes to the NetBSD pkgsrc repository.

The complete list of packages is:

• p5-Apache-Gallery
• p5-libapreq
• p5-Inline

While at it, I also committed a fix for tilde expansion in rdist6, and a fix I finally managed to find for Samba DFS support for Windows XP clients.

For the past few weekends I’ve been typing into my new library database, and now the video part is up-to-date. It lists all my DVD’s and LD’s.

While a majority of the typing was to input the data, some of the time I was re-learning SQL and to some extent PHP. The interface is written in PHP and the backend database is running MySQL.

I don’t think I’ll ever get around to adding the VHS tapes that I have in PAL format. I have nothing to play them with, and they are likely to be in a bad shape from the many years of storing without even rewinding. Not a suitable archive format…